Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Kurze Reise

Tonight I am going to take a night train to Prague, Czech Republic, and then from there I will travel to Vienna, Austria and then spend the day in Salzburg, Austria on my way back to Frankfurt next Tuesday. Should be fun!

You've got to love the German work schedule. I work 35 hour weeks, and I'm only working for 2 months but I get 5 vacation days. Awesome!

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Deutschland

On the roof of the Reichtag, Berlin

So right now I'm in Germany, I've actually been here for about 2 months now, yeah, I've been slacking a bit about updating this...

Kitschy David statue, art museum, and Kölner Dom (from behind), Köln

Right now I am in Köln, Cologne, for a mid-term seminar for the Transatlantic Program that I am participating in. I arrived last night and met up with one of my classmates from my language school in Argentina. He is in his mid-thirties and works for a bank here in Köln, and was in Buenos Aires to improve his Spanish as he has clients in Nicaragua and Panama. It was great to see him again. He lives right in the heart of the city and he showed me around a bit and then we went out to a typical "Kölnisches" restraurant and ate way too much and drank quite a lot of Kölsch (the beer here in Cologne).

At 6:00pm today I am going to meet with the rest of the students from my program. I'm pretty excited about it actually. They are all really nice and I'm interested to find out how they've all spent the last month here.

My roommate from Alicante, to my left, and I in a bar in Berlin.

I arrived in Germany from India (tangent: I tried to give blood two days ago, for the first time in my life, but couldn't because I had traveled to India in the last 6 months. That sucked. I was nervous about giving blood, so I guess that got me out of it, but it was disappointing. I stole some stickers though, so I can lie and say I did...) Anyways... I arrived in Berlin on May 16th and stayed with my German roommate from my study abroad semester in Alicante for a few days. It was awesome to see him again. The last time I had seen him was a year and a half ago when I traveled to Germany with my sister, and I hadn't really spoken to him since then, but it really seemed like no time had passed at all. He took me around the city a bit, showing me some of the more off-the-beaten-path sights. Over the course of the three days we played a few heated games of chess in a cafe, played a few drunken games of pool in a bar, and played some fast-paced, 9-player, running-around-the-table games of ping pong with some of his friends in a park. (I found out later that he was a member of a table tennis team when he was younger, yeah, he was good).

Tour of the Reichtag with the TA Program.

On the 19th I started the Transatlantic Program. The program is F-ing awesome. I still question why I'm here taking part in it, I think my German professor paid someone off. Our schedule for that first immersion seminar is as follows: Schedule for the visit of the U.S. student delegation to Germany It basically consisted of language training, inter-cultural training, presentations about working in Germany, educational presentations about German politics, economy, history, and culture, and we met with various businesses and government agencies. We also took day trips to Hamburg and Rostock, which were cool. I hadn't taken a German course or really spoken German in over a year, so at first everything was a bit overwhelming, but it was fun. I am really enjoying speaking the language again.

I'm working right now at Continental Teves in Frankfurt. The company is great, huge and world-recognized as a leader in its field, so it'll look great on my resume, and my bosses and "co-workers" are really nice, but my job isn't really anything to brag about. I'm working in the technical training department, so I'm just working with apprentices who are going through something like a vocational high school program to become mechanics, mechatronicians, or electricians, and with interns who are studying either electrical or mechanical engineering. What I'm doing is translating a bunch of documents, helping the apprentices/interns with their English, or with math, or questions about their assignments, random odd jobs (for instance yesterday I built a cabinet), and just playing with the machines in my spare time: drilling, milling, and turning. My boss really believes that a big component of the apprentices' education is English, so he has them give presentations in English every week, write monthly English reports, and he hired me to help them with their speaking proficiency. He's planning on sending some of them to one of Continental's branches in England for a bit in the future, so he's really preparing them for that. Continental's training program is really incredible, I'm so impressed with how much these kids know. It's actually a really prestigious apprenticeship though, as my boss told me that this year over 500 students applied, and only 16 were chosen.

Römer Platz in Frankfurt.

Frankfurt from the Main river.

Frankfurt as a city is great. Some people told me before I arrived that the city was ugly, just an industrial, working city. The city, as most cities in Germany, was destroyed during WWII and was subsequently quickly rebuilt with practical, functional buildings, many just cookie-cutter, which sacrifice aesthetics for practicality. Then later on a lot of sky scrapers were built, something unique for Germany, prompting some to nickname the city Main-hatten (as Frankfurt is on the Main river). I really like the city though. The skyline I find magnificent and the view from the river, especially at night, is breathtaking. Also, a lot of the buildings that were destroyed during the war were rebuilt in the same style, so although they are not authentic in age, they still give the city a classic feel and really give the impression that you're walking through a centuries-old city.

Old opera house in Frankfurt.

I don't actually live in the city proper, but rather in a suburb called Eschborn. It's a suburb, but you wouldn't really know it as everything in Germany is so close together that you can't really tell where one city ends and the other begins (Germany is about the size of New Mexico and has a population of over 80 million).

Having a beer at my friend's place.

My German friend from Beijing, he of "Dude Where's my Car" fame, lives in Frankfurt and I emailed him when I arrived and gave him my cell # here. He called me up and asked me where I lived. I told him "yeah, well, I don't really live in Frankfurt proper, but a little outside the city, in Eschborn, actually in Niederhöchstatt." "No way," he said. I figured he was going to say "Come on, what are you doing living there, that's so far away!," but he said "No way, I live in Niederhöchstadt!" "Yeah, where do you live?" "On the street Schöne Aussicht." Now it was my turn, "No way, I live on Schöne Aussicht!" It turns out we're neighbors. Pure coincidence. I met him in China, hadn't talked with him in two months, moved to a metropolitan area of over a million people, and now we live right down the street from eachother. The world can be a small place sometimes.

At the opera, Mozart's Zauberflöte


I've done a lot since I've been here in Germany. I've been to two operas: Mozart's Zauberflöte, and Der Tod in Venidig (Death in Venice). I went to the NFL Europe's World Bowl between Hamburg and Frankfurt with Meat Loaf as the the half-time show. "I would do anything for love, yes I would do anything for love, I would do anything for love, but I won't do that, no no, NO I WON'T DO THAT!" It was great. Incidentally the NFL Europe has lost about 50 million euros each year since it was founded 10 years ago, so the NFL in the U.S. has decided to pull the plug on the league. That means that I saw the last game ever. Wow. I saw Bright Eyes in concert in Wiesbaden, which was amazing. He played almost entirely new songs, which I didn't know as I don't have his new CD, but it was a great concert in a Blue Note-type venue and I drank, danced, and sung my heart out. Connor was as sexy as ever. Last weekend I went to a museum called Dialog im Dunkeln (Dialogue in the Dark), which simulates the experience of being blind. It was an hour and a half long tour through different rooms that simulated being in the city, the forest, on a boat, in a cafe, etc., all in complete darkness. It's amazing how much everything changes without sight. It was really interesting. A couple of weeks ago I took a trip to Baden-Württemberg and visited my German Au-pair from my childhood. She took care of me and my siblings for a year when she was in her 20s and I was 6. She is now married and has two children, which are growing up so fast! She and her family are so sweet and it was nice to see them all again.

World Bowl in Frankfurt.

I work about half the time in German, have a lot of German friends, and am taking a German course in the evening, so my German is getting a lot better. Das freut mich!

Random: UFC 73 is this weekend and is an awesome card: Marquardt-Silva, Nogueira-Herring, Ortiz-Evans, Sherk-Franca, etc. The event is titled "Stacked" and it really is...