Out of my Comfort Zone

The rest of the week following my debatably-successful Holland trip was possibly the low point of the first portion of the program.  Tuesday began with German class in which our teacher decided to force us to improve our communication skills by assigning us to write a five-question survey on a topic of our choice.  We then had to ask the questions of the survey to 30 people: 10 "young people" (younger than college), 10 university students, and 10 "older people" (out of college).  Although I was one of the better German speakers, I tend to be very shy, particularly when operating outside of my native language.  Those of you who see me at PEF every week probably won't believe this, but I'm actually an introvert and it takes HUGE efforts for me to reach out to strangers (I'm often completely exhausted after a Friday night meeting where I feel it's my job to be insanely peppy to freshmen and newcomers).  So the prospect of approaching 30 strangers in a foreign language and engaging them in conversation was more terrifying to me than if I had been asked to walk through a dark room full of tarantulas (spiders are my #1 fear).  Our teacher gave us an hour on that day to begin our assignment and a week to finish it. At the end of that hour I had talked to four people, and I was shaking uncontrollably and on the verge of tears.  I talked to the teacher about it, who was very sympathetic and told me to do the best I could, but not to worry too much if I couldn't get all 30.  Then we were released for lunch.  I went straight to the bank and withdrew some money, since, as you may recall, I was distinctly penniless at the end of my time in the Netherlands.

After trying these seats, I wouldn't mind not getting much play time!

For the afternoon it had been arranged for us to take a tour of the Signal Iduna soccer stadium, home of the BVB league soccer team (which were national champions in the 2011 season).  I'm not a huge sports fan, so it didn't mean as much to me as it did to some of the other Ruhr Fellows, but it was an interesting way to pass an afternoon.  We got to go right in to the team's locker rooms and took a group photo in their (quite plush) turfside seats down by the field.  We stood in the bleachers and tested the acoustics of the stadium by screaming as loudly as we could and listening to the echo, then tried to imagine that sound multiplied by 1000.  The field itself was ragged and covered in bare patches - we were told that when the BVB won the championship match, the fans swarmed the field and ripped up patches of turf as souvenirs.  Repairing the field was going to run thousands of dollars for the stadium, as the damage was too much to just re-seed the affected areas.

The last stop on our tour was the stadium police base and jail - yes, German soccer stadiums come with a built-in slammer.  Apparently it becomes quite necessary on occasion when the fans get a bit too rowdy = Germans take their sports rivalries quite seriously.  The jail is only for men, though; women get an instant free trip down to the police station.

Tim the troublemaker!

Unfortunately by the time we finished our tour we were bordering on late for our seminar discussion with the Doubles, and so they whisked us back off to the university with no chance for supper :(  The discussion was on the merits of "fracking", a new technology for mining petroleum and natural gas which involves shooting water and chemicals into the ground to force the gas out.  I had never heard of the term before our discussion, though apparently it's a hot topic in environmental circles today (which would explain why I've never heard of it).  The best part of the seminar was that somebody ordered pizza since none of us had eaten supper, and the teacher-moderator also brought candy and Capri Sun to pass around (they have Coca-Cola flavored Capri Sun in Germany, but it's non-carbonated, non-caffeinated, and with no extra sugar.  What's the point?), so it was bearable.  This was part of the Doubles' class called "Technology and Society" or something like that, and apparently they had to attend these seminars every week.  I'm glad I only had to go to one.  The other advantage of the seminar, however, was that it was a gathering of German students, so, thinking quickly, I asked several of them for my survey (and the teacher, to get one "older person") and managed to nearly fill my quota of students.  Once the seminar finally ended at 9:30 I headed home, and on the way I saw a middle-aged man harassing a girl about my age in the subway, asking her probing questions though she tried to ignore him.  Of course, this didn't make me any more confident about approaching strangers for my survey, and I went to bed apprehensive about the 20 people I still had to find.

I passed a restless night and awoke feeling slightly under the weather, which might not have been due to my stress about the survey, but certainly didn't help to relieve it.  The weather wasn't cooperating either - it was rainy, cold, and miserable.  Therefore the activity planned for Wednesday's German class, a Schnitzeljagd (scavenger hunt), turned into a film screening.  I forget the name of the movie, but it was another painful reminder to me of why Germans aren't known for making movies.  They're terrible at it.  The plot was that a German man has an Italian girlfriend and they attempt to drive to Italy to have the wedding with her family; cultures clash and comedy ensues.  It was basically My Big Fat Greek Wedding in German, but less funny and more awkward.  There were subtitles (in German) to help the beginners follow along, which meant that I understood every painful word.  But hey!  we got free snacks during the movie, and we weren't running around outside or being forced to ask more people our survey questions, so overall I'm not complaining.  Afterwards everyone went to the Mensa (cafeteria) and I tagged along since there wasn't enough time to sneak off and write emails before our next activity.  But I wasn't hungry, on account of the snacks, so I didn't buy anything. It looked a lot like the dining halls at Princeton, nothing impressive.  I never went in there again, so I can't vouch for the price or quality of the food.  Oh well, I don't think I missed much.

For the afternoon we were given a tour of the electrical engineering department, which was reasonably interesting except for the part where I was so tired (the combination of the gray day and my poor sleep the night before) that I kept nodding off during the presentations.  The actual tour part was better, since we were walking around.  We even got a really cool demonstration of a quadrotors project the department is working on and got to see the machines in action a bit.  The tour ended by 5pm, and I spent the evening doing some much-needed domestic work = shopping, budgeting, etc.  Not terribly exciting, but certainly in keeping with the rest of the week.

Thursday we had the morning off - I took the opportunity to wake up earlier than normal and attempt a call back to the States.  As it has been all summer, Google disappointed me with terrible call quality - though I could hear the person I was calling just fine, she said I was coming through garbled and muted.  I don't know what it was about the capabilities of the internet connections I have had this summer, but they just really don't like Google.  Even Skype degrades after 20-30 minutes of call time, but that's to be expected.  (Not to mention Google's decision to replace video calling with Google+ hangouts in the middle of the summer - which are even more confusing and buggy than the video calling was.)  I suppose I can't complain, as I'm still able to call any landline or cell number in the US for free through Google, but somehow I had grown accustomed to expecting better service from them... Regardless of our frustrations, we were eventually able to talk for awhile before I needed to make myself breakfast and prepare for the day.

I bet my dad could explain why these trees grew this way...

Around noontime the Ruhr Fellows caught a train to Essen to tour the famous Villa Hügel (though I had never heard of it), the estate of steel baron Alfred Krupp (of today's Thyssen-Krupp).  We were about 30 minutes early, so we took the opportunity to explore the "massive and impressive" gardens of the estate.  Already skeptical of the benefit or relevance of visiting a house, no matter how elaborate, it was in the gardens that I got my first hints of how underwhelming this excursion was to be.  We saw hardly any flowers or impressive landscaping, aside from a grove of coniferous trees which had been coaxed into growing into some interesting, rather acrobatic forms.  Several of the trees had two trunks which diverged, then grew back into each other.  This was literally the most interesting part of the house or estate in my mind, if that tells you anything about the effectiveness of the excursion (I never actually got a satisfactory explanation of why it was deemed necessary that we visit this place...).  The 269-room house was impressive, but more as a display of arrogant excess than anything else.  I've seen bigger, more opulent, more colorful, and more interesting palaces in Russia, so it was difficult to get excited about a bunch of mediocre dead rich guys.

No idea whose time each clock represents...

After the failed estate tour, we were led down to a nearby lake for a "boat cruise".  The weather was nice, a bit too sunny in fact, to the point where most of us spent the better part of the cruise with our eyes closed to avoid the glare off of the water and ALL of the surfaces on the boat, which were painted a uniform shade of BRILLIANT WHITE in some kind of sick conspiracy.  There was also a regatta in progress on the lake, but our two-story steamboat barged blithely through the races with little regard for the athletes in their tiny crafts.  Sitting on a boat and sailing around a lake isn't exactly my idea of a good time (I'd much rather be DOING something, even just walking), and, since the Ruhr Fellows had nothing else to do, they started talking.  As often happens in a group of American college students, the subject turned to the sexual exploits of the various members of the group, at which point I COMPLETELY tuned out and resigned myself to a miserable afternoon.  After what seemed like an eternity, we got back off the boat and boarded a train for Dortmund.  Another frustrating bout with Google rounded off the day the way it began, and I crawled between the blankets hoping that a new day would start things back off on the right foot.

Alas, it was not to be.  At 4:30am, my roommate's phone began ringing incessantly, and when she finally answered it on the fourth call, she couldn't understand who was on the other end.  I was only concerned that it might be one of our friends, too inebriated to find her way home (I always think the worst of American young people), but when we were both more conscious in the morning, she assured me that it wasn't the case.  I still managed to nab a couple hours more sleep before starting the day, but I could already tell that things were not going my way. They didn't get any better, either, as the wiener schnitzel I planned to have for breakfast (we had no freezer at the CDC and I really needed to eat it up) took longer than I expected and nearly set off the fire alarm while I was frying it.  By the time I finished cleaning up from breakfast, everyone else had already left to catch a train to the University of Duisberg-Essen, which we were supposed to be visiting that day.  I hurried to the subway station just in time to see a train pulling away, but they come every 2 minutes or so, so I didn't worry too much.  It turns out I should have, because I stumbled up the stairs to the track JUST as the train started to pull away.  Undeterred, I sent a quick text to another member of the group and checked the schedule for the next available train traveling my way (oh, the joys of an unlimited regional pass).  Feeling rather smug with the way I handled the situation, I got off in Essen and stopped, confused.  The answer I got from the group said they were meeting at the West Exit, but as much as I looked around, I could only find the East Exit, Free Exit, and City Exit.  During a frustrating series of phone conversations during which one member of the group even tried to meet me back on the platform, the truth was revealed that while I was standing in the ESSEN train station, our instructions had been to meet in DUISBERG, another 20 minutes down the track.  Although I instantly ran to the train schedule, by the time I found the next train that would get me there, it had already left, and so by the time I actually reached Duisberg, a good 75 minutes had passed from our original meeting time.  Of course, the group wasn't still waiting for me, but though I tried every number in my phone book no one picked up.  I weighed my options: try to find the university campus, which was presumably SOMEWHERE in the city but not necessarily easy to reach, and catch up with the group (which I could reasonably expect to take at least another hour), or give up the day as lost and return to Dortmund.  Since I never wanted to visit the university in the first place, the latter was the obvious choice, and I was back in the CDC by 10:30.

Feeling justified in pampering myself after a stressful and frustrating week, I napped until noon, then spent several hours in the Internet haven of the university library researching various topics (such as flights home from Scotland) and calling my parents.  The day wasn't completely free, however, as I had been invited to Recklinghausen (a good 45 minutes away by train) to watch the Germany-Greece Eurocup game that evening with my doubles.  In preparation, I went to the grocery store and bought grapefruit beer to share, but then remembered that we would be attending a public viewing at which outside alcohol was not allowed, so thought better of it and left the beer at home (it was a different, cheaper brand than the Schöfferhoffer's, and not as tasty - because it is not made with white beer, I later learned).  Upon my arrival in Recklinghausen, my doubles and their friends traipsed off to a cafe for some pre-game refreshments.  It occurred to me that I hadn't remembered to eat anything since my disastrous breakfast, so I ordered a cheese pizza to accompany my Schöfferhoffer's.  Afterwards I convinced one of my Doubles to help me find an ice cream place, as I had a sudden urge for the strange German phenomenon of "Spaghetti Eis".

Only the Germans could come up with a
food so strange and yet so delicious...

As I have previously described, this delectable dish consists of vanilla ice cream squeezed through a press into long, thin strands.  This is then topped with strawberry sauce (and real strawberries, in this case) and white chocolate sprinkles, to simulate cheese and tomato sauce.  While generally the most expensive dish on the menu at an ice cream store, it is a German experience not to be missed.  However, I was fated not to enjoy my treat (with the way the week had been going, I shouldn't have been surprised by this).  Just as we began walking towards the venue for the public viewing, it began to rain.  A light sprinkle soon turned into a full-fledged downpour that had us sprinting across the town to where the Germans' cars were parked, while I clung protectively to my ice cream and tried to hold it level as I ran.  By the time we reached the shelter of the vehicles, we were all soaked through and my dessert was a miserable pink puddle in the bottom of the bowl.  However, it still tasted fine and I scraped up the last drops through the rain dripping down my face as we zipped over to Sarah's apartment to watch the game.

The evening wasn't a total flop - Sarah's couch was a more comfortable vantage point for the game than the town square, we were supplied with plenty of refreshments, and Germany won the game 4-2.  I learned several very interesting German sports cheers (which will be very useful in my future life, I'm sure) and when we arrived at the train station only to find that the train to Dortmund had departed not 5 minutes prior, Sarah and her boyfriend graciously offered to drive me home rather than make me wait another hour to catch the train (and we actually beat the one I would have taken, anyway).  It was past midnight when I finally crawled up the stairs to my fourth-floor bedroom, bedraggled and exhausted, and more than ready for the week to be over.

Sneak Preview

Well, the plan was to have a whole bunch of blog entries in reserve that I could release one by one and make it look like I'm blogging regularly again.  But since that never happened before the insanity of starting a new semester, I'll give you this (unusually brief but loaded) one now and promise to try and resume regular journaling when I can.  Scotland's amazing, BTW, as was my Eurotour, and I can't wait to tell you about them :) In the meantime, here's a preview of coming attractions to whet your appetite ;)


Monday morning (June 18) I dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 for that long-overdue shower.  After a quick breakfast my roomate Lisa and I packed up and headed to the train station.  This was the day that the Ruhr Fellows met with their companies to get a better idea of what they would be doing in their internships starting the next month.  Since the internship is basically the reason I applied to the program, I was really looking forward to this.  It took a good 90 minutes on two trains, a bus and a few block's walking before we arrived at the gate of Vaillant, GmbH, which made me very glad that I would have a host family in the town of Remscheid for the duration of the internship and wouldn't be making this commute every day.  We had an appointment with the HR manager at 10, and after I responded to his introduction with an easy "Freut mich" (literally "I'm glad", it's short for "Es freut mich, dich kennen zu lernen" = Pleased to meet you) he looked a little confused and asked us whether we should proceed in English or German.  I would have liked to try German, but Lisa was more hesitant and I could understand her reasoning that when discussing important things like contracts, we should really be sure we were understanding everything.  The contract was short and straightforward and stated that I was to work 35 hours per week sometime between 6:30am and 6:00pm Monday-Friday, that it was a completely unpaid internship (the idea of payment for the extra four weeks had been mentioned at one point, but it might have caused complications with visas, so I didn't really mind when it didn't materialize), and that I shouldn't spill company secrets, blah, blah, blah. Perfectly reasonable.  Then after an introductory presentation about the company, during which I tried to pay attention and ask intelligent questions, (it was less boring than some of the presentations I had endured during the Ruhr Fellows program, thankfully), we were joined by two more men who turned out to be our internship advisors.  Dr. Jochen Wriske is a tall, blond, soft-spoken and mild-mannered man with piercing blue eyes that peer out from behind thick glasses.  He speaks English without much of an accent in an almost timid voice, and as we split up and walked to what would be our home departments for the next 8 weeks, he confided in me that I should correct his English whenever it was possible to do so without embarrassing him in front of his superiors (as we switched to German fairly early on in the internship, I think I only had the opportunity to oblige him two or three times, which is fine because I hate correcting other people's English).  The tour of the department was really a tour of the coworkers, as I was taken around to every desk in the building and introduced as "the American student who will be doing her internship with us for the next 8 weeks" (in German, of course).  Most people, hearing "American", greeted me in English, to which I replied softly and succinctly in German, eliciting the ubiquitous surprised exclamations of "You speak German?!" Honestly, it makes me wonder what image America is sending to the Germans if EVERY SINGLE PERSON I meet is shocked that I can actually speak German at a reasonably fluent level.  It's also more than a little embarrassing to constantly receive compliments on how good my German is.  How am I supposed to reply to that? "Thanks, you too"? "Well, I try"? for as much practice as I have meeting that compliment, I have yet to find a really gracious way to move on with the conversation.  (Suggestions welcome.)

After meeting at least 50 people, of whom I may have remembered 12 names at the end of the 8 weeks, it was (thankfully) lunchtime.  Vaillant has a cafeteria, and the food is fairly good and more than reasonably priced.  Entrees range from 3-5 Euros apiece, but there is also a special "government-subsidized" option which is 2 Euros for a meal (usually meat, vegetables, and a starch) as well as a bowl of soup and a dessert.  It doesn't get much better than that (which is also how I was able to spend less then 500 Euros during my entire 8 weeks of internship, and that includes the 100+ I spent in Luxembourg… but all that later).  So, of course, I nearly always ate the cheap option, though sometimes it looked so completely unappetizing (chili or soup, for example) or the other options looked so delicious (for instance, they served pizza about once a week) that I splurged and spent 4-5 Euros on my lunch instead. After lunch I was also shown the company convenience store, where the really important part was the ice cream cooler.  On especially unbearable days I would cheer myself up with a creamy treat after lunch, even if it meant doubling my food spending for the day.

The afternoon consisted of a meeting with my advisors (I actually had another advisor besides Jochen, since he would be on vacation for a good three weeks during my internship) during which my project for the summer was explained.  I would be working on a new sensor to monitor the proportion of fuel and air in the mixture that enters the gas-powered water heaters which are Vaillant's specialty.  This is especially important now because the quality of natural gas, which has until now been relatively steady and predictable, will in the future begin to vary as current wells run out and gas has to be drawn or purchased from several sources.  At the present time, boilers are calibrated to the type of gas available in their region and then set to run, as deviations from the ideal will happen on a large enough time scale for regular maintenance to be able to address them.  However, when the gas quality is changing drastically from month to month or even day to day, there needs to be a flexible system in place which can adapt to these changes.  I would be working to develop such a system in the most cost-effective and easily integrable way possible.  I was very happy with this assignment, because even if it wasn't in my favorite field (thermodynamics and electronics are far from my strong suit), it was well-defined, practical and applicable, which is exactly what I was missing in my internship last year and hoping to find this year.  My advisors turned out to be great about giving me enough definite instruction that I didn't feel lost while still leaving me room for creative thinking and adding my own input, another way I was hoping this program would improve on last year's experience.

The last item on the agenda was meeting our host families.  Jochen was actually to host Lisa (I guess they didn't want me to have to be around my advisor 24/7) except for the three weeks of vacation, in which she would need to move to Cologne.  My host father was another company employee, though from a completely different department.  Harald Brokamp is a giant of man about my dad's age who wears almost exclusively blue dress shirts and blue jeans and looks out at the world with a keen engineer's gaze behind large glasses under a tousled head of gray hair.  His English is also very good, though he speaks with a stronger German accent than Jochen (as a matter of fact, I didn't hear him speak enough English to notice this until the very end of my internship when my host parents met my younger sister and boyfriend over Skype).  He lives in one of the area's traditional slate-shingled houses built at the beginning of the last century which he has (mostly) renovated, together with his girlfriend, Carla Sommer (around the same age), and their poodle, Charlie (one year old).  I have the impression that Europe is rather more accepting of these… alternative… living arrangements than we are in America, though it is only in the older generations that it really seems to raise any complaint.  Once the host families had exchanged phone numbers with Lisa and I and preliminarily discussed our arrival in two weeks, our program came to an end.  Seeing as it was only 2:45, Lisa and I sauntered back to the train station, looking forward to a leisurely afternoon.  We made it to the first train transfer all right, at which I looked at the schedule and saw that the next train headed to Dortmund was an IC (InterCity), one of the faster train types.  Lisa expressed doubts that our semester tickets were valid on this type of train, but I assured her that that only extended to ICEs (InterCity Express).  Unfortunately, not only did Lisa turn out to be correct, but we were controlled before even reaching the next stop.  That was an unpleasant surprise, and an expensive mistake - 14 Euros each for a 40-minute journey from the unfeeling conductor who brusquely informed me that our tickets were only valid on regional transportation.  I actually needed to withdraw money and had only 5 Euros in my wallet that day, so Lisa had to lend me enough to pay the ticket (or fine, depending on how you see it) and I spent the rest of the journey in sheepish silence.  It went better than it could have - I think technically we were riding illegally and could have been subject to a 40-Euro additional fee had the conductor been feeling particularly grumpy.  As it was, we were back at the CDC by 4:30 and I enjoyed a few hours of relatively good internet connection before calling it a day.

An Exercise in Frustration

Wow.  Well, I HAD faith in the German rail system, Deutsche Bahn, but on the beginning of my epic EuroTour I've only needed to catch three trains so far, and they've ALL been late and made me miss connections.  Let's hope this isn't a pattern for the week, as much as I like train travel… but that all comes later.  Let's start from where we left off.

Which, ironically, also begins with a missed train.  I got up bright and early on Sunday morning, the 17th of June, ready to knock another Dutch city off my list before heading back for another busy week of classes and outings.  Checking out of the hostel was an ordeal in itself - I was so desperately low on Euros that the 10-Euro key deposit meant the difference between eating and going hungry that day.  Unfortunately, my travel partner Nick wasn't quite as… motivated… as I was to get an early start.  Since he didn't want to give up his room key before leaving, and the front desk wouldn't give me the deposit without both room keys, I took Nick's last 10 Euros (he wasn't exactly rolling in money either, remember) and told him to collect the deposit.  Fortunately breakfast was available by the time I had to leave, so I was able to get at least one meal in.  I slathered Nutella and apple butter on toast, added a generous helping of sprinkles, and poured myself a bowl of Musli (a trail-mix snack somewhere between granola and oats) on the side.  Since we had wi-fi in the hostel, I figured I might as well check what track my train left from instead of having to navigate the construction site of the Rotterdam Central station, figuring that I wouldn't have very much extra time once I got there (I never leave myself enough time to get anywhere when I'm traveling, and sometimes it comes back to bite me, as you may remember from previous adventures).  But when I found the site and typed in my train number (which I had, at least, previously investigated - go me ;]), I got a message which read "this train has been cancelled. Seek another connection."  Under what kind of circumstances is a train CANCELLED?  I have no idea, but apparently I do NOT have good luck with Dutch trains.  (That's my second stop on this EuroTour - let's hope my fortune has improved in the meantime!) However, my (unprecedented) foresight of checking at the hostel allowed me to easily find the track and time of the next train headed to Den Haag, and actually gave me more time to enjoy my breakfast before dashing across town to the station (my Rotterdam Welcome Card was only good for two days, and I'm too cheap to pay for public transportation across short distances if I can avoid it).  It was quite a charming walk, actually, up one of the main streets of the city which runs parallel to a canal, and quite peaceful on a Sunday morning.  The construction labyrinth around the Centraal station had been completely reorganized overnight (it's like they don't actually WANT you to travel anywhere :P), but eventually I found my way inside and settled down for a comfortable ride to Den Haag.  It didn't take long to reach - only about 30 minutes - and soon I was wandering the train station, looking for a map to orient myself.  The only one I could find was posted on a construction fence (surprise, surprise, this station was also under construction) and showed little more than the city center.  Of course, my foresight had not extended to looking up a map of Den Haag beforehand, or planning out a route to hit up the sights I had picked out.  With difficulty, I found the probable location of the museums listed on my "to-see" list, snapped a picture with my iPod which soon proved too low-quality to be of any real use, and set off in the general direction of my first stop.

A fawn and rabbit share breakfast in the city park

Just across the square from the central station was a pond in which a flock of Canadian geese, together with their half-grown young, swam.  As I passed by, they flocked hopefully to the edge of the water, looking for handouts.  I pulled my extra sandwich out of my bag (at this point it was three days old and not very appetizing) and tore the crust off, bit by bit, to feed them, trying to be inconspicuous in case feeding the birds was frowned upon.  Shoving the still-soft center of the sandwich back in my bag for later, I moved on and was soon soon strolling through a lovely park on a wide, tree-lined gravel path.  Looking to my right I noticed a fence, and beyond it, a herd of deer grazing peacefully.  I did a double-take - yes, there was a big herd of spotted deer in an enclosure right in the middle of the city!  Those crazy Dutch… anyway, it being June, some of the fawns looked like they couldn't have been more than a month old, and watching them caper and play brought a smile to my face (I even got a video of a couple of little ones mock-sparring).  However, I soon turned a corner and left the deer behind.  Across the field was a strange little shack with a rainbow-striped flag flying from it - as I got closer, I could make out the words "Occupy Den Haag" scrawled across the side.  Two or three tents were tucked into the woods behind the shack - not a very impressive showing; I guess the Europeans don't feel very strongly about "being the 1%".  I haven't seen any signs of the "Occupy" movement anywhere else in Europe, though.

"Occupy Den Haag". It looked to be about 8 strong.

It was a lovely stroll through more parks and nature preserves out to the Louwman auto museum, though it took a good hour to get there.  I actually had no intention of visiting the museum itself (the entrance fee was 13.50 Euros with no discounts for students, and cars aren't a particular interest of mine), but in Rotterdam I had picked up a coupon for a free postcard which I thought would make a nice souvenir for my little brother (he's not REALLY into cars anymore, but he's a 15-year-old boy and I have no clue what else to get him).  Unfortunately, with my usual oversight (do we see a theme here?  You think I would learn at some point) I had impetuously decided to make the 1-hour walk without reading the fine print on the card, which clearly stated "1 free postcard WITH ADMISSION TICKET".  I should have known - there's no such thing as free lunch.  Slightly dispirited, I looked around the gift shop to see if anything else caught my eye to justify my trek out here, but nothing looked worthy of my last few Euros, so I moved on.  Since I couldn't properly read the road names on the iPod photo of the city map, I headed off in the direction which seemed most likely to be the right one, trusting to my usually-reliable sense of direction.  Unfortunately, when you're as far north as the Netherlands, the sun doesn't help much with direction, because it's basically just in the south of the sky the entire day.  I passed by a stable and saw a few people out exercising their horses, and even followed one sprightly young gelding for a bit before I overtook him and his walker.  The advantage of being on foot is that no path is off-limits, no matter how sketchy.  I walked on a sand hiking trail for a while and skirted some dunes that looked like they belonged in Florida than the Netherlands.  I hit upon a relatively well-marked bike path and re-entered a residential area, wishing the whole time for my trusty bike so that it didn't take so darned LONG to get places.  Sure enough, I took the wrong way once or twice and had to resort to following bus routes in order to orient myself (each bus station has a map of the neighborhood). Finally at 1:30 I arrived at what should have been my next destination - only to find that I hadn't cross-checked the address from TripAdvisor and I wasn't at the right museum at all.  I wanted to be at a dungeon museum and instead I was staring at a giant modern art sculpture.  It turns out I had a coupon for a free postcard here, as well, but at this point I was tired, hungry, and my feet were sore, and though the coupon didn't explicitly say "with admission ticket," the lines at the ticket desk were long enough to convince me that it wasn't worth trying.  The one high point of this frustrating detour was that the museum had free Wi-fi.  I immediately Googled the ACTUAL address of the dungeon museum, called up Google Maps and got directions.  While giving my poor feet a well-deserved break, I memorized the directions and closely examined the map of the city, noting with relief that the museum was actually within a couple blocks of the main station where my train was scheduled to leave from at 5:15pm.  I wearily set off again, but I didn't get far before my hunger and frustration overwhelmed my desire to accomplish everything on my list.  Finding a bench with a pretty view, I broke out my trail mix (which I had brought from Princeton) and took the edge off my hunger.  In less than two minutes I was surrounded by a flock of small, crow-like black birds who eyed me hungrily and crept ever closer.  Feeling like a character in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds", I picked out the smallest, blandest pieces of my trail mix and tossed them to the flock, testing how close they would come to me to get the food (some of them definitely got within two feet).  When I tired of this, or rather, got creeped out by all of the birds staring at me with their beady black eyes, I moved on, though I had to walk nearly two blocks before the last of the birds stopped hopping along behind me, hoping for more treats.

After what seemed like an eternity of walking in the uncomfortable heat, I found the Museum de Gevangenspoor, or Prison Museum.  I couldn't have been more disappointed.  The ticket office was so hidden in a corner that I almost walked out again, thinking I was in the wrong place.  The entrance price was a whopping 7.50 Euros, which information I hadn't been able to find beforehand, and it turned out that the only way to see the museum was on a guided tour, which ended up being solely in Dutch.  They gave me a flimsy 8-page pamphlet that supposedly gave the same information as the tour, but from knowing German I could tell that I was missing things.  The room with the torture implements was not nearly as impressive as I had been led to believe and NOTHING was labeled, so the end result of my museum visit was that I was completely fed up and frustrated with my day.  I left a scathing review of the museum on the provided survey and kept the pamphlet in English out of spite, though they had suggested that I return it "when I was finished".  Objectively, the museum probably wasn't so terrible, but on top of everything else that had happened that day, it was like the straw that breaks the camel's back.  Dejected to the point of tears, I gathered my backpack from where I had stowed it in a locker (at least I hadn't had to carry the weight through the museum tour) and stumbled back out onto the city streets.  By this point it was nearly 4:30 and time to head back to the station to catch my train.  When I pulled my ticket out of my bag to check the track number and exact time, my heart nearly stopped.  In my haste to buy the ticket before I left, I had chosen a DIFFERENT station in Den Haag as my starting point.  Not knowing what else to do, and fortunately having left a little extra time to get to the station (which never happens), I hurried on to the station and looked for the train number.  Praying that the Netherlands were like Germany and I wouldn't meet a conductor until after I had passed my declared starting point, I climbed on to the train and settled down into a nervous wait.  When we passed the station without any sign of railroad personnel, I let out a sigh of relief and slumped over to take a nap, completely exhausted by the miles I had covered that day.  I was shaken awake from a lovely dream some time later by the conductor, who took one look at my ticket and moved on.  I managed to get back to Dortmund without further incident and literally fell into bed at 9:30pm, too tired even to take a shower as I hadn't since leaving Germany.  Before I drifted off completely, I vowed that I would never again travel alone to a country where I didn't speak the official language, even if practically everyone speaks English.

(For the record, I think I'm already technically breaking that vow by traveling to both Amsterdam and the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium on my EuroTour.)

A Quick Note of Confession

Hello faithful readers (yes, all four of you),

You may have noticed that I have not posted anything to my blog in nearly a month.  At this point, I've already explained this to several of you, but I thought I'd put it here formally in the unlikely case that anyone else cared to know.  While I don't have homework, so I can't blame it on that like last year, I did find myself getting too busy for the blog.  Working, getting ready for work, or traveling to work accounts for between 9 and 11 hours per day, and I really like getting my 8 to 9 hours of sleep every night (or rather, I like going to bed early but then don't end up getting up early enough to do anything in the morning :P).  That leaves about 6 hours a day during the week, give or take.  Sometimes we go out to eat or do something else as a family in the evenings.  I especially enjoy playing board games with my host parents and talking to them about various subjects, both to better my German and learn more about the world.  To be honest, I also spend a lot of that tmie goofing off on the internet, whether it be Facebook or just looking at funny pictures of cats.  I even call my family and friends once in a great while (this is a lie.  This morning I Skyped with someone other than my boyfriend for the first time this summer.  And I think I may have called my parents four times in twelve weeks.  I'm actually ashamed of that record, but at least it means I don't get homesick?) A portion of that time is actually dedicated to "meaningful" Internet communication, mostly writing long and thoughtful emails to friends I don't or won't see anymore.

And then comes planning.  Of course, I want to take advantage of my time here in Germany, and that takes organization and research.  I've had some AMAZING experiences this summer, but none of them happened without me doing some logistics.  On that note, in only 3 days I begin an extremely ambitious trip across Europe, spanning 9 days and 7 countries.  I have been frantically trying to organize this for the past three weeks, getting particularly anxious as 2-week deadlines pass without tickets being bought or lodging being booked.  The good news is, I've got things mostly figured out at this point, but it's taken hours of research (and a bit more money than I would have had to spend if I had started earlier).  It should be a blast, however, and involves PLENTY of travel time.  Time during which I have little better to do than read and write.  I won't have reliable Internet access during the trip, but hopefully I can write several blog posts in TextEdit which I can upload as soon as I get to Scotland (or some WiFi in between here and there).  But, things don't always go according to plan.  So no promises, but know that I really WANT to write down all of the cool adventures that have happened to me this summer, and I PLAN to get to it sooner rather than later.  I've been faithfully keeping a journal with notes on each day, so remembering important stuff shouldn't be a problem.  Who knows, maybe I'll ONLY remember and write down the important stuff... but let's not be unreasonable ;)

Until then, keep wandering wide-eyed!

Erin

Double Everything

Now for the long-awaited second half of my Rotterdam adventure...

Saturday morning I was awake by 7:30, which is actually on the late side for me, but on this day I was especially glad to be such an early riser, as I had far too much to see and not enough time to do it all.  I got as ready as I could without accessing the majority of my luggage, which was safely locked in a crate beneath our bed and guarded by a slumbering Nick who had the combination.  Finally I shook him awake impatiently (in my defense, his alarm had already gone off once) and obtained access to my stuff, and by 8:10 we were tripping downstairs to partake in the (complimentary) breakfast.  There was no sign of Shiloh, so I presume she had already headed off to Brussels for the day.  Breakfast was mostly cold, and consisted of bread with various fixings, and several options for hot and cold drinks.  There was one particular topping, however, which I was particularly looking forward to.  

My mother's college roommate's husband (how's that for complicated) is Dutch and as our families are still quite close, we go down to a camp in Sweden (, Maine) for a weekend every summer to hang out with them when they come up from Pennsylvania for vacation.  The two foods that we ALWAYS have at camp with them, which therefore I strongly associate with the Netherlands, is this particular kind of cheese which comes in great big rolls and we shave ourselves (which I always thought was super-fun as a kid; gimme a break, I'm an engineer), and sprinkles.  Not just normal sprinkles like what you get at an ice-cream store (which, as everyone knows, are also called Jimmies), but super-flavored sprinkles.  There are chocolate (dark and milk), chocolate-vanilla, and various combinations of fruit flavors.  And they go on bread.  One of our favorite lunches when we go visit this family is whole-wheat bread with (peanut) butter and sprinkles, or cheese.  

So when I opened the unmarked metal canister sitting amongst the spreads and saw the black and white sprinkles it contained, I felt like I was really in the Netherlands.  Nostalgically (as I will still be in Germany when my parents make our traditional vacation this summer) I munched on toast with peanut butter and sprinkles, and even added a German flair by trying a slice with Nutella instead of peanut butter.  Satiated at last (I think it took longer to tell about this breakfast than to eat it), Nick and I set off for our first destination of the day: the Rotterdam Market.  In all of my travels I have only touched upon this delightful aspect of Europe, once in Berlin, and once in Hamburg (the one in Clausthal wasn't big enough to count for anything, and it was all old people selling their junk). I wish we had more flea markets in the States, because it's like a whole CITY of yard sales crammed into one big open square.  Everything you ever could have wanted was at the market: cell phone cases, purses, clothes, lingerie, fabric, watches, books, music, furniture, antiques, tools, extension cords, bicycle repair supplies, carpet, flowers, produce, sweets, fast food, and probably most impressively, fresh fish.  I mean, some of these fish were so fresh they weren't even DEAD yet.  That made me jump a bit, when the crabs I was so curiously inspecting began waving their sluggish claws at my nose.  Since Rotterdam is right on the coast, these fish must have been the night's or morning's catch, or at the most Friday's.  It was amazing.  It took Nick and I a solid hour just to walk through all of the stalls, but that was okay because our next destination didn't open until 10am anyway :)

After perusing everything, it occurred to me that anything I bought at the flea market was likely to be a better deal than in a store.  I thus frantically began looking around for souvenirs, but didn't have much luck, especially since nothing had caught my eye on our first time around and I had little desire to shove my way through the ever-thickening throngs of shoppers a second time.  I managed to find a trinket for Emily and a Tupperware container (yay I can make leftovers again!), and Nick bought an extension cord for his room back in Dortmund.  Then we treated ourselves to a Stroopwaffel (for which we had free coupons, courtesy of the tourist office - it's like a thin cookie sandwich with caramel in the middle, really yummy and sweet) and a small container of raspberries (many of which turned out to be rotten - ew) and walked out of the market up to our next stop.

People actually LIVE in these crazy apartments!

The Overblaak development, better known as the Cube Houses, is a series of apartments designed in the late seventies by a man named Piet Blom.  What makes these apartments quite remarkable is that they literally look like yellow cubes turned up on one corner and balanced on a pole.  One of these houses has been opened up as a museum, and it was here that Nick and I turned our steps.  After climbing two flights of incredibly steep stairs to get up into the actual "cube" we were surprised by how normal everything seemed.  Everything was close-set, but it didn't feel terribly cramped, and the only way you would have known that you were inside an upturned cube was that the windows were at funny angles.  The first floor was the "lobby" and a kitchen, where the dirty dishes in the sink made me suspect that the man behind the desk might just be the occupant of the apartment after-hours.  Then, up another set of narrow stairs came the main floor (at the widest part of the cube), which included a bedroom, bathroom, study, and another staircase, each in a different corner with no doorways in between (with the exception of the bathroom).  The second staircase led up to a third floor in the top of the cube, which was one room with large windows in the top and on three sides.  It was a very open and bright space because of all the windows, and looked like an enjoyable place to hang out.  I don't think more than three people would be able to fit comfortably in the apartment (and that's only if it's a married couple with a small child or the kid doesn't mind having the upstairs as his bedroom, as that was really the only other place for a bed) but overall I was pleasantly surprised by the design.  It would certainly be a unique living situation!!

Beautiful on the outside, I'm sure the museum would
have been just as interesting!

After the cube houses Nick and I headed back across the market to a giant medieval church we had spotted earlier which contained an early-history museum that looked quite promising.  Unfortunately when we got to the front door it was still closed, although the museum was supposed to open at 11 and it was well past that by this point.  Disappointed, we decided it wasn't worth trying to come back later to see if it was just opening late for some reason, and moved on to the next item on our list - lunch.  At this point I was starting to get a bit worried about the dwindling supply of Euros in my wallet, so instead of an expensive cafe we rode back to the central train station and nabbed hamburgers, fries, and shakes from a fast food restaurant (Smullers, one I've never heard of or seen before, so I can still pretend it was Dutch food ;]).  Conveniently enough, our next destination was only a couple of blocks from the train station.

"Night" falls in Miniworld. Every 24 minutes a new day dawns

I wasn't into trains much as a child (after all, I'm a girl) but after seeing how awesomely intricate and entertaining grown-up model train sets can be when I visited Hamburg last year (this is the part where I would reference you to that blog post... except I never wrote it... oops) they made it back on my list of "things probably worth checking out in any given city" (along with Natural History museums, City History museums, and Zoos).  There's a really famous model train set in Den Haag, which boasts a miniature version of all the important places in the Netherlands, but while I was wandering around Rotterdam Central station one of the buildings I repeatedly passed advertised "Miniworld... an entire world awaits you!"  Yay another model train set!  Since a discount was also conveniently included in our Rotterdam Welcome Card, we decided to give it a look.  It didn't disappoint, although it wasn't quite as expansive or impressive as the one in Hamburg (for example, while I took 210 pictures of the one in Hamburg, I only took 84 pictures here...).  There were made-up towns based on real-life places as well as replicas of actual attractions in the Netherlands (for instance, the Euromast we climbed the day before and the beautiful white bridge that was just a block from our hostel).

A transformer terrorizing Rotterdam?  Oh no!

But the really exciting part about model train sets isn't the amazingly intricate detail that is put into the replicas of real places, though that certainly is marvelous.  What I like about them so much is examining all of the tiny people in the tiny situations that the curators think up.  If you're going to make thousands or tens of thousands of tiny people to inhabit your miniature world, you have to have some fun with it and put in some jokes or you'll go crazy.  Apparently, the creators of this particular world are quite sadistic, though there were also some tamer and more ridiculous scenes.  I saw a bloody car accident where the front windshield of the matchbox car was smashed in and a woman figure lay on the ground in a pool of red and glass, a nude beach where a young couple was playing with their small child, all happily exposed, an archaeological dig site where they were just finishing uncovering a dinosaur skeleton, a gynecologist's office through the windows of a skyscraper (as well as offices containing nuns, a wedding party, horses, and sheep in the same building), another accident involving several vehicles which had stopped traffic on a bridge, a rock concert which contained a fair number of nuns in the audience as well as at least one cow, a building on fire, a woman lifting a horse above her head, Thomas the tank engine (in several locations) and multiple "Occupy"-esque scenes where a cow was either the reason or mascot of their protest - it was difficult to tell.

The Euromast!  Or, a mini version of it. In the background,
the cube houses and the medieval church we also visited!

Of course, the most remarkable thing about a model train set is, indeed, the trains, and especially how they are all so well-timed and coordinated that none of them run into each other.  It is truly a feat of mechanical and electrical engineering (YAY engineers!).  This model train set also didn't just include trains - trucks and vans also rolled along the (presumably magnetized) streets, transporting tiny goods from town to town inside MiniWorld.  All in all it took us a good two hours to go around and see every part of the exhibit, which was slightly more exciting to me than to Nick, by far not as big a museum-goer as myself.  However, he patiently waited for me to get my fill of the tiny scenes and even helped me find some of the "easter eggs" (like the penguins floating on an iceburg in the middle of Rotterdam harbor, a unicorn, or a smurf flagging down a train).  Finally I had seen everything there was to see, so we headed back towards our hostel into the museum district for some more traditional exhibits.

The rhino's about 6" tall, for scale...

Of course, I headed straight to the Museum of Natural History (mostly because I didn't know the address of any of the other interesting-sounding museums).  While Nick was originally going to wait outside for me, when the entrance fee turned out to be a mere 3 Euros and the museum little more than a dozen rooms in total, he followed me inside instead.  While the collection might not have been impressive in size, it was very well-done, and Nick and I enjoyed trying to identify the rows of stuffed birds and mammals, tentacly things floating in jars of ether, or various skeletons and skins that glared down at us from shelves and walls.  The museum also gets credit for quality over quantity - it had impressive specimens of tiger, orangutan, polar bear, giraffe, and Nile crocodile, and that was only in the front lobby!  The mutated creatures were particularly fascinating, especially the two-headed calves.  The skeleton of an Asian elephant from the Rotterdam zoo was there, although the room he stood in had a curious and not altogether pleasant smell.  The pride and joy of the museum was a replica of the skull of the largest fossil predatory whale ever discovered, appropriately named Leviathan.  It is supposed to be a huge creature closely related to today's sperm whale, and it could easily have fit a SmartCar in its huge maw.  I'm glad nothing in the ocean grows that big anymore! (that we know of...)

After the Natural History museum I still had high hopes to visit another museum, although at this point I was left with fewer than 20 Euros and was seriously doubting my ability to pay for food for the rest of my trip... However, when I entered the smuggling museum, which according to my online information had free entry, I was dismayed to learn that whatever I had seen was out of date and the entry for students cost a whole 4 Euros.  I wasn't THAT interested in smuggling, so I decided to call it a day.  Now, however, Nick and I faced the problem of where to find food, as he wasn't exactly rolling in cash either.  He had brought his ATM card with him, at least, but was reluctant to face the fees of withdrawing money at a foreign bank.  I had seen a DeutscheBank earlier in the day (which has a special partnership with Bank of America to only charge the exchange rate when you use their ATMs) so I told him where I had seen it and laid down to rest my weary legs.  Unfortunately Nick returned within the hour empty-handed -- apparently it was only a Financial Center and not an actual bank.  Taking advantage of our unlimited public transport tickets, we decided to tour a bit of the city via tram and try, on the way, to find a restaurant which would take a Visa card so that we wouldn't have to pay cash for food.

It wouldn't be a trip to Holland without
seeing at least one windmill...

This turned out to be shockingly difficult.  Cash is still the currency form of choice in most countries outside the US and Canada, and Visa isn't nearly as well-known in the EU as Mastercard, so time and time again we met with shaking heads and apologetic "no"s from restaurant and cafe owners.  We finally gave up and trekked to a McDonalds in the center of the city (leave it to the Golden Arches to be a haven for Americans!) where at least the food was cheap, if not national.  While we were eating our rather pathetic dinner, we witnessed a rather singular event. A boy and his father had just gotten their food and the boy was carrying the tray to the table.  Suddenly a pigeon swooped into the restaurant, flying right over the head of the boy and causing him to duck and drop his soda.  The boy's father sent him on to a table while he went back to the counter to ask for another drink.  The pigeon, meanwhile, had landed on a table, from which he watched the boy choose a seat, strutted back and forth a couple of times rather proudly, and flew back out the door.  I don't want to know what that boy did to that pigeon or his friends, but I'm pretty sure he just got paid back for it.

Is it a statue or is it a person...?

One more amusing story from the evening: as we were searching for an adequately cheap and international place to eat, we passed a silver statue of a man on the sidewalk holding out his hands as if to ask for money.  The shocking realism of the statue caused me to pause and take a closer look.  In Munich last year I had encountered people who painted themselves silver or green and stood on a box in the city square all day, with a small container for money set out in front of them.  I couldn't decide if this masterful sculpture was an impressive work of art or such a street performer... If it was a person and I showed too much interest, I knew that he would probably move suddenly to try and jump me, and I also knew that it would probably work.  But my curiosity got the best of me and I couldn't resist reaching out to his outstretched hands.  They were warm to my touch... but hard like metal.  Still, I had to touch him a couple more times to make sure that I wasn't being fooled.  Nick, meanwhile, had stepped back, convinced that the man would jerk to life any moment and waiting to laugh at my inevitable shriek.  Nick had noticed that on one side of the man's chin the metal was slightly flesh-colored and concluded that his makeup had at that spot begun to wear off.  Fortunately for my pride, I was right and it was only a masterfully-done statue, but it definitely made my heart race for a minute...

At this point it was past 9:00 and both Nick and I were worn-out from our adventure-filled day.  Feeling a little lame, we headed back to the hostel and turned in for the night, even though it was a Saturday.  When I mentioned this to Nick, he pointed out that there wasn't much "going out" one could do without money, which neither of us had, and it's not really my thing anyway.  So we settled in to rest up for the morrow, because neither of our adventures were quite over yet...

Tulips, Trains and Towers

Sorry, guys, I swear I wrote this one almost completely and then it failed to save and I didn't get around to retyping it for a few days... that'll teach me to rely on the auto-save feature :P

I lost no time on Friday getting up and finishing my preparations for the weekend; I got up at 5:45 and by 7:00 I was out the door.  This left me barely enough time to buy my ticket for the return journey to Germany before hopping on my train.  All was going well until we unexpectedly slowed down and stopped on the tracks with no station in sight.  We must have been waiting for a train to pull out of the next station, because we stayed that way for about 10 minutes and when we finally started moving again, we soon reached the next stop.  However, this unforeseen delay meant that I missed my connection in Viersen, though by only a minute or two, and had to wait a whole hour for the next train.  Fortunately I had an iPod to amuse myself, which is basically a small computer (Bible, music, games, and books all in one).  I was traveling alone, as my travel companion wanted to take advantage of his Eurail pass and use a faster, more direct train to Rotterdam, but this is not something new for me, and soon I was safely aboard the next train.  Luckily, most local trains in my corner of Europe run every hour, if not more often, so this wasn't an enormous disruption to my travel plans.  By my next transfer, I was already across the border into the Netherlands, though since the farmlands rolling by outside my window were virtually indistinguishable from the countryside of Northern Germany from whence I'd come, the only way I knew this was because the signs at the station looked a little funny - because they were in Dutch.

Now, apparently Dutch people will get mad if you say this to them, but their language sounds like an illiterate Englishman and a drunk German tried to have a conversation and ended up turning it into an entire language.  For example, fifteen in Dutch is pronounced "five-tsehn" (ten in German is zehn, pronounced "tsen").  However, it doesn't really matter, because everyone's so educated that they ALL know English at least, if not a couple of other languages besides, and I never had a problem with communication during the weekend.  But it was still helpful that, when I could stop laughing long enough, I could make out enough on signs and over loudspeaker announcements to get by, because that turned out to be very important early on...

My third train was supposed to take me all the way to Rotterdam, but at one station along the way it paused for an unusually long time and there were several announcements made over the loudspeaker.  I understood enough to learn that there was some sort of obstruction on the tracks ahead and the train would have to stop short of Rotterdam, and they were telling the passengers to find an alternate route.  Disgruntled and a little concerned about being able to find my way, I wandered around the train station until I found someone who looked official.  I was just debating whether I should ask directions in German or English when I realized that the person already speaking to the official was asking for directions to Rotterdam in German, so I left my question of the languages unanswered and instead followed my just-informed fellow traveler to another express inter-city train.  I was slightly worried about the fact that my ticket was good for a route which I was no longer adhering to, but from my experience the railroad conductors are about as prevalent on Dutch trains as they are in Germany (i.e. I saw hardly any of them) so it didn't end up being a problem.  However, it did mean that my four-hour journey to Rotterdam turned into a six-hour plus ordeal which left me hungry and grumpy.  I satiated a bit of my hunger at the intervening train station in Uthrecht with a cheese-covered roll (always your best bet in Europe for quick, cheap energy), which is worth mentioning for my interaction with the cashier, or lack thereof.  The rolls were sitting in bags on a warmer, so I grabbed one and silently handed it to the cashier.  He hesitated for a moment, and I realized he was trying to guess which language he should speak to me.  I think I answered in German just because I was used to it at that point, but he may or may not have tried Dutch, French or English first and I don't think he was ever quite sure where I came from.  It was quite interesting, coming from such a monolingual culture, to think about a country where you don't automatically greet a new person in your native tongue...

Things didn't get much better upon my arrival at the Rotterdam Central Station, which is basically a giant construction site.  In fact, my impression was that most of the country was under construction, from what I saw... at least that means their economy can't be doing too poorly!  I had been recommended an independent tourist office by my recently-acquired guidebook, Europe on a Shoestring (which Joe happened to find in one of the discard bins during move-out at Princeton and, though it must weigh a good six pounds by itself, I thought a useful enough resource to bring along), but though it was supposed to be right in the area of the train station, I couldn't find it for the life of me and instead spent 30 minutes wandering around a couple of city blocks peering into the darkened windows of what seemed to be government buildings (I'm just glad I didn't get arrested).  Finally, I gave up and schlepped (fun fact: schleppen is a German verb meaning "to haul" or "to drag" - it just got Americanized!! For those of you who don't believe me because I'm from Maine and I talk funny, it is an actual English word as well: Schlep (it comes to us from the German through Yiddish).) over to the official city information office, since I had a couple of hours to kill.  Nick, my travel companion, had been held up in Germany by some "banking issues" which he didn't describe and I didn't inquire further about, and wouldn't arrive until 4pm.  I took my frustration of losing an entire day to delays out on the chaos of visiting a new city by viciously researching all of the interesting-sounding pamphlets available and planning our weekend, looking up locations, opening hours, and admission prices to avoid any other unpleasant surprises.  I also decided to go in on the Rotterdam Welcome Card, which for 13 Euros gave me two days of unlimited access to the city's public transportation network, as well as a booklet of coupons for 25-50% off local attractions.  Since I planned to do as much as possible while I was in the city, I figured the card would pay for itself.  After my research was done, I looked around the office which doubled as a souvenir shop until I found a couple of pieces of reasonably-priced, thoroughly Dutch kitsch (another Americanized German word!!) to bring home to friends and family.  Then, it finally nearing 4pm, I broke out my new card to take the tram back to the Central Station and meet Nick.

Having eventually found each other (which was no small feat in the chaos of the central station) and acquired another Welcome Card for him, we headed to our hostel to check in and regroup.  We had found accommodations at Hotel Room Rotterdam, a small hostel with good reviews on HostelBookers which had the most notable advantage of being the cheapest one in Rotterdam.  It was located in a beautiful, rough stone building only a block from the water.  As we walked inside, I can only describe the atmosphere as "chill".  The man who sauntered up to the counter to greet us had a distinctly Australian-sounding accent, though I never did figure out if he was actually from Down Under or that's how Dutch people sound when they speak English (which is at least partially true).  Though he was quite nice, he charged us 88 Euros instead of our expected 81 for the rooms (22.50 a night for each of us, and we had already made a 9-Euro down payment at time of booking) and when we walked up to the third (American fourth) floor to our room, we discovered that it contained 10 beds instead of the promised 8.  In hindsight, since I had the receipt with me, I should have said something right then, but I kept my mouth shut (I REALLY hate confrontation, even more than I hate losing money), even though the unexpected increase in expenses, combined with the general high cost of EVERYTHING in the Netherlands, led finances to be a little tight on the back end of the trip.

Shiloh and I at Hotel Bazaar, a ?Turkish? restaurant

When we opened the door to our room, the only other occupant was a petite girl on her laptop on one of the top bunks.  She gave us a shy smile and a wide-eyed "Hello," and we soon learned that Shiloh was taking the opportunity to tour Europe after finishing a dance study-abroad program in France before heading home to the States.  When we asked her about her plans, she told us she'd be making a day trip to Brussels the following day to use up the last of her Eurail pass, but that she didn't have anything special planned for the evening.  We didn't yet know what we were doing, but we invited her along regardless, and she joyfully accepted. Together we tripped down the stairs, Rotterdam map in hand, back to the front desk where the receptionist poured us each a Dutch beer (Hertog Jan, which was actually one of the best beers I've ever drunk - heck, it was almost enjoyable) and sat down to share his recommendations.  He drew various circles and marks on our map where we would encounter things worth seeing, but our primary concern was food (especially because of my mostly non-existant lunch).  He highly recommended Hotel Bazaar (a Middle Eastern restaurnt with big portions for cheap) as well as a little "Grandma's Kitchen"-type traditional Dutch restaurant.  It being already on the late side and us being very hungry, we opted for the former.

Before we packed up, the receptionist brought us each a shot of Dutch gin, on the house - as an apology for pouring himself a beer and not paying for it, he said.  This presented an entirely new dilemma as I had never taken a shot before, and am certainly not used to imbibing significant quantities of hard alcohol at a time (the only time I've drunk anything stronger than beer, it's to taste or try it, so I take tiny little sips and there's usually not much to begin with...).  I didn't even know if all of the liquid in the glass would fit comfortably in my mouth, or if I would end up sputtering and looking like a fool.  I finally ended up gingerly taking about 3/4 of it in my mouth, at which point I realized that a shot is not a very big mouthful.  Fortunately it was also a very smooth gin (or at least, that's the adjective the receptionist used, I have no idea about alcohols) so it tasted very much like a spruce tree and the alcohol wasn't as noticeable as I was expecting - to my immense relief.

Now, realizing that a glass of beer and a shot of gin was going to hit me a lot harder than normal, as empty as my stomach was, I was all for getting to the restaurant as soon as possible.  Indeed, I did feel it, and it made the walk a tad more... um, entertaining... but it wasn't significant, and nothing embarrassing happened.  We walked through Rotterdam's "Walk of Fame", which was just as cheesy as it sounds, but I did recognize a few of the names, like the one at the right.  Fortunately we were given good directions to the restaurant, and we had no trouble finding the place - it was getting in that would prove to be tricky.  Apparently it's a pretty hopping place on a Friday night, but when we asked the hostess, she told us with a sideways glance that if we could be gone by 8, she had a table for us.  It being only 6pm, we agreed, and were soon poring over our menus filled with exotic-sounding dishes in what can only be described as a colorful atmosphere.  No, it was literally colorful, as the light from the rows of votive candles in colored glass jars and the stained-glass chandeliers provided the only light in the bustling basement dining area.  Shiloh went with a simple soup, Nick ordered a kebab (I think with chicken), and I got a lamb dinner that sounded like it came with plenty of extras.  When our food came, my jaw just about dropped as I saw the enormous plates the waiter was carrying.  Shiloh's soup would easily have fed three people, my dinner included meat, salad, rice, a tomato, pepper, and yoghurt sauce, and Nick's kebabs were similarly accompanied, not to mention the complimentary breadbasket and assortment of sauces.  We fell right to eating, and I was astounded again and again as absolutely everything on my plate turned out to be delicious.  Maybe it was because I was so hungry, and maybe it was the alcohol, but I even enjoyed the tomato (and that will be particularly impressive to those of you acquainted with my food preferences).  We shared across plates, too, of course, and the fantastic food was not limited to my order.  Whatever country that food came from, I want to move there, because EVERYTHING they eat is AMAZING.

We were up there!!!

None of us had any trouble cleaning our plates and with considerably fuller bellies, we were soon ready for some real adventures.  Naturally, by this time in the evening all museums and most tourist attractions were closed, and it wasn't late enough for the bars or dance clubs to be worth visiting (purely for the cultural experience, of course ;]).  However, we soon settled on the Euromast, a 185-meter tower which boasted beautiful views of the city.  Though it was already past 8pm, we were even further north in Rotterdam than in Germany, and less than a week away from the longest day of the year for the northern hemisphere, so the skies were only rainy-day dark and had not yet been dimmed by twilight.  The way to the Euromast led through a beautiful park and an unexpected wedding party, which we carefully tiptoed around, trying not to be too conspicuous.  Safely at the base of the tower, we looked up to a row of windows high above the ground and decided that's where the observation deck must be.  Come to find out, that's actually a restaurant (talk about eating in style!) above which are two luxurious honeymoon suites (a night's stay is only 300 Euros, and includes a bottle of champagne and breakfast!  How's that for a memorable night?), which are all below the open-air observation deck.  Of course, the wind was much more noticeable 100 meters in the air than on the ground, and it drove the light rain into us in a quite unpleasant way, but nothing could spoil the majestic views.  Curious as always, I circled the observation deck and was pleased to find a stairway that led up even further.  Following it led us to an upper observation deck, at which there was an elevator that went up even more.  Wanting to get the most for our money (and the tickets weren't exactly cheap, even with 25% off from the welcome card), we continued ascending until we entered a strange little room with glass walls, but no lights.  We sat down on the benches encircling the post in the middle of the room and wondered what was going on.  In fact, Nick had just said, "Euromast, what are you doing?" when he was nearly knocked off his feet by a sudden shudder - the room began to move.  Slowly we emerged into the evening light as the entire room ascended the tower.  Shiloh and I looked at each other in excitement and glee.  Just then, the room began slowly rotating, giving us a truly panoramic view of the city.  I began laughing out of sheer enjoyment - it just kept getting better.  The platform kept ascending to a remarkable height of 185 meters, from which we could see the entire expanse of Rotterdam spread out below us.

The view from the Euromast towards our hostel

We spotted the bridge near our hostel and several other city landmarks before the room, still spinning, began a gradual descent back to where we had come.  Still grinning from the adrenaline rush that came from being so far up in the sky without much between us and the ground, we headed back down the maze of elevators and stairwells towards the boring life of the gravity-restrained.  Once we were finally on the ground again, we headed back across the park, satisfied that we had redeemed the day from its frustrating start.

The adventures weren't quite over for the day; on our way through the park a flock of small, bright green birds flew overhead.  I swore they looked like parrots; Nick said that was impossible.  (Later we learned that it is quite common in large cities with zoos to see exotic birds that have escaped from captivity and end up thriving, so I could have been right after all!)  We arrived back at our hostel in the midst of the Eurocup match between England and Sweden, so of course we each grabbed a beer from the bar and sat down to watch - it's the European thing to do.  By the time the match ended it was 10:30 and FINALLY getting dark, so we took the opportunity to walk the two blocks from the hostel to the river to see the bridges lit up, which was truly a sight to behold.  After some Parkour-style hunting for photo opportunities which involved some possibly-illegal climbing on rooftops, we returned to the hostel to rest up for a long, full day of touring.  Before I clambered into my top bunk, I slipped out on the balcony to take a picture of the still-glowing 11pm view from the hostel...

Rotterdam, the Netherlands, 11pm on June 15th, 2012

It had been a good day.  So now I will leave you to read about my good day, and I will try not to take so long in telling you about the next ones...

Coal Mine Take 2

I swear this post has been almost two weeks in the writing... I'm beginning to wonder how working people get anything done, as I feel like all I do now that my internship has started is work, sleep, and eat...  Hopefully I will settle into a routine soon and then be able to catch up a bit... or go on a blog-writing marathon some rainy Saturday and pound out the last month for you.  It (might) get done eventually, I promise!

On Wednesday morning I wasted no time getting up and getting on the internet - if I was going to make a weekend in the Netherlands happen, I needed to find a place to stay and at least three things worth doing in whichever city I chose to visit, pronto.  While I had been considering Amsterdam as the obvious choice, the 44 Euros/night for even the cheapest hostels was making me reconsider, especially since it would only run me 25 Euros each way for the train ticket.  I suspected the high prices were a result of my short notice, but even future weekends were coming up pricey, so I began to doubt the wisdom of staying in the capitol.  Fortunately, this is Europe, so public transportation is AWESOME and it would be no problem to stay in a smaller, surrounding city and day trip into Amsterdam if I wanted.  I looked around and decided that Rotterdam was both cheaper enough (with hostels starting around 20 Euros) and big enough to attract me. I had heard rumors that another member of our group was also thinking of visiting the Netherlands, and I am not particularly fond of traveling alone (what's the fun if you can't share any of your adventures?) so I asked and found out that he had independently come to the same conclusion as far as his destination.  I quickly had a hostel booked for both of us in a very convenient location and began investigating attractions and activities in the city, always wanting to be the informed traveler.  

The plan for the morning was to tour the chemical and biological engineering department, which was FAR less interesting to me than mechanical had been.  However, we had one chemical engineer and one biological engineer in our group, so I suppose they have to try and accommodate everyone (not to mention, part of the goal of this program is to convince us to come back and study in Germany at these universities).  During the lab tour I saw row after row of lab benches covered with beakers, stirrers, pipettes, chemicals, and nothing exciting that I could see.  Fascinating for some people, I suppose, but I prefer to work in macro.  The most interesting thing we saw was a model of a pipeless plant scheduling problem which was the culmination of several group projects.  Since the subject of one of my term papers for my robotics class this year was a scheduling problem, I immediately asked several questions about the methods they used to solve the various difficulties I knew were associated with these kinds of problems (without getting too technical, scheduling is part of a class of problems known in computer science as "NP", which means that as the size of the problem gets bigger, it cannot be guaranteed that the best solution can be found within a reasonable amount of time.  Therefore many "workaround" methods, called heuristics, are developed which find a "pretty good" solution quickly even if they can't promise its the best one.  Lots of research in computer science right now is concerned with whether new ways of solving these kinds of problems can be invented which are guaranteed to find the optimal solution without taking decades to do it).  But otherwise, it was a fairly mundane morning.

Our schedules for the afternoon said "Meeting of the Minds" which sounded very important and academic, like a global summit conference or a trivia competition.  What it turned out to be was getting all of the international interns from the universities at Dortmund and Bochum together and taking them to a coal mine museum.  Very anticlimactic.  We climbed on the bus at TU Dortmund and drove all the way to the end of its route, it seemed, because we were on there for quite a long time.  I was chatting with another Ruhr Fellow when I looked up and saw someone I was completely not expecting - Kat, my lab partner from the spring semester.  When I got her attention she also seemed quite surprised to see me, but the confusion was soon cleared up when she explained she was working in a lab at the university in Bochum as part of the German Summer Work program (which I had originally intended to apply to, before I realized in December that the deadline was October 31st).  Having someone there I already knew, albeit not well, made the rest of the day more enjoyable.  I'm also quite glad that the trip to the active mine was fresh in our minds, because the museum complex was not terribly riveting.  Having just seen how an active mine worked, I was in a much better position to ask intelligent questions about the miner's daily lives, which the museum (housed in the aboveground portions of an abandoned coal mine) showcased.  We saw the places where the miners clocked in, got paid, and were laid out if they were unlucky enough to get blown to bits or crushed in the mines.  The most unsettling part was the miners' clothing, each set of which was attached to a metal cage which the miners hoisted high up near the ceiling overnight to help it dry and keep it from wandering off.  As the tour guide held up each article of clothing, I recognized it from what I had been wearing only the day before - including the underwear.  I don't think I've ever had the honor of wearing a museum exhibit before...

The view from the top of the tower.

We also saw the various lights which were invented to help the miners see their work, from the original oil "protected flame" lamps to the modern headlamps.  We learned a bit more about what causes the explosions in the mines (excess methane gas which builds up in pockets underground and can be released without warning by mining activities) which rarely happen nowadays, and about the miners' hard lives.  The coolest part by far was when we got to climb the tower which provided the support structure for the lifts that brought men and materials down into the mines.  (Our guide called them "headgear" but I'm pretty sure that's not what they're called in English.)  You do see them all over the region, most marking sites of former coal mines which have been shut down as the coal runs out at the layers we are able to mine with our current technology.  As a matter of fact, coal in Germany is beginning to run out altogether and the remaining six coal mines are operating at a deficit, heavily supported by the government.  They are all scheduled to close by 2018.  In any case, we could climb right to the top of this one and see for miles around.  I've had the opportunity to do this several times now in the area, climb to a high spot and look around, and I can tell you that the whole region pretty much looks the same; lots of rolling green hills and fields with little red-roofed towns clustered at their bases, and here and there a metropolitan center.  The Ruhr area is actually one of the most densely populated areas in all of Europe, if not the world, so I have heard say.  Certainly there are a lot of tiny little towns everwhere and not many stretches of unbroken wildland!

After our tour we were treated to a supper of currywurst at the restaurant and I nabbed a children's book, Max der Grubenpferd (Max the Mining Horse) and a few postcards to send home from the gift shop.  One of Kat's friends insisted on buying everyone a round of beer and I reluctantly acquiesced (when in Rome...).  It wasn't anything spectacular.  When we finished supper we walked to a seemingly abandoned train station which was little more than a raised slab of concrete along a set of dilapidated tracks, but sure enough a little regional train came puffing along after a few minutes and we all traveled back to Dortmund for the other part of the Meeting of the Minds.  The program had bought us tickets to the final concert of the Piano Festival held at the concert hall, which was nice, but there was something else competing for our attention.  The Eurocup is going on this month, as I've mentioned, and that night Germany was playing the Netherlands and the game was supposed to be a good one.  Therefore on the pretense of wanting to catch the second half of the game, I snuck out of the concert at intermission (I like classical music well enough, and the pianist and string quartet were good, but I had already listened for an hour by this point and my tolerance was just about up) with Kat and our new friend.  After trying for a while and failing to find a public viewing nearby, we parted ways, since they wanted to go into a bar to watch and I was content stopping by the Stadthaus viewing on my way back to the CDC.  I got there almost at halftime, watched a moment or two of the game, and noted that the score was Germany 2, Netherlands 0.  Then I went to bed.  I know, I'm a super-lame soccer fan, but I had gotten up early, okay?

Thursday we also did not have German class, as we were to visit one of the other partner universities of the program, Bochum, for the day.  I got up a bit early to buy my ticket to Rotterdam (which I was cleverly arranging with a border town as my place of departure in order to take full advantage of the SemesterTicket we had been issued for the program, good for the entire summer on all buses, subways, and regional trains in North-Rhein Westphalia, therefore saving myself a whopping 15 Euros each way) at the Hauptbahnhof before leaving and nearly missed the group's train when it took longer than I thought, but soon we were following the tide of students headed towards the row of concrete buildings which are typical of the universities of this region, founded in the fifties and sixties along with a post-war reversal of the philosophy that people in an overwhelmingly industrial region have no use for higher education.  Even though neither we nor the people meeting us had any signs or knew anyone in the other group, it didn't take them long to figure out who the Americans were, to my chagrin.  The nice lady from the international center and her timid assistant swept us along across the campus, past the library where the word "Universitätszentralbibliothek" (University Main Library) were spelled out backwards in neon lights (when we asked why, she just rolled her eyes and said "art") to a small meeting room in a peculiarly vertical building which we entered from the roof.  Of course, drinks and cookies awaited us, as well as tote bags filled with brightly-colored pamphlets and booklets full of smiling people telling us why we should come study in Germany.  We sat around the table, munched cookies, and patiently sat through yet another presentation on the statistics of the university, with special attention paid to how many girls study in each department (it's beginning to make me wonder what they think American students care about...).  We were also informed that the peculiar design of the campus was meant to look like "ships of learning in the harbor of knowledge"... definitely sixties.  After the presentation we were whisked back out into the "harbor" for a decidedly peculiar tour which consisted of us wandering from place to place seemingly randomly while our "guide" chatted with one or another of the group members, mostly Tim since he spoke the most fluent German.  At one point we climbed to the top of one of the "ship" buildings which hold most of the labs, classrooms, and offices, and suddenly found ourselves out on the rooftop.  I'm not complaining, the view was nice and I suppose it saved time rather than walking around the entire campus to see everything, but having a campus tour that involved a rooftop seemed a bit... unusual to me.

Our tour worked up quite an appetite, so we were very happy to learn that lunch was next on the schedule, and that it was paid for by the University.  Not being given any specific directions about my meal card, and being unable to find a list of restrictions on it, (and wanting to take full advantage of free food anytime I could get it,) I loaded my tray with tortellini, döner, salad, mousse, and a drink.  The lady at the cash register scowled at me and complained that the ticket was supposed to be good for ONE meal and I had two, however, when she found out I wasn't a student she grumpily let it go, even though I tried to offer to pay the difference.  I was happy and managed to enjoy most of my ample meal (which ended up being my lunch AND supper, so things evened out).  At the Mensa, and again later in the afternoon, I ran into Kat again and learned a little bit more about her daily routine as a lab assistant.  Her experience sounded quite similar to mine last year at TU Clausthal, minus the knowing German part.  I promised to let her know if I was traveling anywhere exciting, as it was unfortunately too late notice for her to join me on my planned Dutch excursion.  

Following lunch, we toured the engineering facilities of RU Bochum, which fortunately involved a lot of walking and very little sitting to listen to presentations, or I know I wouldn't have been able to stay awake.  While the labs were a mix of impressive and... less so, a couple of things stood out.  In one lab, which field of research was not made clear, an apparatus had been constructed which could trap a single drop of water in an ultraviolet standing wave and make it levitate.  We all got a chance to try our hand at water levitation, and it gave me a profound sense of satisfaction to be able to so defy gravity.  We were sure that would be the highlight of the day, until we were led into a large open space in the last lab, which had a table at one end.  On this table were laid ten lab coats and an apparatus which looked a little like a food processor from outer space.  We all became more attentive as we realized that we were about to participate in science!

The Science Machine!

Actually, the device was the result of an Engineering and Entrepreneurship course final project, where teams of students were tasked with coming up with a new product for the German market and then actually producing samples.  This particular project was basically a fruity version of Dippin' Dots, where instead of ice cream, fruit smoothie mix was dripped into a vat of liquid nitrogen and immediately frozen into delicious little spheres.  Of course, everything tastes better with ice cream, and we had it on the brain anyway, so we also used two methods - liquid nitrogen and a commercial ice cream maker - to prepare the stuff, with the supposed goal of comparing the textures.  We got to make and eat ice cream, that's all I cared about :)  The lady leading this particular demonstration was originally from Peru and English was her third language, so her explanations were halting at times and she was convinced that the little fruit balls were called "shoopies" in our language.  No one had the heart to tell her that that word doesn't mean anything in English.  It was the most amusing hour of the day, as the liquid nitrogen would create clouds of vapor as it was poured and evaporated upon contact with the air in the room and other warm surfaces, and this vapor could then be conjured into all sorts of shapes by blowing on it or stirring with a finger.  We started calling the ice cream "science", to the endless distress of our leader, who was afraid we were misunderstanding.  We would say, "This science is delicious!" or "Wow, this is the best science I've ever made!" and she would begin to explain something about the process or how engineering was much more specific than science, to which we paid absolutely no attention.  (You can't blame us, really; it was 3pm and we had been listening to an endless stream of the university's self-promotion since 10am - we were ready to have some fun.)

When we had polished off the rest of the ice cream and "shoopies", we headed back to the strange vertical building which housed the international center, to wait for a reception we were invited to at 5.  However, the list of things I needed to do to prepare for the weekend's travel loomed large over me, and I fidgeted for a few minutes before telling another member of the group not to let them wait for me and sneaking back to the train station.  The evening was spent doing much-needed prep work both on- and off-line, including my laundry for the first time since arriving in Germany (as promised, the convenience of a dryer wasn't worth my precious 2 Euros and I hung my clothes to dry in the boiler room for the night).  Armed with a fresh supply of money and a full backpack of provisions for the journey, I climbed into bed around 9:30, promising to get an early start on the weekend's adventures... which hopefully you won't have to wait two more weeks to read about!!