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!!