A Detour in the Opposite Direction

So, my summer and fall plans were set.  But there's one other adventure I haven't told you about yet.  One of the biggest reasons I joined the shark tracking project was the promise of a trip to Santa Catalina Island, California, during the week after spring exams to test all of our work.  I was particularly excited about this as it would be my first opportunity to visit the West Coast (before this, I'd only just been west of the Mississippi River when I went to St. Louis, MO over fall break for a medieval ball, and that was because the airport we flew out of just happened to be on the west bank ;]).  A good friend of mine, with whom I planned to room next year until I made the decision to study abroad, lives very close to Long Beach and I explored visiting her either before or after the trip, but her final exam the weekend before and piano recital and marathon the weekend after precluded that opportunity.  I still hope to visit her sometime, but it has been indefinitely delayed.

There was one more flurry of activity before we left as I realized, rather suddenly, that the free study abroad storage provided to me by the university (which conveniently also extended over the summer) was only available to me before I left.  It was a frantic three days of collecting my entire room into four piles: bring to Germany, store at Princeton, store with friends (anything I needed until the day I left or wouldn't fit in a box) and send home to have at Christmastime (which opportunity was only graciously provided by the wonderful Danielle, who happened to be visiting relatives in Boston the same weekend my mother and sister were going there for college visits).  Somehow it all got done, and my amazing, wonderful, servant-hearted boyfriend helped me trek no less than five small boxes, 2 under-bed totes, 2 plastic chests-of-drawers, and three large boxes across campus in the blazing heat to the basement where they will rest (hopefully) undisturbed until my return in February... I only dread lugging them back out in the dead of winter without his help, let's hope it's another snowless one!

We planned to be in California for nearly a week; flying out Sunday morning and returning Saturday morning.  Packing was quite the ordeal; to save on shipping costs, my advisor wanted us to bring many of the materials and robots with us as checked baggage instead of FedExing them across the country.  I didn't want to have to check a bag in both directions but didn't own something that I could either leave in California or fold up into my carry-on, so instead I volunteered to bring the PVC piping for the sensor frame and extra material for the steering fins.  When I finally began packing two days before departure (which is actually pretty good, usually I pack the night before :P) I discovered that the two-foot lengths of PVC were too long for any of my carry-on bags which were a maximum 22'' long.  After emailing the group several times about this problem and getting no response or suggestions to buy a mailing tube to check the pipe (which I thought very silly and unnecessary), one of the other students on Saturday night FINALLY said that he could probably fit the pipe in his checked bag.  They slid in without any problem, of course, and took up hardly any space, and we were off.  We did each end up having to check a bag, for which our advisor promised to reimburse us later, but I was skeptical as I would be in the country only a few days after our return before being abroad for seven months, and I doubted he could get an official reimbursement in that time (I was correct - he ended up handing me a $20 bill in the airport and saying "I owe you $5", but I doubt I'll ever get it... oh well, everything else was paid for so it's nothing in the long run :P).  We all got to Los Angeles without incident, where we met the other professor we would be working with, a marine biologist who works at CalState Long Beach.  We drove to our (more than a little) sketchy hotel for the night after transferring the important equipment to the biologist's 26-foot boat for transport the next morning.

We got an early start in the morning, catching the 8:30 Catalina Express over to the island.  Catalina Island boasts itself as "California's Only Island Resort" and it's been kept amazingly wild, for California.  Apparently a lot of Westerns were shot on the island and it now has an imported population of buffalo (unfortunately we didn't see any of these during our trip).  There are really only two towns on the island, Avalon and Two Harbors, and the rest is mostly undisturbed desert-grassland with only a couple of dirt roads to get from place to place.  We stayed in a house in Two Harbors, a beautiful three-bedroom, two-bath arrangement where the other female student and I took over the master bath and bedroom upstairs and left the first floor bedroom and couches to the two boys and the professor.  The facility where we worked was one harbor over from Two Harbors; about a mile by boat and three by road.  Each morning the biologist, who slept on the boat all except the last night, would drive over to the pier at Two Harbors around 7am to pick us up, and we would start the day with hot breakfast in the  research facility's cafeteria at 7:30 before getting to work.  The cooks were amazing and made really good food.  We always had bacon for breakfast, which made me happy :)  The weather was amazing while we were there, sunny and 70 every day.  Unfortunately there was more than a little breeze from the north-west which made it a bit chilly most days, and I had only brought one light jacket (after all, we're in California!) so I was often a tad uncomfortable.  But the weather was the least of my complaints.

As I've already explained, I stayed away from the coding aspects of the project during the year.  The goal of our Catalina trip was to test the new, multi-robot system.  Since what I had done first semester dealt with the particle filter, which at this point we were doing post-processing and not real-time (not to mention, that my methods had made it worse, not better), and my second semester work was determining the best frame configuration, I didn't really have anything in progress that I could work on during the week.  The other students worked hard at implementing the modem, debugging their controller code, and creating a user interface so we could control the robots.  In the meantime, when I wasn't helping take the robots apart or put them back together, I sat in a corner twiddling my thumbs and (almost) wishing I had done something more complicated or not finished it by the time we got to Catalina.  I don't like feeling unproductive or like I can't contribute, so it was really hard for me to accept that the menial tasks I was doing were as helpful to the project as the other students' contributions.  Sleep was also an issue, as the professors and other students seemed happy to work far into the night, often not returning to Two Harbors until after midnight.  I resented not having the opportunity to sleep a full eight hours in a night - I've never been a good "low-sleep" person and knew that I would need all the energy in my reserves to make it through my incredibly busy last weekend in the US.  I got so fed up that one night at about 11pm I asked my advisor if I could do anything else to help, and when he (a little peevishly as he prefers self-starters, which as I noted before, I am not) replied that there wasn't, I announced that I would walk back to the house.  I was only about 70% serious (and will admit that I was being a little bit of a drama queen) but when neither my advisor nor the biologist seemed flustered by my declaration, merely saying "go ahead, then.  It's pretty safe", the tables were turned upon me.  It was actually one of the best experiences of the week, hiking back silently in the dark (I had a flashlight but didn't use it) on the winding dirt road by the light of the full moon.  At one point I startled a large doe standing not ten feet off the road, who couldn't decide whether I was a real threat and so stood there, majestic in the moonlight, as I strode past.  I covered the three-plus miles in about forty minutes, but had been back at the house for less than a quarter of an hour before I heard the others tromp in.  Still, that hour was better-spent in my opinion than it would have been had I chosen to stay and mope in the lab until we all packed up for the night.

One of the biggest redeeming factors of my time in California was the daily snorkel we enjoyed just before dinner on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.  The water still only being about 60˚F, we used wetsuits.  Initially I protested about this (I've swum in water FAR colder than 60˚) but after seeing what was IN the water I was quite glad for the extra protection.  I don't think I've yet fully explained why we chose Catalina Island as our research station.  The goal of our project being to track sharks, we needed to go somewhere we could find them.   It just so happens that the bay that the CalState Long Beach research facility is on is a very popular place for female leopard sharks to congregate, right in the shallows next to the shore.  The researchers postulate that these are pregnant females, and the warmer water in the shallows helps speed up the gestation process.  In any case, the sharks gather there in swarms during spring afternoons, milling around to soak up the warm water.  Leopard sharks stay rather small, growing to only about 6 feet in length.  They have long, thin bodies, with the largest ones only being about as big around as an adult man's thigh.  They are a quite harmless and docile species, and they have very small teeth with which they feed on worms and other small bottom-dwelling creatures.  Nonetheless, it was an awe-inspiring and slightly unnerving experience to be floating there in three feet of water and be surrounded by no less than two dozen sharks.  They quickly skittered away if I paddled forward, but if I lay still for long enough they would cease to be wary of me and even swim right underneath, their petite dorsal fins nearly grazing my belly on their way by.  On the first day I almost didn't dare move as they came close, but after being reassured by the biologist that he had never seen anyone bitten by a leopard shark, on the second and third days I slowly drifted my hands down into the sharks' path and would let my fingers skim across their backs as they swam by.  They didn't seem bothered by this, and their skin was surprisingly soft for everything I'd heard about sharkskin being used by ancient peoples as sandpaper.  The important part is, I TOUCHED A SHARK!!!  Not only a shark (for there was both a 1-foot horn shark and a 2-foot swell shark in the touch tank at the lab, which I regularly petted on my way by) but one nearly as large as myself!!  Seeing the beauty of the kelp forest and experiencing the thrill of swimming in the middle of the shark swarm more than made up for all of my feelings of inadequacy and uselessness.  (P.S. I discovered through this experience that though I'm petrified of spiders, which in 99.9% of cases can do nothing to me, I'm not scared of sharks which are much more likely to do me damage... go figure!)

No zoom - I was actually this close.  Don't worry, these are the little ones.

What's more, on Wednesday the biologist lent me his waterproof camera case, and I took pictures as I snorkeled of the fish, sharks and rays that populated the cove.   That was the other exciting animal I saw - whether bat rays or skates (for I heard them called both), the large creatures with flat, pointed "wings" flew through the water with grace and speed before settling on the bottom in a cloud of sand, stirred up to hide them from unwelcome predators.  There were always a few gathered on the bottom in the deeper part of the cove, and it was quite fun to dive down towards them and see them shoot away through the water (never too close, mind, I saw their stingers...)  On Thursday many of them were flying up through the water column (some a little close to the surface for my comfort...) and when we asked the biologist about this strange behavior, he said "Oh, they only do that when there's a big predator around.  It's safer because then the sharks can't dive-bomb them."  So apparently we were also swimming around with something even bigger than ourselves, since on the previous days the rays hadn't seemed to view us as a big enough threat to put themselves in a state of alarm.  I'm not sure if I would have wanted to see a tiger or white shark swimming by or not - I wasn't scared of the leopard sharks because they really didn't look like they could hurt me, but I had seen too many deep-water horror movies and read too many gruesome accounts of shark attacks to be so assured about the big guys...

And so I had my first experience of California.  My advisor didn't seem to mind that I wasn't pulling my weight (or so I felt), so overall it was a positive one.  Fortunately our flight was changed at the last minute from a red-eye leaving at 10pm to an afternoon flight arriving then, so I didn't lose another night of sleep (though I still napped for the majority of the plane ride even though I tried to stay awake and see the country from the air...).  My advisor, who was also returning to his house in Princeton, called us a shuttle from the airport and I enjoyed a rather pleasant hour's ride back to my dorm during which we discussed his views on education and parenting, and I got to hear plenty of stories about his children.  As I said before, he is a wonderfully laid-back person and would make a great friend, but his approach to independent research and mine differed too much for him to make a good advisor for me.  Yet I still learned from my experience and enjoyed California, so I would say that this year, all told, was a success.  It certainly went out with a bang, as I will describe in my next post!!

Led to a New Place

While the independent work project basically took over my year, it wasn't all I did.  While I had to drop Kindred Spirit (the Christian a cappella group I am a part of) during the fall, I rejoined in the spring and my life was greatly enriched by the fellowship of the seven wonderful new members.  Because of the independent work project, I had to move one departmental class from this year to next, but overall I've completed nearly all of the requirements for my degree (yippee!!).  Though the schoolwork was tough, breaks were fun.  Fall Break I went to Fort Wayne, Indiana, to meet my boyfriend's family (same boyfriend as last year, in case you didn't know ;]), and for Thanksgiving he came home to meet mine.  Christmas was home as usual, though I spent nearly the whole time working on my independent work project and other term papers and such.  Even so, my fall semester exam period was quite grueling, and I ended up having to stay up three days straight to get everything done.  In the spring I purposely lessened my course load, taking only three classes besides my independent work project and rejoining KS.  Troubles in the dining hall stemming from mismanagement and abuse of power have led me to stop my employment there, so when I return next year I'll either have a lot more free time or get way more involved down at Public Safety.  I applied to be an RCA next year in December, but was rejected in the first round, which really hurt since everyone had always told me what a perfect candidate I was.  When I went to the dean about it, he told me I wasn't confident or strong enough for the position, which really made me stop and re-evaluate where I was personally.  Hopefully I've been able to use the criticisms productively and can continue to grow with the feedback I receive.

In fact, this January I went through a season of rejection.  Several elected or appointed positions which I thought I was highly qualified for I didn't receive: KS Fellowship Chair, PEF Officer/Service Team Leader, RCA, and Dining Hall Student Coordinator.  Again and again I was passed over, until I began to wonder what God had in store for me.  I figured He wouldn't just close all of these doors without opening some amazing opportunity that was truly His plan for me.  (To be fair, I was led to this conclusion by the wonderful wisdom of Danielle, the PEF staff for the junior girls; on my own I would likely have been more tempted to despair about the situation).  So I prayed about what He truly wanted me to do with my senior year; it seemed that, one by one, my ties to Princeton were being severed.  Just before Spring Break it occurred to me that taking a semester to study abroad, something which I had always wanted to do but thought that my opportunity had passed when I chose to do a year-long independent research project, was once again a possibility.  I considered my options and talked it over with my parents, who were more than enthusiastic for me to go.  (My Spring Break was spent in Florida with my family, a very nice week considering I otherwise wouldn't have seen them for an entire year!)  Coincidentally, just about the time I started thinking about this again there was an information session for the Institute for Study Abroad (IFSA), an organization which connects with foreign schools and sets up integrated semester and year study programs for American students.  The benefit of going through a third-party program like this is that many of the administration details are taken care of, and an American transcript is provided at the end of the program.  Originally, I was considering Australia or New Zealand as my destination.  (At this point my options were either Germany or an English-speaking country; although Mom was confident that my French would return quickly enough should I choose to go there, I was less sure.)  The only problem with a southern-hemisphere university was the schedule: their second semester begins in mid-to-late July, and the German internship I had applied for didn't end until July 31st.  So, after much back=and-forth with both my internship coordinator and the Institute for Study Abroad, narrowing it down to the United Kingdom and then researching the course options at each of the universities, I decided on the University of Edinburgh in Scotland as my program of choice.  I quickly found the class equivalents I would need to fulfill my remaining degree requirements and got them approved by the Mechanical Engineering undergraduate coordinator and department chair.  I spent a day running around to all the other departments acquiring signatures of approval for other courses for distribution requirement credit and handed in all of my forms, just in time for the deadline as usual.  There was a brief scare when none of my paperwork seemed to have gone through by a week after the program deadline - it turned out that there was an unexpected death of someone on the IFSA staff which threw a wrench in the works.  Everything was soon sorted out and my application sent off to Scotland while I finished up my spring semester, fortunately with much less stress and more sleep than the fall had produced.  Spring Exam period was relatively relaxed, but as three and then four weeks went by without any word from Edinburgh I began to get anxious.  However, as God is wont to do, as soon as I (finally) prayed about it I received an email the next morning expressing the congratulations of the IFSA staff on my acceptance into the fall 2012 program.  I'm still not sure if it's really sunk in that I won't be at Princeton for the fall, but I am truly looking forward to the break in many ways.  While a good friend of mine earnestly encouraged me to take a year off to travel instead of replacing one of my semesters at Princeton, I think I will be glad of my choice.  While I love my school, it has really worn me out (or perhaps, the way I have chosen to do it has worn me out) and, more than any other year, I am very close to the class of 2012 and Princeton won't feel the same without their presence.  Studying abroad for a semester is a form of escape for me, for good or bad, but I intend to take full advantage of the opportunities afforded me by the experience.

So, now that you know what I'm doing for the fall I should probably also tell you what and why I'm abroad for the summer.  After last summer in Germany, which certainly had its ups and downs, as those of you who read my blog know, I was enamored with the country and the culture.  My one goal this summer was to get back to Germany somehow, and preferably without having to do research again.  By the time I started seriously looking for internships at Christmas break, most of the deadlines for Princeton programs (the German Summer Work program, the International Internship Program) had passed.  My heart was beginning to sink until I came across a program through the Keller Center for Engineering Entrepreneurship called the Ruhr Fellowship.  This program lasted for the months of June and July and consisted of one month of language and cultural exposure (tours of the local university, excursions to various companies) followed by a one-month internship in an engineering company.  This being exactly what I was looking for (an industry internship in Germany) I immediately applied, although I hedged my bets with another internship or two as well.  This made things interesting for a while.  I applied to an online math tutoring job, figuring that perhaps I could do that in my spare time even with another internship.  I hadn't noticed that this was a year-round position, and so was quite surprised when the company contacted me right away for an interview and subsequently with a contract.  I momentarily considered taking the job in place of one of my campus employment positions, but it didn't pay as well as any of them and would have ended up not being as flexible as I would have needed, so I politely declined their offer, saying I might contact them in the summer if I became more available.  I am considering reaching out to them now even just to say that because of my sporadic internet connection and the time difference, I won't be able to do anything this summer either, just to keep my word.  We'll see.  The other internship I applied to was LeadAmerica, a sort of selective summer conference for bright and promising high school students.  I was also accepted to this position, surprisingly enough (after my first ever phone interview went astonishingly well), the catch being that they wanted a final answer about a week before I heard about my acceptance to or rejection from the Ruhr Fellowship.  It was a season of learning business etiquette and how to be tactful.  I ended up calling the director of LeadAmerica and personally asking for an extension on the deadline (again, on the advice of Danielle and one of the career counselors); he was so impressed at my courtesy that he granted it with no problems.  A few days after that I heard for sure that I had been selected as a Ruhr Fellow and called the director back, a little apologetically, to tell him the REAL reason why I couldn't accept his offer.  He was very gracious about the whole thing and told me he didn't blame me a bit for choosing Germany, wished me the best of luck and asked me to remember LeadAmerica in the future should I ever need summer employment again.  I am sure blessed!!

All this was also because the Ruhr Fellowship program was originally scheduled for June 1-July 31, and I was looking into possibilities for August.  As plans continued to unfold, however, I learned that Princeton's Commencement (Graduation) ceremony was held June 5.  The paperwork I began to receive from the Ruhr Fellowship seemed to indicate that the start date was not yet set in stone; crossing my fingers, I wrote "June 5" as my available date to leave the US.  When I noticed another place to indicate interest in extending the internship portion of the program, I quickly filled in that as well, though I had not at this point ruled out studying abroad in New Zealand as a possibility.  Though I had discussed my need for a later start date with the people in the Keller Center and gotten a green light, the program director in Germany was less than enthused and for a while it seemed that she might revoke my acceptance, though when I agreed to extend my internship to August 24th it appeased her and she continued to welcome me.

So now the plan was to stay at Princeton through graduation, fly out as soon as possible (the evening of Commencement) to Germany, where I would stay until the end of August.  Orientation in Edinburgh begins September 5 - that gives me approximately 2 weeks to get from Germany to Scotland (I worked it so that I would have enough time to tour leisurely through Europe, though I wouldn't quite have enough time to make a return to the States worth my while).  Although this means I won't see my homeland for a whopping seven months straight, it opens up exciting new opportunities to travel to places I haven't yet seen.  As of now I haven't planned anything concrete, but I have vague notions of meandering through the Netherlands and Belgium before dropping down to France (Paris for 2-3 days, perhaps?) and zipping under the English Canal to the United Kingdom, where I will continue to take my leisure through the rolling English countryside, nonchalantly arriving in Edinburgh on the correct day.  Regardless of how it actually pans out, I'm sure it will be an adventure.

Speaking of adventures, now I'm off to have a few more so I can tell you about them later... we'll get to Germany eventually, I promise ;)

Junior Year

Well, here I am again.  Off on another international summer adventure.  I guess I have something against staying in the US when I'm not in school?  Anyway, this adventure is looking to be even bigger and grander than the last, and I'm quite excited.  Keeping the tradition of previous years, I'll give you a quick overview of my activities in the intervening year, as well as my lessons from last summer, before diving into my chronicle of the present adventures.

So, this year was another busy one for me, but then again, they all are. :P  Looking back I'm not quite sure what possessed me, but for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to do my thesis/independent work requirement this year instead of next.  Granted, I got to work on a really cool project, and the professor is really nice as a friend, but it was a difficult experience and I struggled a lot during the year.  The professor was visiting for the year from California Polytechnic Institute at San Luis Obispo (CalPoly for short) and teaching a class in the fall about autonomous robots.  Since that's my main area of interest within mechanical engineering, of course I wanted to take the class.  Unfortunately, it directly conflicted with my Mechanical Design course, which I was not allowed to delay until next year.  So, I asked Dr. Clark if he had any research projects going which he wanted undergraduate help with, since I didn't want to pass up this opportunity to learn from an expert in the field.  He replied that he wanted students for two projects: cistern mapping in Malta and shark tracking in California.  Of the two, sharks sounded more interesting, so I volunteered to work on that project and have this professor as my advisor.  After much finagling, I got ahold of my departmental advisor and he told me how to get the project counted for credit, and I was delighted when the undergraduate coordinator for mechanical engineering informed me that this project would fulfill my independent work requirement for the department (read: I don't have to do a thesis next year).

The project was using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV, it looks like a torpedo) equipped with acoustic telemetry to track organisms underwater.  Apart from all the technical jargon, it works by catching a shark (or fish) and clipping an acoustic tag to it.  This tag sends out a signal (beep) at a certain frequency every few seconds.  The AUV is equipped with hydrophones (acoustic receivers) which pick up on this signal.  Since there are two of them, it determines the direction the signal came from using the difference between when each of the hydrophones received the signal.  It can only do this in a single plane (not 3-D) and cannot distinguish between the two sides of the robot, so we adjust our driving pattern to figure out whether the tag is on the left or the right.  The professor has been working on this project for a couple of years, so they had already implemented this system for a single AUV and were now looking to extend it to multiple AUVs.  This, of course, introduces difficulties such as sharing information between the robots (we installed a modem on each robot so they could communicate), controlling them so that they work together to provide the maximum amount of information, and designing a motion planner so that they don't run into each other.

I was shy about the coding aspects of the project, since I had never taken a computer science class past the introductory one, and so I volunteered to do what sounded easiest, which was to verify and refine the sensor model for the receivers, and build a new frame for the hydrophones.  I did the first part during the fall semester, and learned a lot about self-directed work in the process (namely, that I should have tried harder to work on it during the entire semester instead of leaving it all until Christmas break when my advisor wasn't available).  I had a really hard time with the report, as well, since I had never really written anything of this magnitude before (73 pages!) and was unclear on the format.  In retrospect, it was a terrible paper, particularly since I didn't really understand what I was doing and my advisor told me five days before the report was due to redo all of my results because my method didn't make any sense.  When I did it the way he wanted, the results got worse compared to the default method, which changed all of my conclusions and sent me scrambling to explain why I spent all semester doing something that hurt instead of helping.  I also had a poster session the first week back which I completely bombed, because I had no idea how to make a poster in the correct format, chose to hand-make it instead of printing and left it until the last minute.  I was 20 minutes late to the 1-hour poster session and my poster was smaller than the minimum requirement.  Despite all that (and it was rough, let me tell you) I got a B- for the semester, but I vowed to learn from my mistakes and do better in the spring.

This worked slightly, but since the system I needed to test didn't come in until after Spring Break and my advisor had a couple of poorly-timed conferences to attend near the end of the semester, I still found myself in serious crunch and had to reach out to my friends for help with the experiments I needed to run (since they required holding the tag and receivers 50, 100, and 150 meters away from each other, I obviously couldn't do them by myself, not to mention transporting all the materials the 1.5 miles from the E quad down to the lake).  But the members of the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship once again showed themselves to be amazing and I had no less than five separate people come help me gather all my data.  The second-semester report was much more professional and polished than the first, but there were still some serious flaws.  I attribute at least some of my poor experience to the lack of feedback I received; to illustrate, consider that though I sent my advisor a draft of my report three weeks before the deadline (even though I hadn't done any of my experiments yet O.o) and he promised to read it, he forgot and I didn't know that until 5 days before the due date when he asked why I hadn't sent him any thing yet.  Regardless, my poster was also much better (properly sized and completed on time), though in the 2.5-hour poster session I only talked to about 4 professors (25% of your semester grade for the project comes from the grades assigned by the professors at the poster session, less the highest and lowest grades). All told, I ended up getting a B for the second semester, which I thought a rather small grade increase for the additional amount of work I put into the project for the spring :P

All was not lost, however.  Through this experience I have discovered that I do not do very well with self-directed independent work; I much prefer to be given small, concrete tasks to complete and to be regularly supervised.  I suppose that's a good thing to know for next year when I'm looking for a job I'll enjoy.

Week 2

The second week started out a little hairily, with me using up the last of my milk but only having about 10 Euros in my wallet, not really enough to go shopping with.  I splurged on the "essentials" of milk and juice on Tuesday, and fortunately got (the sad remains of) my stipend on Wednesday, a total of 357.57 Euros, enough for groceries for a while, at least.

Monday was my first day of real work, which was very exciting.  I was officially introduced to the kneader and began making samples - and quickly discovered what a slow and tedious process it is.  The kneader is basically a very hot, very scientific mixing bowl where the different components of my samples (polymer, MAPP, and fiber) were melted down and mixed together to make a more-or-less homogeneous mixture.  The frustrating part was cleaning the machine between samples, as it was still very hot and the cooled plastic was often very sticky and difficult to remove.  Before any of this, however, I had to figure out how much of each component to add to the mixture, which rather complicated calculation I performed on a Google doc spreadsheet.  This summer I really came to appreciate the usefulness of Google docs, as it avoided having to keep my data on a flash drive whereby I could move it between computers.  I could get access to the Google doc from any computer with an internet connection, which meant that I could work just as well on my laptop as on the computers in the interns' lab.  (This turned out to be especially useful since I forgot my password for the lab computers and it was a couple of weeks before we got that all straightened out and I could log on there.)

Because of these several complications, I only finished two out of my 52 total samples on Monday, but I had use of the kneader for the entire week, so I could only hope that my rate would improve with practice.  Monday I got the treat of Wiener Schnitzel and potato salad for summer, a very German meal.  At the supermarket you could buy frozen wiener schnitzel cutlets just like you can buy chicken nuggets here in the States, so I often had these for supper since they were both my favorite German food (although they technically originate from Vienna, Austria) and quite easy to make in a frying pan.  Monday night was also my first time attending square dance, which I've already told you about. I was quite excited about this opportunity and only regretted that I had left my cowboy boots at home, which would have been the perfect addition to my square dancing outfit (and indeed, many people wore cowboy boots to practice every week, as well as western-themed button-down shirts and belts with large metal buckles).  Since dance practice didn't get over until 10, it was quite late (for me) when I finally got to bed, but staying up was well worth it.

Tuesday I was back at the kneader and trying very hard to make the process more efficient, but I still only got through 5 samples before lunch.  I then had to spend the afternoon cutting up flax fibers into workable lengths, and using the rubber-handled scissors in the hot, sweaty room wore patches of skin off of my fingers by the time I had finished cutting up the entire 900g of flax.  At 5:00 I attended the Praise and Move small group upon Renate's request, although I hadn't quite understood what the group was about when she invited me to it on Sunday.  This first week we didn't waste any time but were preparing an African chorus called "No one like Jesus" which we sang in English, German, and French - and Renate informed me that we would perform the song in church the following Sunday, which made me a little nervous, but excited at the same time, because I love to sing.  After the small group it was time for youth group, so I stayed for that and met some of the church members who are closer to my age.  I understood the pastor's message for the most part and really enjoyed myself there, and was only sad to discover that this would be the group's last regular meeting before summer vacation, so I wouldn't get the chance to attend in later weeks (in Germany, the academic year runs from October to July for college students).  This activity kept me up later than usual as well, although not as late as Monday night, and for awhile I almost thought that I would get back into a normal sleep schedule.

Wednesday was my first full, uninterrupted day at the kneader, and as I hoped, I was getting faster.  I got 14 samples in between 8:15 and 4:30, finishing one polymer system and moving on to the second which was (thankfully) much easier to chip off of the kneader.  After work, at which I received my stipend, I took a much-needed shopping trip and re-stocked my fridge with necessary foodstuffs like hamburgers, bread, and fruit, but also a couple of treats like ice cream.  One thing which I was very pleased to find this summer was that Germans have excellent ice cream, better than in the States, and I frequently took advantage of this specialty.  I also purchased cleaning supplies for my room and swept my floor, which had become amazingly dirty in only 10 days.  I tried harder after that to take my shoes off at the door of my room, but the unprecedented amounts of hair I was shedding, from stress or malnutrition or whatever other reason, meant that I always swept up a substantial dirt pile on my weekly cleaning sprees.

Thursday was much like Wednesday, with me finally finding my "groove" for the kneader and producing 15 samples between 8 and 4:30.  After work I took care of some administrative things, such as calling my parents for the second time from Clausthal (I also discovered a way where I could use my computer to call American land lines/cell phone numbers at no cost, which made contacting my parents easier as we could avoid dealing with their uncooperative Skype) and starting to make plans with a German friend of mine from Princeton whom I very much wanted to visit while in his country.  Exhausted from my several later nights, I fell into bed at 8 and immediately fell asleep.

Friday I hit a snag as the new polymer system I was working on proved to be much harder to clean than the others and required a higher processing temperature, making the entire room hot and sweaty to work in.  I also found that I hadn't quite prepared enough flax to make all of my samples, and these setbacks caused me to give up for the week, frustrated, when I came to a good stopping place a little after 2:30.  Leif always left around lunchtime on Fridays, and once he was gone I lost much of my motivation to keep working late into the afternoon, not to mention I was wont to come in earlier than most of the interns anyway.  On this particular Friday I had a good reason for stopping early, however, as Renate had invited me to a Women's Retreat with the church that weekend and was picking me up at 3:45.

When Renate picked me up, we drove about fifteen minutes outside the town to a small retreat center down a dirt road.  It took us a while to find everyone else, but eventually we spotted them on the porch of one of the cabins.  There were only about five other ladies there, and at first I thought that this was because we were early or something, but ti turned out that the church is so small that only about seven women came to the retreat at all.  We spent the first couple of hours chatting as we waited for the last partaker to arrive.  Other than introducing myself, which by this time was old hat to me, I chose to sit and listen to conversations rather than try to participate in them,  because these women already knew each other so I would have relatively little to contribute anyway.  Apparently they took my voluntary silence as an inability to communicate, because one or two of them would occasionally ask whether I could understand them, to which I truthfully replied that I was getting about 90%.  Overall, they, like the others I had encountered, were shocked that an American with no family ties to Germany could speak so well (I think I did my country proud this summer, and certainly tried my hardest to dispel the stereotype of the stupid, arrogant, monolingual American), and I would respond as politely and completely as I could when questions were directed at me.  Eventually we tired of waiting for this other lady and decided to go for a walk.  The countryside around the retreat center was gorgeous, as is the case around Clausthal in general.  We walked on rough roads and trails through the woods and along a couple of Teichs (a small lake with a dam and a water wheel at one end for generating power), and I took some pictures of the beauty.  The youngest woman there, who was still around ten years my senior (the rest were all my mother's age or older), started a conversation with me in which she inquired about my life, my studies, and my boyfriend.  I often found the limits of my German vocabulary in that particular conversation, especially when attempting to describe my boyfriend - I kept coming back to "He's really super nice" because I didn't know the words for "thoughtful", "wonderful", "kind", "amazing" and so forth.  After our little walk, the last participant finally arrived in time for us to enjoy a cookout of sorts.  It was "bring your own food", but Renate thankfully had brought some Wurst that I could share, so I didn't have to go hungry.  By the time we finished eating, the sun had begun to set, so their plans for having a teaching session and introductory activities were cut short.  Renate spoke briefly on relationships, then we broke for the night.  I realized during Renate's teaching that I was only understanding about 75% of what she was saying, and decided that I would really be better off staying home the next day instead of returning for the rest of the retreat.  I also didn't want to get in the way of the ladies' understanding and being blessed by the teaching and discussions in which I would be more of a burden than anything as I required extra explanations and repetition.  However, I enjoyed a good conversation with Renate on the way back from the retreat center (she would also spend the night at home and return in the morning) about the things she had mentioned and some relationship issues I had been dealing with in my own personal devotions and thought life.  I am very glad I went to the retreat, and I did learn a few things.


Saturday, now freed up by not returning to the retreat, ended up not getting much done.  After the busy weekends of Princeton in Munich, it was nice to have some days with no expectations when I could just relax, even if it made me feel guilty for being so unproductive.  I worked a bit on some of my summerlong projects (though probably not as much as I should have).  My one treasure of the weekend was discovering the "Amazon Kindle for Mac" app in the App Store and the wealth of free classic books available on Amazon - I must have downloaded 40 novels, quite ambitiously (in my defense, I read at least 7 of them during the course of my internship).  This, understandably, also ate up a big chunk of my Saturday, but at least it made the prospects of the rest of my summer much more appealing.


Sunday the weather was beautiful and we performed "No One like Jesus" in front of the entire congregation - it came off surprisingly well and we were quite proud of ourselves.  I was also officially "welcomed" into the congregation on this Sunday (since everything was so hectic with the baptism the week previous) with a bag of candy and a brochure introducing the church, which I saved to read later and never did :P  After the service I called Leif and got quite lost trying to find his house (I knew I was going the wrong way when I almost wandered into someone's backyard where they were having a cookout O.o), where he had a bicycle waiting for me, a hybrid street and mountain bike that had stood in his garage unused for three years.  When I had inquired about obtaining a bicycle for the summer, which I very much wanted to do as it increased my mobility at least tenfold, he graciously offered to lend me this one and I was ecstatic about not having to spend any money on a such a temporary convenience.  It was interesting, to say the least, riding the bike back in my Sunday sundress, but I made it without mishap.  The frame of the bike was really too big for me and the tires too thin to do the kind of riding I know I would tend to, and the rear gear shifter didn't work (I later discovered that it suffered from a loosened spring that I couldn't fix), bringing the bike from a 21-speed down to a 3-speed, but it was a bike and I was content.  All the problems with the bike didn't stop me from having adventures with it, as you will read hereafter.  The other big activity of Sunday was making a week's supply of shepherd's pie (or a normal amount for a five-person family, which is always what I had made), which is about the most complicated meal I made in the summer (and yet lived as frugally as possible and didn't tire of my variety - I might just make it this year, being independent!).  And so ended my second adventure-filled week in Clausthal.


Well, I can't promise that I'll ever finish this blog, especially since I head back down to Princeton the day after tomorrow.  But I'll keep trying, and you may eventually hear about all of my shenanigans - if you're lucky.

Week 1

**Note: Sorry about the wonky formatting on this post.  I originally wrote some of it in TextEditor at the airport and apparently that messed with the specs - I've tried several times to unify it but eventually just gave up (it looks all the same in my edit window but not on the published page).  I will try to remember only to write in Blogger from now on :P.**


So, now that I've given you a run-down of the different aspects of my life as it was here in Clausthal, I shall proceed with a short summary of each week, filling in any anecdotes or lessons that I learned from week to week, including my occasional weekend travel.  

You've already gotten a pretty good, though scattered, picture of my first 24 hours or so in Clausthal; Leif picked me up from the bus station, drove me to the Wohnheim (I was just glad not to have to carry my absurdly heavy bags anymore), then showed me quickly how to get to the Institute before leaving me on my own to settle in.  I unpacked and organized my room to my satisfaction, and cooked a supper of frozen veggie stew thickened with instant mashed potatoes before turning in for the night, early as was my wont.  Monday morning I slept in til 7, exhausted from my traveling of the day before (and not having slept very well on the worn-out goosefeather pillow).  Not having done any shopping yet, my breakfast was a PB&J sandwich and some tea (I actually ate an astounding number of peanut butter and jelly or nutella sandwiches for not being in America - it was my typical lunch) before I headed down to the institute at 8:15, armed with my questions.  After surprising me with his helpful answers to all of my inquiries, Leif made the rounds with me and introduced me to all of the coworkers with the same spiel, which I had memorized by the time we got through: "This is Erin, she is a RISE student from the USA, here for 8 weeks to work on a research project with natural fibers."  Then we sat down in Leif's office, he looked at me and said, "So, what do you want to do your project on?"  Now THIS was a question that I was definitely not prepared for.  I thought that Leif was going to put me on a project of his to help him out with grunt work, and he would do all the concluding and heavy thinking (what can I say? this is my first internship).  So I uncertainly answered, "Whatever you want me to do?" but that wasn't good enough for Leif.  He gave me a very quick, very basic introduction to natural fibers and FRC, and then told me that I would have to do background research to figure out what was already known and what needed to be explored so that I could come up with a decent project to occupy myself for the next eight weeks.  Having shaken me with this revelation, he deigned to let me go for the rest of the day to take care of various administrative duties, such as posting a Facebook status that I had arrived safely (which my boyfriend suggested I do.  This is a new concept to me, as my parents never insisted upon such confirmation when I was growing up, mostly because we never had any way of making such confirmation in the days before cell phones and Facebook), registering and receiving a student card at the international center, setting up an account for the university wi-fi (though this only exists in the academic buildings, so the vast majority of the time I relied on an Ethernet cable for my laptop, and setting up this account was also of first priority on that day), finding the Deutche Bank ATM in town to withdraw money (another 500 Euros, which smarted quite a bit), then proceeding to the Student Help Center to pay my 300-Euro down payment on my apartment, as well as my first installment of rent.  Although I did not arrive in Clausthal until the 26th, my room was rented to me from the 20th of June to the 31st of August, meaning that I had to pay almost three week's extra rent.  At 255 Euro/month, that's no small thing!  With my wallet significantly lightened, I proceeded to the grocery stores to do some serious research.  I walked up and down every aisle of Aldi and Marktkauf, examining the wares.  When I saw something that I might be likely to buy, I noted the price, so that when I was finished I could make a thorough price comparison and know for sure that I was always getting the best deal on my groceries (as far as choosing between the two most convenient grocery stores could guarantee me).  This was mostly motivated by my tight money situation, but knowing myself and the stellar example of my frugal coupon-clipping, bargain-hunting mother, I think I might have done it regardless.

After taking care of all of my administrative "chores", it was suppertime, so I returned to my room to continue using up the random collection of food that I had acquired in Munich.  This meant that my supper was very typically German as I prepared wurst (Germans love wurst.  I don't see what the big deal is - they're basically hot dogs) and potato salad.  The weather on this first day was hot and sunny, which I liked, but I was warned by my fellow Princetonian that this is anything but typical for Clausthal, and I was soon to find that she was correct :P  I also continued my "early to bed, early to rise" habit for most of the summer, easy since I never really involved myself in any social activities with the other interns.


Tuesday was a research day - I read no less than fifteen articles that I had found on the topic of natural-fiber-reinforced plastics, their possibilities and tried combinations.  This took all day, of course, and at the end of the day I checked in with Leif and asked for more clarification on one of the questions that I had had - horses.  As you've already read, it wasn't long after that that I was accompanying Mirjam to the stables and enjoying German hospitality.  Unfortunately that ended up being my only trip to visit the horses, due to the horrible weather for the entire month of August and the latter half of July, one week of me being sick, multiple weeks which were shortened by weekend travel, and scheduling conflicts at the end when Mirjam and I weren't available on the same day.  But it was fun that one time, and helped fend off the chronic loneliness and longing for contact with horses which inevitably besets me during summers when I can't get up to Living Waters camp where I served in the barn for six summers.

Wednesday morning I checked back in with Leif and we discussed what I had found in my research and what else I needed to search for in order to refine my topic.  Then he sent me off with another of the American RISE interns to be introduced to a process called Vacuum Assisted Resin Infusion, or VARI for short, which is one of the methods for making composite samples.  It wasn't a method that I used in my project, except for one week when I had nothing to do and Leif was trying to keep me occupied, but it was interesting to learn about.  This took the entire morning, and in the afternoon Leif shipped me off to sit in on a German-taught class on creep behavior.  I was surprised at how much I understood, until I realized that I already knew the material and was only connecting my previous knowledge to the sporadic words and phrases which I recognized.  This once again made me unsure about taking classes on new material taught in German.  The class also involved running an experiment and analyzing the data on computers using MATLAB, which made me glad that I was already familiar with the program as it counterbalanced the disadvantage of working in my second language.  This successfully took up the rest of my time at the institute for that day, however, and I was then free to return home for a supper of chicken and vegetables in gravy (kind of like chicken pot pie without the pot pie) before another early bedtime.

Thursday brought more research and a break in the up-to-then beautiful weather.  Leif was gone at a conference, so I didn't have to go in to the institute, which I didn't except for an introduction by Audrey, the other intern from Princeton, to the kneader, a machine that I would actually be using quite a bit in my project.  I was glad to finally get an introduction to something useful and paid careful attention, though it turned out afterwards that I still needed a run-down by one of the coworkers before I was officially allowed to use the machine.  I also went shopping for some more things I had discovered would be quite useful, including a dish towel and a throw pillow to supplement my sad goose-down monstrosity.  This summer taught me a lot about which household goods are really necessary and convenient and which are really redundant: a dish towel being one of the former, and paper towels belonging to the latter category.  Supper this night was about as German as it gets with fried Wiener Schnitzel and potato salad - have I mentioned how much I like German food?

Friday finally brought some tangible progress as Leif helped me form a definitive project with goals, process, and hypothesis.  I was ecstatic when I finally got to start doing some useful, productive work as well by washing the flax fibers I would be using in my composites.  I set them in the oven to dry over the weekend and returned to my room after my first complete week of work (which really didn't seem like I worked at all, but it was to get a little better in coming weeks).  I was also exposed to more of Leif's incredible helpfulness as he lent me an old microwave for the summer, one that he apparently just had hanging around in his basement.  Although the machine was obviously from the early 90s, it still worked well and made dinners immensely easier on many a night (leftovers + microwave = 2-minute prep time).  Supper this night was spaghetti, in which I added the last of the wurst (it was better this way than eaten straight, although less German).  I also found and watched "Inglourious Basterds," a movie that I had been wanting to see for a while.  It was an excellent movie, if a little bloody, and I only wish that I had had someone else to watch it with.

The weekend was incredibly uneventful, as the cold and rainy weather eliminated any possibility of going outside to explore the area.  I spent the two days in working on various computer projects and getting in contact with friends and family.  This was also the Sunday when I first attended the church which would become my spiritual home for the summer, which I've also written about previously.  While I came to the weekend with not much to show for it, it was also nice to have a couple of days to relax and adjust to my new routine in contrast to the activity-packed weekends of the Princeton in Munich program.

Okay, my biggest challenge with these "weekly summaries" is going to be avoiding tedium, I see.  I can only hope that I will realize that it is in both my and your best interest not to record the minutia of daily life, because it means less for me to write and for you to read.  Let's see how well I do with the next seven weeks!

The Family of God, All Over the World

Anybody who knows me knows that religion is a big part of my life.  God isn't just someone who I go visit on Sundays and try to keep happy by throwing Him some money every once in a while; He's my closest friend, wisest counsellor, faithful provider, eternal savior, traveling companion, and the lover of my soul.  I love Him, and by His grace, I love His people.  So it was only natural that I should try to find a church to attend while I was here in Clausthal.  I hadn't had the time to go to church in Munich because we were doing something every Sunday morning (although I did go when we were in Berlin), but I expected that my weekends would be much quieter here in Clausthal, especially since I didn't have very much money to go around traveling.  I prayed about finding a good church similar to Calvary Chapel and Westerly Road, where the people read the Bible and loved God and I would find good fellowship.  My prayers were answered with surprising swiftness when I was going shopping on my first day here and noticed a building next to Marktkauf which had a dove on the sign.  Upon closer investigation I discovered that it was, indeed, a church, and looked to be one of the modern, casual, back-to-the-Bible variety with which I was so familiar.  I decided to attend the next Sunday and find out whether this would be my church home for the summer.

Now, when packing for the summer, I was definitely thinking more about Munich, and the fact that it is summertime, than about the fact that I would be working in a lab.  Therefore I only packed two pairs of jeans, which was definitely a mistake.  I (of course) have to wear long pants in the lab, but neither do I want to be doing laundry every week, since I have to pay for it here.  So anytime when I don't have to be wearing jeans, I don't, even if the weather should convince me otherwise.  All this is to say that when that first Sunday came around, I happily dressed up in one of the several dresses I had brought to Germany (way too many, in hindsight) and trotted off to church in my dress shoes, even though it was sprinkling and chilly.  The service started at 10, so I planned to get there around 9:40.  When I arrived I was one of the first ones there, which I didn't count TOO strange as the people in my church NEVER arrive on time for service.  However, as the time drew nearer and more people showed up, no one seemed to be heading into the sanctuary, and I became more and more confused.  I was too shy to ask anyone, however, nor confident that my German would suffice to explain my confusion.  I kept waiting for someone to notice that I was new there and introduce themselves to me, but though I got some puzzled looks, no one offered anything more than a "Hallo".  Finally, a middle-aged woman came in, shook my hand in greeting, and asked me if it was my first time.  Grateful to have someone pay attention to me at last, I responded that it was, that I had come here alone after seeing the building on my shopping trip, and wasn't sure what was going on.  She smiled and explained that this day they were having a "Taufe", which is why no one seemed to be getting ready for service.  I didn't remember what a "Taufe" was except that it sounded an awful lot like "Täufel", which is the word for Devil.  The very nice lady told me to stick with her and she would take me where I needed to go, so I didn't ask any more questions, but put my jacket back on and followed her out to her car in the rain.  During the drive she and her husband asked me if I went to church in the States, and what it was like.  I tried to describe Calvary Chapel, but that's hard enough to do in English and requires quite a bit of specific "Christian" vocabulary, and I didn't know this in German.  For instance, I was asked if my church was "evangelisch", which I translated as Evangelical.  Yes, I responded, but then they asked if I everyone had to dress up for services and other questions that made it sound like "evangelisch" was more like orthodox, which Calvary Chapel certainly is not.  When we arrived at our destination I suddenly remembered what a "Taufe" was, as I saw the people gathered on the edge of a lake.  We were here for a baptism!  Everything suddenly made sense to me, and my guide explained that they had planned to have service outside at the lake as well, but since it was raining they would relocate back to the sanctuary after the baptisms.  The baptism ceremony was very similar to how we do it at Calvary Chapel (except that we baptize in the ocean in the summer and in a giant cow trough in the winter :]), with the pastor asking for a confession of faith from the people being baptized, and then gently dunking them under the water "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit".  We sang a song or two, including "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus" (in German), then headed back to the church.  We had had to walk through some grass and a dirt path and my legs had gotten mud-spattered, so Renate, as I later learned her name, brought me to the kitchen in the back of the church to help me clean up a bit before the service.  Then we all gathered in the sanctuary, sang a few songs (one of which I recognized as being translated from an English song we sing at Calvary Chapel), and heard a message.  Everything was in German, except for one of the songs which we sang in English, so I didn't understand the sermon completely, but I got the basic meaning.  After the sermon there was a full-out meal for the congregation, complete with potato salads, meats, drinks, and desserts.  Renate sought me out again and talked to me more, and I gave her the by now well-practiced spiel about where I came from and what I was doing in Clausthal.  She was very friendly and happy that I had found the church, and promptly invited me to a small-group meeting on Tuesday.  Since I didn't really have anything else to do, I agreed to come, even though I wasn't quite sure what it was all about (I just heard something about singing).  I left the church at around 1pm, head spinning, but very happy to have found a place to call my spiritual home for the summer.

As I later found out, the church is a small, independent, pentecostal church.  I have always been wary of charismatic churches because of the abuses that so frequently occur in America, with people jumping and dancing in the aisles during worship and "speaking in tongues" in the middle of the sermon.  However, this church was not nearly as chaotic as I had always imagined a pentecostal church to be, and I was very happy with their style, which is actually quite similar to my home churches in the States.  The congregation is small, not more than 100 people, and the age ranges from students like myself to young families to people in my parents' generation (there didn't seem to be many gray heads in the service - I suppose the church isn't 'traditional' enough for them).  It is a very international church, partly because of the large proportion of student attenders (which I didn't get a very good idea of, since it is the summer and most of the students are at home unless they are international students for whom it is too far to go home), but there are also several families from Africa.  

The international aspect of the church was really brought home to me when I attended the small group "Praise and Move" on Tuesday.  Turns out it is a group which meets weekly to practice praise songs from all over the world, which they occasionally perform for the church during Sunday services.  The first week I was there, they were working on an African song called "There's No One Like Jesus", which we sang in English, French, and German.  I picked up the simple lyrics quickly enough and gladly joined in, but was a little nervous when Renate mentioned that they would try to perform the song on the following Sunday.  It was great fun when we did it, however, and it went off well, and I smiled at the fact that on my second Sunday attending the church I was already at the front helping lead worship.  Guess it pays to be friendly and take every opportunity afforded you!  After that I gladly attended "Praise and Move" every week, and near the end of the summer we performed another franco-African song, "Jesus est mon ami", which I convinced another member of the congregation to video for us.  In the "Praise and Move" group we had a Philippino woman, a couple of people from Ghana, three Indonesians, someone from the Cote d'Ivoire, me representing the Western Hemisphere, and even a young Vietnamese man who sort of stumbled upon our practice and was prevailed upon to join us, in addition to Renate and another couple of Germans.  We all spoke German together, but my German was actually better than that of several of the group members, which they (as usual) marveled at and whined about a little bit.  I guess I'm a living plug for Princeton's language education, if after nine months I can speak better than people who've been living in-country for years.  

Immediately after the "Praise and Move" was the youth group meeting, which I unfortunately only got to attend twice before they stopped meeting for the summer.  There I met another couple of Germans my age, including Renate's son Tobias, who speaks decent English and likes to joke around.  Everyone was quite friendly and welcoming, as has been my unilateral experience here in Clausthal.

One of the church's traditions that I grew especially fond of was the "Kaffee & Kuechen" after the Sunday morning service, presumably provided by congregation members in a sort of rotation.  Every week there would be about half a dozen types of desserts and pastries out for the congregation to enjoy while they fellowshipped after the service.  The church can get away with this because it is such a small group - it reminded me of Women's Bible Study back home, and made me realize the advantages to a small church.  During this time I met many other of the congregation members, and was able to share about my spiritual background and tentative plans for returning to Germany someday, as well as listen interestedly to whatever they wanted to talk about.  A few people approached me claiming that they wanted to practice their English, but in most cases my German was better and besides, I'm here to learn, not to teach.  My contacts through the church became very useful at times and I'm convinced that it was another way God was providing for me - once I missed the last bus of the evening coming back from a weekend excursion, but a quick phone call to Renate and her husband picked me up from the bus station 16km away without needing to hear any more.  Another time, I needed to take a train very early in the morning to go visit a friend in another city, and was resigned to the fact that I would have to ride my bike the long and dangerous road to the train station.  When I happened to mention this to Renate, she immediately exclaimed that there were people in the congregation who lived in Goslar right by the train station, so it would be really unnecessary for me to have to ride there when I could just stay overnight with them.  I'll give you more details about that particular adventure later, but it set a new standard in my mind for German hospitality.

On my last Sunday in the church, the pastor approached me and asked if he might call me up to the front to pray for me before I left, to which I gratefully agreed.  Several of the elders in the church came up and laid hands on me, and they all prayed that I might have a safe journey back and enjoy God's blessing in the coming school year, for which I was very touched and thankful.  I know that God heard their prayers, and I will certainly lift up the little "Pfingstgemeinde" in Clausthal in turn.  I know, at least, that if I ever return to this area of Germany, I will have a place to stay and friends to see should I choose to come visit Clausthal.  I plan to stay in touch with the Eschmanns (Renate, Frank, Tobias and Tabea) and hope that I do, but even if life comes between us, I know there will be a joyful reunion someday in Heaven, where not even the language barrier will separate our fellowship.  As one of the students from the "Praise and Move" group remarked, he will be sure to find me in Heaven, because all he will have to do is follow my laugh. :)

Bow to your partner...

One of my other questions to Leif on that my first day concerned the opportunity to involve myself in dancing in the area.  While not being naturally endowed with any particular grace of motion, I have always been a rather active (I prefer this term as being more fitting than "athletic") person.  When I first began my journey at Princeton I was enamored by the multitude of both dance and a cappella groups on campus, and purposed to get involved with both during my time there.  I had no previous dance experience (the closest I had come was a couple of years of gymnastics as a young child and swimming lessons throughout my youth, culminating in two years on the high school swim team), so I had little chance of making it onto any of the audition-only dance squads, however, there were still several opportunities for which I needed little skill.  I immediately sought to become involved in the Ballroom Dancing club, and attended beginner lessons sporadically for the first semester.  However, there are nearly always more females than males in beginning dance courses, and the frustration of being repeatedly left without a partner (not being aggressive enough to snatch one of the few boys who did dare to attend) finally caused me to throw in the towel until I found a partner.  This I thought I had managed in the person of Alex, a wonderful friend of mine who was also president of the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship (and a fine catch in the opinions of most of the female membership of the group).  Alex is a gentleman in the traditional sense of the word, and a staunch defender of all things manly (including bacon, Lord of the Rings, bacon, swordfighting, and bacon, to name a few).  Thus it came as little surprise to me that he was also highly interested in learning the fine (and very manly) art of ballroom dancing.  I extracted a promise from him at the end of my freshman year to be my dance partner in the fall, and went off to my summer adventures quite content.  We were foiled in this venture, however, by the unfortunate scheduling of beginner lessons on Friday evenings during Princeton Evangelical Fellowship's weekly assembly.  The president of the organization couldn't very well abandon the group meetings to go dancing, so though we managed to attend a few "makeup" lessons scheduled throughout the week, we were never able to attend regularly enough to feel anything other than embarrassed and unqualified.  However, it was in the fall of my sophomore year that I discovered the Princeton Swing Dance club which met weekly on Wednesday nights for lessons and free dancing, and fell in love.  Not only was this dance more free and rhythmic than the strict technique of ballroom dance, it was created to be danced to jazz music, which is one of my favorite genres.  One of my main challenges came with the spontaneous nature of the dance, which clashed firmly with my controlling, OCD, Type A nature which wants to know exactly what I'm supposed to be doing every moment so that I can know that I'm doing it well.  However, after much (sometimes agonizing) practice I learned the art of relaxing, enjoying myself, and listening to the guidance of my partner, and with a good enough lead I can actually appear to be (though it may be only an illusion) a reasonably skilled dancer.  Several months before my boyfriend and I started dating, I began dragging him along to swing dance (not unwillingly, but reluctantly as he was shy to be "not as good" as the other dancers there).  I, in my turn, accompanied him to Contra and English Country dances as frequently as our busy Princeton schedule would allow us to attend them.  I had discovered the local country dance group which hosted these dances when they came during OA Leader Orientation Week, prior to the Orientation camping trip which I helped lead, to host a Contra dance as entertainment for the leaders.  The August air lay hot and muggy inside the gym, but heedless of it, we danced our hearts out until the sweat poured down our faces and backs, and I fell in love with the energetic, nearly frantic pace of Contra dancing.  Unfortunately their weekly events are also held on Wednesdays, in direct conflict with Swing, but they occasionally also have Saturday dances which we can attend.

So I was looking with some reluctance towards my summer which I saw as being quite empty of dancing.  I was in luck, however, because another member of the Princeton in Munich program was a much more avid swing dancer than I, and I have already detailed to you how she dug up several swing dance events for us to attend while we were in Munich.  I scoured Google for similar opportunities in Clausthal, but I think this town is just too small for that kind of young city-dweller type of activity.  Nonetheless my sharp eyes had not failed to notice the shirt that Leif was wearing on the day he picked me up from the bus station and how it had the logo and name of a dance group emblazoned upon it.  Therefore I asked with a great deal of hope after opportunities for dancing in the area.  Leif informed me that he was a former ballroom dancer and instructor himself, but my previous experiences with ballroom led me to only smile nervously at the prospect of trying to learn this strict art in another language.  Then Leif mentioned, with a slight tone of disdain that I could hardly blame him for in his position, that there was a Square Dance group in the neighborhood.  I, in his words, "ausgeflippt" (seriously, that's the German word for "flipped out" ;D).  Not a minute later he was behind his desk typing furiously on his computer, and very soon he pulled up the website for the Harzer Country Dancers.  He pointed out to me that they met weekly, on Mondays, having first one hour of square dance lessons, then one hour of line dancing, and concluding with an hour of hearty square dance.  I was very eager to join in this most American of pastimes and somewhat assumed that my few experiences of square dancing (the annual PEF Hoedown and a square dance on a family vacation two summers prior) would be sufficient to keep me afloat in a dance which I imagined consisted mostly of "bow to your partner"s, "do-si-do"s, "promenade"s, and other such trivial movements.  I was soon to find that I was quite wrong.

As usual, Leif knew just whom to call to find me a ride to where I was going, and the next Monday I walked to a Shell gas station near the Wohnung to meet a blue Honda whose driver would take me to the dance hall.  (I've had more "blind dates" of this nature this summer than ever before, and I can't imagine being bold enough to go through with any of them without the enthusiasm, trust, and sense of adventure which my wonderful experience and friends from two years at Princeton have taught me.  I'm so glad that I have, though, or I would have missed out on so many experiences.)  Her name was Rita, and she was friendly and talkative as we drove the ten minutes to Buntenbock, the next village over.  She asked me if I had any prior experience in line or square dancing, and, recalling middle school gym classes of dancing the Cotton Eye Joe and Electric Slide, and the aforementioned square dance experiences, I ventured an uncertain yes.  We arrived after the square dance lesson, unfortunately, or I perhaps could have saved some of my dignity and received a bit of a warning of what was to come.  As it was, I quickly learned that the line dances this group practiced were significantly more involved than the simple ones I had learned.  Nonetheless I stood in a corner and watched carefully, and when a dance seemed simple enough that I could reasonably get the hang of it, I would step to a spot in the formation least in the way and, eyes fixed firmly on the feet of the person in the group who seemed most comfortable with the pattern, attempt to mimic.  I got a couple of them down passably, though I can't say that I would remember how to dance them on my own.  It was enough, however, to impress the other members of the group, who repeatedly approached me and asked how I already seemed to know several of these dances, to which I replied with a blush that I had never seen them before but was just mimicking what I observed.  As happened many times during my first few days in Clausthal, my background and reason for coming to such a small and "off the beaten path" town were inquired after, and my language proficiency (after it being revealed that I had studied German for less than a year) remarked upon and admired.  At first the people were reluctant to speak to me in German, and a few who knew English addressed me in it, but I always responded in German to the best of my ability and they soon accepted that I could understand just about everything they were saying, even if I didn't always know how to respond.  All of this served to inflate my pride somewhat, but all of my haughty self-confidence was about to come crashing down as the hour of line dance came to an end and it came time for square dancing.

Now, I've always been too shy to ask a guy to dance, my boyfriend being the only exception, and that only recently.  So my strategy is to stand near the edge of the dance floor and look hopefully and expectantly out onto the festivities, hoping someone will take pity upon me and ask.  It was the same here, but since I was new one of the older members of the group graciously extended his hand to me at the first dance.  I was fairly quivering with excitement as we stood in formation and I heard the familiar, "Bow to your partner; your corner too"... and then things fell apart.  The caller was ostensibly speaking English, but half the time I couldn't make out what he was saying - and even when I could, it was unfamiliar commands like "Tag the Line" or "Weave the Ring" or "Two Ladies Chain."  Sometimes the move was self-explanatory, such as "All Face In" (and even that's a little ambiguous - how do you define "in"?) but more often than not it was something completely not intuitive (how does one describe a "California Twirl"?)  I quickly became completely lost but tried to put a brave face on it and keep alert, trying to disturb the flow of the dance as little as possible by looking desperately to my fellow dancers for clues.  When a move was called and I was forcibly moved into the correct position (which happened more often than not) I would try to remember what that meant, but so many of the calls were so similar!  How was I supposed to remember the difference between a "Swing Through", "Pull Through", "Pass Through", "Slide Through" and "Turn Through"?  I wasn't completely horrible - I recognized a couple of moves (Allemande Left, Do-Si-Do, Swing and Promenade) but the vast majority of the time I would respond to a command with a blank look and a nervous giggle.  Sparing you any more agonizing details, suffice it to say it turned out to be a very embarrassing and disorganized dance because of my incompetence.  When the entire thing was finally over, I retreated shamefacedly into the corner.  One of the callers soon followed me over and said, very slowly and clearly (in German), "Do you understand me?"  When I assured him, blushing, that I did (he must have chalked my blundering up to an inability to understand the commands - I wish I could have blamed it on that!), he asked me curiously if I had ever square-danced before.  Thinking about my experiences in comparison to what I had just bungled through, I realized that the proper response was "no", and told him so.

As soon as the members of the group found out that I had, in fact, virtually no square-dance experience, everything changed.  Their attitude went from, "Wow, this girl's really not very good" to "Oh, poor dear, she's never been taught and is flying by the seat of her pants".  Needless to say I was not invited to dance any more that first week, for which I was actually quite grateful.  At the end of the time, the caller came up to me to explain a little more about square dance as they danced it here.  It turns out that there are international rules for square dance, which is why all of the figures are called in English.  There is an official rule book which describes all 62 of the basic figures in detail, and then there are additional figures which correspond to higher levels of complexity.  This particular group dances "Mainstream", which is the first level of square dance beyond Basic.  This means that there are 82 separate calls that one has to know how to perform from any possible configuration, in time to the music.  Once this was all explained to me, I promised to look up the figures on the internet and learn them so that I could join in the dance without embarrassing and frustrating the other members of the group.

Somehow, though I only had to be in the lab 8 hours a day and had relatively few social commitments outside of the institute, I never managed to get as much done in my "free time" as I planned.  Many grand projects passed the summer undone, and studying square dance was no exception.  I remembered a couple of times, usually on Monday evenings while I was hastening to finish my supper before Rita or Jorgin picked me up for the lesson.  But I found an excellent site where all 82 figures were described in detail with accompanying animated graphics of the dancers moving, so I could better visualize where each dancer should start and end up.  I picked it up remarkably quickly (surprising even myself) and by the third week could dance an entire dance without getting confused and lost more than five times or so (and to give you some sense of scale, each dance lasts about 15 minutes and can include up to 100 calls, though there is often a pattern or string of calls that is repeated several times throughout the dance).  All of the group members marveled at my learning curve - Jorgin, my sulky chauffeur while Rita was on vacation, complained that in three weeks I had learned more of square dancing than he had in 15 months, which I bashfully attributed to my youth.

One thing is true, I never failed to enjoy myself - the group was friendly and laughed a lot, and everyone always greeted me with a smile.  It was definitely always one of the highlights of my week, and one of the aspects of Clausthal which I will miss the most when I return.  Apparently, the group will miss me, too.  On my last week here, I missed my ride because I got caught up doing something else and came late to our meeting spot, and Rita did not have her cell phone on her so she just assumed I wasn't coming.  Undeterred (and determined not to miss my last chance to square dance), I took the bike Leif had lent me for the summer and rode along the back way to the dance hall (I was sure glad I had scoped it out before now!), arriving just a few minutes late.  The season is approaching where the group will have many performances at folk events and such, so they were running through all of the line dances they knew, and I could only step in on a couple of them.  Then in the middle of the practice the caller stopped everyone and, smiling at me, asked me to come to the middle of the room.  He made a very nice speech about how enjoyable it was to have me there and to see how quickly I learned, and I just stood there with a gigantic smile on my face and blushing as hard as I could.  Then another senior member of the group stepped forward with a present for me - a beautiful picture of the group, all decked out in their performance garb (cowboy hats and all) in a frame made of pine branches - appropriate for the Harzer Country Dancers.  In addition to this wonderful photo, they attached a token to the frame.  Now, once a dancer has "graduated", meaning that they are certified to know all 82 figures, they receive a very nice name plate from their home group.  Then, when they travel around and dance at other groups, they receive a token from that group as a gift, which they attach to their name plate to show how well-traveled they are.  I haven't graduated yet, and I have no home group, but if and when I do I will be able to attach the Harzer Country Dancer token to it, and if I travel around and get involved in this worldwide phenomenon I will always carry the memory of this wonderful group of friendly people with me in a very real way.


Now, I fully intend this blog to be something more than a chronological record of my daily activity in the summer.  I want you to learn something from my adventures, as well.  If I had been too shy to step out into such a totally new social situation as the square dance group (or the church I will tell you about in my next post), I never would have known the fun I have had and the friends I have made this summer.  While it certainly pays to be wise and discerning, sometimes the best adventures are to be had well outside of our normal comfort zones and social circles.  I have learned the valuable skill of laughing at myself and not valuing my pride higher than a good experience or lesson learned, and it has opened the door to many a friendship and memory that I look back upon fondly.  So, especially if you're still young, don't be afraid to try new things.  You will often be surprised at the warmth and generosity of others, and even if you should chance to have a bad experience, learn to take it in stride and don't let it stop you from trying again next time.  Who knows how many hidden talents and passions you may uncover, and how many new friends you may find who may come into your life again in unexpected ways in the future!

Okay, enough moralizing.  Go out and enjoy life to the fullest, and above all, keep smiling!!