Hmm... I'm writing this late Friday, but I'm not sure when it'll go online b/c I haven't been able to connect to the internet for over 9 hours now. Gaa! Also, this will be a loooong entry, since it's been a few days. Tangentially, this is why I can almost never manage to keep a diary; I hate leaving anything out, and so writing it becomes too much of a time sink. I'll do my best to keep this journal for the summer though, just for you! Anyways, on Wednesday I got to go to Ulm with Mr. Danuschewske for a meeting. It meant getting up really early for a 5:45 am train, but it was fun. After the meeting we got some ice cream and walked around Ulm. We went to see the cathedral (picture in the previous post) and the old city wall (pictures ... now!)

Ok, the first picture is a view from the inside of the old city wall (it's on the right.) If you look carefully (click it to enlarge), you'll see a sign that says that says, "Seel Tower 14th Century. In the Houses on the City Wall lived the soldiers 1610-1805." Except in German. The second picture is a closeup of the sign. The third is taken from the other side of the wall, and the windows on top are the windows of the soldiers' barracks. Hmm... before we move on, I have to put in two more pictures of the cathedral, because I find them aesthetically pleasing:

Oh, and speaking of really cool pictures, credit for the following one goes to Mr. Danuschewske, who borrowed my camera when a bee on a fountain by the wall caught his attention. There isn't much to scale by in this picture, but the thing was huge (for a bee).

The old part of Ulm is really pretty! There are roses everywhere!

And there were lots of beautiful old buildings. This one is from 1594:

Then we walked back to the train station...

And took the train back to Kassel (about 4 hrs.) I took this picture out the train window:

I love how ... classic, is that the word I want? ... this picture is. It just looks so idyllic, with the cluster of houses in the middle of lush gently rolling hills under a soft layer of (cirrus?) clouds.

Later Wednesday night, in Kassel, I met up with another MIT student who was in town, Alex. I thought I was starting to know my way around Kassel, but I got sooo lost going to meet her! Luckily I've gotten quite adept at asking directions! Anyways, we found each other, and then went to eat at, coincidentally, the Alex.

We had a really nice dinner. I had some delicious strudel, and she tried the croissants. We hadn't met each other before Wednesday, but relaxing at the restaurant and getting to know each other was really fun. We compare notes about working for Deutsche Bahn (she's at the Minden branch), and I enoyed being able to say more than I usually can, since I'm still considerably more articulate in English than German. Alex spent a couple of years in Germany growing up, so her German is excellent! After dinner we found a Discotheque and danced for a bit.

Above are picture from the Discotheque, and one of Alex and me before we split up for the night to get a bit of sleep before work the next day.

Thursday morning saw me once more at the train station in Kassel, this time headed to meet Mr. Foth (head of the Kassel Engineering Division) at the Hannover train station, from whence we traveled to Bremen. Mr. Foth used to work in Bremen before he came to Kassel, and he showed me around the city a bit.

Here's a pretty, old windmill. Bremen wasn't bombed in WWII as Kassel was, so it has more original architecture. In the older part of the city the streets are all quite narrow and cobblestoned with rows of adjascent houses.

You may have heard of the Bremen musicians? Touching the donkey's feet on the musicians' statue is said to bring luck. The statue's a popular attraction; you can tell the parts everyone touches for luck by the different shades of the metal. I made sure to collect my luck!

Less well known is this place, where they used to hang people. The gallows stood in the middle of that circle on the ground.

Bremen's a port city on the Weser river.

We got coffee and light food at the cafe above. I couldn't help taking the picture, because the lights in that place were just sooo amazing!

So, after that we went to Deutsche Bahn, which was also really cool, but I can't take pictures there. The first locomotive they ran in Germany, in 1913, is at the Bremen branch of Deutsche Bahn! I met the colleagues there, including Frau Schnakenberg, who gave me a tour of some of the campus. I love the scale of everything at Deutsche Bahn.

Mr. Foth has a bicycle that he keeps in Bremen, and one of his friends lent me a (21-speed with gel seat!) bike for the day, so after work we biked back into the city. We took a scenic route, and stopped to buy cherries and strawberries by the side of the road. We biked along the river and to a park where we stopped to eat the fruit. Along the way we saw a lot of small pretty houses. I had seen a lot of these in Germany. It turns out that they're actually weekend houses. This is apparently the thing to do in Germany; instead of a vacation house or a timeshare in another city, a weekend house on the river. These properties tend to have as much or more space for the garden as for the house! When we biked over a bridge that we had walked over earlier, I was strongly reminded of that scene that's in a million movies, where the hero is walking along, is momentarily out of sight behind a tree, and suddenly is 10 years older, or a lot stronger, etc.

I love how popular biking is in Deutschland. There are bike lanes everywhere, and it's not unusual to see people in suits biking! Biking with people you work with/for is also really neat, and something I didn't expect.

That night we went to eat at a typical German bar/restaurant with a couple of Mr. Foth's friends, which was nice, although at that point I was pretty tired. Then we went back to the hotel. In the morning I didn't hear my alarm go off ... I don't know if the fault lay with me or it, since I've been skeptical of it for a while. Anyways, when I didn't show up for breakfast Mr. Foth had the front desk call my room, and it was fine. We went back to Deutsche Bahn for a few hours. In late July I'm going to get to work in the Bremen branch for a couple of weeks under Frau Schnakenberg! So we talked about what I'll be doing then. I also got to climb around a train being worked on -- Deutsche Bahn's so much fun!

So then I just took the train home to Kassel and went to the gym. I've been intermittently trying to get online for 12 hours now, to no avail :( So I sort of vegged out to some music, and napped, and wrote this. (And made food. Somehow, I've lost my strawberry jelly. Don't ask me how!) And now it's really late, to the point of being early, and so I guess I'll sleep a little more and try the online thing again tomorrow.

If you read this, you've probably already read week 2. In case you're interested, I've decided to start changing the top picture on the Journal page every week (page 3 now has a picture of some arches by the river in Bremen.) So if you're interested in seeing some carbonated water in a can and Döner (Preeya), check out the top of page 2. Also, if anyone knows how I can add commenting functionality in html (I'm using Dreamweaver), let me know! I'm going to try to figure it out myself otherwise, but I have no internet to ask at the moment. Anyways, I think this post is long enough for now! Goodnight!

Kim

I had a really cool day, but I don't have time to go into detail yet. I think more posting will have to wait for the weekend. So for now I'll limit it to one picture. This is me (duh!) in the foreground with Ulm's Dom (Cathedral) in the backgound.

Now go do something interesting! We'll meet back here on the weekend and compare notes.

Yes, I really really am the luckiest person ever. When my alarm went off this morning, I recall thinking to myself, "Silly me. I forgot to turn off that silly alarm for Saturday!" and then turning it off and rolling back over to sleep. I was in the middle of an entertaining dream, when it somehow dawned on me that today was in fact Tuesday. I sat bolt upright and looked to the clock: and I had somehow, impossibly, only taken an extra 5 minutes of sleep! It was crazy.

Anyways, I finished up the Klappsitz project (I mentioned it a while ago) today. Then I got to a fun little exercise in logic, figuring out where to put the bolts for some other seats arranged in a certain way. And then Stephan and I biked down to Bahnhof Wilhelmshöhe. We had a company meeting for a couple of hours. They talked about the new office space that we're going to move into in mid-August, and also some budget-ish things. After the meeting, Stephan and I met a friend of his who works for a different part of Deutsche Bahn and looked out on the rails from a high window in her office building. Then we walked our bikes to a Biergarten where we met the rest of our division. Our whole office (around 20 people) had drinks and dinner at the Biergarten. We hung out there for a long time; we arrived at 4pm and I just now got back to my apartment at 11pm! So much for the gym today... I had a delicious, very traditional German meal: bratwurst, saurkraut, potatoes, and a mug of beer! In middle and high school I avoided eating, or even sitting next to someone eating, sauerkraut. I don't know if I was just crazy then, or if German saurkraut is just vastly superior to American stuff, but at any rate, this stuff was Delicious! Maybe it just tastes better in the context of a German meal. My coworkers all had a lot more to drink than I had, on the order of several liters. Eventually I had a glass of Chardonnay as well. Mmm, that was good. I couldn't actually finish my meal; it was generous and filling as well as delicious. The whole atmosphere was very nice and relaxed. My coworkers' conversation ranged over old stories of East and West Germany, cars, and engineering problems. Tomorrow I get to travel to Ulm with Mr. Danuschewske! It should be fun, and I promise to finally take some more pictures!

Kim

Hi, just a quick post w/o pictures today.

I can't believe it's week 3 already! Brad crashed at my place last night, since his classes don't start until 2pm on Mondays. In the morning I made some eggs for us and then we parted ways. Work today went well for the most part; I think it was my most efficient day yet, since I'm finally starting to be able to use the software competently and also because I had a concrete deadline. Mr. Danuschewske asked me about "Dear Mr. President" by Pink, which I hadn't seen yet. I just watched it on YouTube now. That's certainly fodder for interesting conversation tomorrow. I stayed later than I had planned at work, so I didn't have time to hit the gym before the dancing. I bought some groceries instead. Then I went to a Hip-Hop class! It was a lot of fun. It was just a bit of stretching to music and then learning choreography for the rest of the time. No pictures, since I'm not talented enough to dance and photograph myself at the same time. I'm apparently ok at it though, because I got independently complemented by a pair of twins :) I also got a kiss from one of them, although I assure you it was completely cultural! I didn't actually expect that facet of culture here. After the dancing I went to the gym, because I paid lots of money to go, so gosh darnit, I'm going! This is one of those times that my frugality is good for me. At the gym I listened to a lot of American music from the 80s. Dreamgirls, Thriller, Nutty for You, Moulin Rouge, etc. I love hearing songs that we've done in ShowChoir, such as the first and third in the list. Anyways, the day went by quickly, and now it's late again (for me, I know most of you are just getting home from work.) So, goodnight, sehr sehr freundlichen Grußen.

Kim