Deustchland, I'm Home!

In the past two days, I have learned that airport benches are surprisingly comfortable, and that beer is an interesting thing at 9 in the morning.

The way back from Norway was far better than the way there, even though it took more time. The way there I slept for a scattered three and one half hours, but on the way back, I slept for a disjointed eight. The bus was even more full this time, so I took a normal seat next to a man from Poland. I slept for four out of the eight hours on the bus, paritally because the single seats can lean back until they are almost horizontal. Since the person sitting in fornt of me did not also figure this out, I had lots of room. I arrived in the airport at 6:30 and slept one hour at a time until 9:45. Then I checked in for my flight, browsed through the duty-free stores, and read the paperback that I had found in the hotel's guest assembled library. I have come to the conclusion that the New York Times Bestseller list is too long. The book should not be on any list, as it is rather dry, but just interesting enough to keep you reading. Horrible stuff. A book should be so badd that you stop reading outright, or so good that it is hard ot stop. I'll have none of this purgatory limbo stuff. I really hope that my little brother brought the book that I asked for. If not, I can start reading the summer assignment that I found out that I have to do yesterday.

Anyway, I caught the plane, took the airporter and walked back to the house. To be honest, I was quite proud of myself. I made it all the way from a little town in Norway back to my house in Germany all by my lonesome.

I recieved a warm greeting from my hosts, but not before Stephan spotted me from his balcony and said hello as if I had never left. He is a funny one. We exchanged stories about our week, then met Wilhelm at a chinese restaurant to celebrate the boys getting their report cards. The food was great. We got four different plates and mixed each one separately with some rice in little bowls. When we got home, we stayed up late playing a fun board game for my last night staying with them alone.

This morning I got up and went to the market with Wilhelm. We got everything, including another stop at the breakfast stand. They had beer this time and Wilhelm ordered a pils for us to split. The first sip wakes you up, but then... it was nine in the morning! We did not finish the bottle between us. No more beer before noon, thank you. Also, I got the picture of me sucking on the white sausage that I promised way back in the beginning.


I guess the picture isn't too bad. I was expecting to look ridiculous.

My parents come this afternoon with my brothers. I am very excited to see them. We will stay here for one more night, then my family will move to Florian from work's house to stay as part of a house exchange. I hope that he is nice to my dog. I think that he will be.

I guess this is it. I'll keep postingabout the adventures I will have with my family. I get back to the states on the 12th of August. So ends the chapter of my living alone in Germany.

Norway

Harry Potter has it good.

I arrived early Friday morning on the nightbus from Oslo. There were no beds, no talking heads, and of course, no wizards. The bus was jam-packed. I took my friend's advice and took the back seat so I could stretch out, but was informed by the african man who wanted to share my seat that there were no other open spots on the bus. Reluctantly, I moved my feet. It was hard to rest so cramped up. I got about 3 1/2 hours of fragmented sleep during the whole 8 hour ride from 10 until 6. My friend Kingdon and his mom Unni Marie came down to the docks to pick me up.

Balestrand is a small, quiet little town on the coast of one of Norway's many fjords. Kingdon's parents own a bed and breakfast overlooking the water, and have generously provided me with a room. This is a picture of Kingdon in front of the hotel.



Every morning we all get up and go downstairs to have a breakfast of delicious Norwegian jams on toast with a soft-voiled egg or two, and maybe some oatmeal as well. Then we do chores, like weed-whacking the edge of the lawn or making beds. When we are finished, we are free to do as we like for the rest of the day.

We can go swimming, fishing, or... or... throw a ball around. The fishing here is okay, mostly shakers with a few good sized fish thrown in. No really good fighters. Apparently all of the fish in the fjord have worms in them this time of the year so we cannot eat what we catch either. Here I am fishing off of one of the docks with the fjord in the background.


Unfortunately, I finished reading the book that I brought on the way here. However, I am getting a lot of work done on my college essays.

The seagulls here are a strange form of entertainment. Until today when Unni Marie moved the chicks, they were swooping down off of the roof and attacking anyone who tried to cross the courtyard. Pretty funny really.

Well, I will take the night bus back to Oslo on Thursday night, then wait in the airport for 7 hours before my plane takes off. It will be nice to be back in Deutschland again.

Blue Overalls

So much time, such a little thing. For the past week and one half I was working in the autoparts manufacturing plant owned by Franz Schabmueller.

The first day I came in through the fingerprint identification locked doors into the manufacturing plant and was issued a locker key, a pair of calipers, and blueprints for my first project by my new boss. Her Stoehr is a very Bayerish man. He is about 50 years old, the same height as me, with silver hair, a young grin, and twinkling blue eyes. He laughs a lot, and has a thick Bayerish accent. It is hard enough to understand him when he speaks German with this accent, but he also wants me to learn the southern German dialect of Bayerish. He would say something to me in Bayerish, make me think that I know even less German than I know, then repeat it in Hoch Deutsch (High German) with his rumbling accent, so I was never quite sure when to listen. He was very hard to understand.

The vise that I was supposed to make did not look complicated to make, and while Franz had assured me that it would take me all week to complete, I was positive that I could finish by the end of the next day. After all, we had 8 hours of work time per day. As I already mentioned, the hours were long, from 7 till 3:30, but I did not mention the break time. We had fifteen minutes to eat breakfast from 9 till 9:15, and then fifteen minted to eat lunch, from 12 to 12:15. It is not a pleasure cruise at work.

Florian helped me the first day, teaching me how to read the blueprints and use machines to turn scrap metal into what was drawn on paper. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it. I did not feel excited by it, but it is nice to focus on a on one's work and let your mind go. He helped me use a milling machine to get the steel to within one millimeter of where I wanted it, and told me to file the rest of it off. My shoulder, which is injured from rowing, began to hurt five minutes into the filing, but I kept going, thinking that the pain must have just been from sleeping on it wrong the night before. After an hour of filing, I found out that I was wrong and had to stop. I checked on my progress and saw that I still had .4 millimeters to go. After an hour of filing! The shoulder injury was no problem, as I simply let Herr Stoehr know, and he taught me how to use the machines with greater precision.

That is, of course, if you are allowed to do it by yourself. I felt myself growing restless when I had to watch another worker doing part of my job for me, to show me how it was done. It was necessary, because I could not have learned how to use the machines just by looking at them. When I was confined to watching or was frustrated with having to re-do a piece that Herr Stoehr dubbed "nicht schoen" (not pretty), sometimes I would start to notice that my feet were hurting from standing so long. Florian kept us laughing, which helped to take my mind off of the frustrations of work.

Notice the hole in his shirt? That is from when the sparks from the buzz-saw he was using caught fire to it and burned the hole. Later in the same day one of the younger employees started using the same machine that I am using in the above picture, but did not attach the steel that he was going to cut properly. So when he started the machine, the ten pound hunk flew out of the machine. Florian was busy filing at the time, and barely missed getting hit by jumping over the low flying cylinder of death. He gave it a surprised look when it slammed into the wall, then went back to his filing without a word. Everyone in the shop burst out laughing, except for the boy who's fault it had been.

By the end of the week, I had used milling, spinning and drilling machines, not to mention files and saws, to finish my project. Franz and Herr Stoehr were spot on with their estimates - I made the final touches halfway through Friday. I don't know why the lighting is weird in this picture...
I stopped three days early of two weeks because of a change in plans to go see my friend from rowing, Kingdon, up in Norway. His parents have a hotel up there, and that is where he lives for the summer. I leave tomorrow to Oslo, then take the overnight bus and arrive in his harbor at six in the morning. If you want to see pictures of where I will be staying, go to http://www.balestrand.com/. My next post will be from Norway!

Guess I'll Blog Tommorrow

I just finished the rough draft of my college essay- it is late and I am going to bed. Now that I got that out of the way and might actually have time, I will write manana.

Gute Nacht

No, I Didn't Die

It has been two weeks since my last post - sorry about that. I have been speaking German every day until my tongue can no longer pronounce the umlauts and my grammar collapses into a jumble of words mixed every which way around. On top of that I have been working very hard at German School two weeks ago and then in an autoparts factory learning to work steel all this week. I will write what I remember, and start from the top.

So I left off with me going out to see the party after the game. Awesome party. We went to the local park and met some of her friends, who were very nice. We hung around there for a while and then I went to Sausalito with some of Monika's friends. She stayed at the park to catch up with some friends. The bar was teeming with crazy soccer fans. We had fun there until it was time to walk the girls home, then we returned to the bar for a few hours before retiring.

The next day, my family and I went on an outing to a huge lake some hours away. We stopped for lunch at a monastery and had some delishious traditional bavarian food before continuing to our final destination. If you are wondering what is on my thumb, that is the German flag that the girls insisted on painting on me at the Rathausplatz the day before. The lake was beautiful, with the Alps looming in the distance. We swam and paddled Bella around in the family kayak chasing ducks. After a couple of hours, we came back to shore and ate some fruit. I practiced my cherry seed spitting skills. We had a great time messing around, and took some video footage with the family camera that we had been using all day to catalougue our trip. Stephan has a great Shakira impression. After all of this, we stopped at a well-known lakeside restaurant, not far from the old German royal palace on an island in the middle of the lake. I had a delicious, fresh-caught, albeit strange fish, a pike perch, which looks very much like a cross between the two species. I wonder how that worked?

The next day was a prelude to a dull week of German school where I learned much, but was too tired after three hours of learning German and an hour and a half of private lessons to do much else. I met up with Monika and we went to the Baggersee, a local see, or lake, and played in the water and with frisbees and volleyballs. I had a good time.

After finishing with German School, I went out like usual on Friday night and met with Monika and friends. It was fun, but the party was nowhere near as happening now that Germany lost to the would-be Weltmeister Italy and was out of the running for the cup. I noticed that I could understand a lot more of what was being said and almost carr on a simple conversation.

Saturday morning I woke up to the telephone ringing. Franz was going to come and pick me up to show me around the factory. I was a bit intimidated at first, to say the truth, with all of the machines, and the people taking steel parts and moving them around. I saw a few kids my age and thought that I would be doing the same work. What if I messed up? These part were used in real cars!

Fortunately for me, Franz took me through a corridor echoing with the grating sounds of steel being cut to show me where I would be working. It was a small work area occuppied by my future teacher, two other interns, and some full time workers. I learned that I would be making a small steel vice from scrap metal in my first of two weeks with the company. I was also a bit surprised when I learned about my work hours. The buzzer to start work goes off at 7 every morning, and the buzzer to go home sounds at 3:30 that afternoon. Naturally, I was a bit disconcerted and planned to get to bed early on Sunday night.

Nothing at all happened on Sunday, except for going to Gino, the Italian place to watch the finals. I had some delicious house made black pasta served with perfectly grilled calamari, all hinting of lemon and european olive oil. I went to bed early for my big day at work, and did not know that Italy had won until the next day when I was on my way to work at 6:40 with my carpool, Florian.

I have to get to bed, but I will write more about work tommorrow and begin to post regularly again. Here is a photo of me at the work-table, filing my vise into shape.

Friday

The big game. Deutschland and Argentina. 5 o'clock.

I woke up in the morning and made it late to German class. I was so tired throught the whole class, that the teacher actually said that she was sorry that I was sick. Actually, I was feeling better, but still tired. I think that is was because we stayed up till midnight watching a comedy about post-war Berlin that I found very funny. After class, I met Ramon for some Turkish food, which they have plenty of here, then went to meet some of Ramon's friends at the Rathausplatz to watch the game. Ramon was too tired to come and instead went home to sleep.

The Rathausplatz was more full than last time.


It ended up that I was meeting no fewer than 9 girls there in the square. Not a single guy with them. I tried to have fun with them, but I was so tired that I could hardly even manage a laugh. In the end, I stayed until 3, then went home to take a nap.

I fell asleep almost right away, and woke when Stephan came in to tell me that the Game was on. I put on the German soccer jersey that I had gone out and bought the day before and sleepily settled in to watch the first half of the game upstairs with Stephan.


It was very uneventful, with lots of back and forth at midfield and 0-0 when I put on some shorts and went downstairs to watch the second half with the rest of the family. Germany won in penalty kicks after tying it up with a header with 10 minutes of normal time remaining. It was a big upset, because Argentina was favored to play against Brazil in the finals. Ramon and his friend went wild as we pranced around the room. I could not help but think of what was going on in the square. As if to answer my pondering, honking horns filled the air for hours to come.

It was then that Monika Schapmuller called me and told me to meet her just outside of the square. I hopped on my bike and was away.

Finishing Thursday's Account

It has been a while, but here I am with a new post. Where was I? O yes, I was with Ramon at his school on Thursday. Here is a picture of the water fountain that I drank from all those days ago. The water pours out of the mouth when one presses the button in-between the ears.


So I made it back from bringing my bike to the store, and met Ramon and my other new friends outside of the front of the school. They were supposed to walk down to the field where Tom, Atilla, Mate, and Ramon and I played soccer. However, the students were hesistant due to the dark clouds overhead and distant thunder. They decided to wait for the rain to come. Sure enough, in five minutes, it was pouring rain. Thunder and lighting brought the sky alive.

Because we could not go down to the field, we took advantage of the situation and went to the underground gym, I do not know why it was underground, to play indoor soccer. We had a blast. I was goalie again and our team won the game. After we joked around in the locker room before leaving to get ready for the France-Spain game that night.

I went to the game with the whole family and some of Ramon's friends. Spain got killed. 3 to 1. The only goal that Spain scored was a penalty kick. It put a bit of a damper on the mood, but it ended up being for the best. Yesterday France knocked Brazil out of the running in a 1-0 win. Incredible. Brazil was the favorite to win the tournament. Also, I was able to eat my bratwurst and sauer kraut without jumping up every other minute like the Germany game last Saturday.

As you might have been able to guess, that is Stephan's thumbs up. After the Spain game, we rode around on our bikes a bit, then went home as it was late.