Things I Do Not Understand

So let's look at a very German restaurant, well known across the world - Hofbrauhaus.  It is full of Bavarians being Bavarian, wearing lederhosen, drinking beer, and singing songs.  Let's look at a nearby store.  It is also quite German as far as I can tell.  It is a supermarket known as LIDL.  At the first location one can purchase a full liter of beer for about 7€, which is often repeated every hour.  At the latter, one can purchase a full liter of ice cream for about 1.49€.  Now to me it seems obvious where to spend one's money.  Getting almost 5 liters of ice cream for the price of 1 liter of beer sounds like quite a deal.  That's why the Hofbrauhaus is going out of business and Germans have stopped drinking beer entirely....


Wait... but they have't?  Actually Hofbrauhaus is still doing great business and Germans are still drinking lots of beer.  How can that be, given the circumstances?  Well I haven't given you the whole picture.  It turns out that the supermarket, LIDL, that sells the ice cream that should put Hofbrauhaus out of business is only open until 8:00pm like every store in Germany.  As a restaurant, the Hofbrauhaus stays open until about midnight, leaving Germans with no choice but to drink beer during those sad hours.


This my friends is the root cause for Germany being known for beer, I think.

The Stone Ages

This past week the honors program from my Uni sent it's engineers to Munich to visit companies.  As the only one currently living in Germany, I was the only one with a German cell phone.  That means the rest of the group had no way of contacting anyone else, except face to face. 


Chaos.


Now I realize of course that people lived like this for millennia, but most of us have been dependent on cell phones for the last few years and it has shaped our social planning.  Everything is impromptu.  If you are running late, it's easy to call ahead and explain.  In short, we've become bad at making and sticking to plans.


I'd say by the end of the week we mastered it though.  More posts coming!

Contagion

Not a movie review, this is much better.

Going through the work day and look out the window to see an emergency vehicle pull up at PUMA right outside the brand center.  The brand center is a section of the building where we have all shoes from Spring ’13 set up right now.  People from all over the world are here this week having meetings to talk about the shoes, and make final changes.  That makes it a very busy exciting week around PUMA.  With all those extra people and stress etc. I wasn’t totally surprised to see an ambulance, but then 4 more pulled up...

Time for our meeting.  We went down to the brand center to discuss the shoes that our group was responsible for.  We cover all the shoes, then most of the team heads back to the office.  My supervisor though insisted that we stay longer and look at the whole range of shoes.  Normally great, but I really wanted lunch.  As we were looking through the shoes a guy walks in and announces that some people had come down sick, and we were not to go into show rooms 1 or 3.  The people were going to the hospital to see what was wrong.  I didn’t see the big deal since they said it was just some throwing up and diarrhea (admittedly unpleasant).  We finish looking at the shoes and go to leave the brand center to go to lunch (20 minutes late).  Coming to the door we learned that sometime between when my colleagues escaped the brand center at our meeting's end and the present time they had decided to quarantine us.  Not cool.  Hungry, and I needed to leave early for the day anyway and they weren’t letting anyone out.  I checked around, and they had people guarding every exit and there were people with masks and medical equipment wandering around.

After a while of this, the head doctor called us all together.  He opened with, “I’m sure you have all heard what is going on here.”  Which was followed with an immediate rejection of the claim from the 150 or so of us locked in there who really had hardly any idea what was going on.  He went on to explain that 18 people had come down sick at once and after examining them in the hospital for the cause, decided it was just an ordinary bug, that makes you uncomfortable for 8 to 10 hours and then passes.  Thank goodness.  They let us all go after only about an hour with the advice to wash our hands regularly, not to kiss anyone, and to drink lots.  Most people assumed he meant beer.  Germans...

Anyway, we were released upstairs to explain what was going on to the people who had been on the outside and confused.  They were all terrified to come near us lest we be infected.  Shortly afterwards we all got an email saying that after all the commotion, we should all just head home for an early weekend.  I caught the bus at 13:30 and enjoyed an extra couple hours free.  Just as well, I was going to leave by 14:30 anyway.  I got out earlier and with a story.

Side story:  The meetings this week for the new shoes has been quite memorable when combining the story above at closing with the alarm during the opening ceremonies on Monday.  A pipe had burst and flooded shoes stored in the basement (which I got to clean up with the other development interns), so we all evacuated a little bit and stood outside in the -5F weather (-20C).  The people at the meeting of course didn’t have coats with them.

Dresden

If you're sharp you've already guessed from the title that this entry is about a trip to Dresden.  It started off quite early.  I was surprised to walk out the door at 5:30 Saturday morning to see everything was covered in snow.  Fortunately when we got Dresden it was gone and slightly warmer.

Waiting at the bus stop to kick off the morning.

The "Artsy" side of Dresden.

They turned gates into bikes.  Not practical but creative.

I don't know what it is but it was impressive.

The Japanese garden in the foreground looking across the Elbe to a number of the larger landmarks.

Karen is terrified of these spiky stars that keep following us everywhere.  

They just seem dangerous!

Crossing one of the bridges in town.  We did a lot of walking on Saturday looking at all the sights.  I think this was the last bridge crossing before closing the night with Chocoloccino and cake.

The coffee filter was invented in Dresden.  Everyone knows that it's not the bean that makes the coffee good, it's the filter!

Volkswagon has a manufacturing plant here that is all glass so you can watch the process.  Unfortunately we weren't there while they were giving tours.

This was in the middle of a 15km run early on Sunday to see things farther from the center.

We followed the river to all sorts of cool stuff

The bridge is the "Blue Wonder"  and I don't know what the spike is in the back.  Dresden is just spiky.  We had to jump a fence later, and another spike got the better of Karen's running pants.. Schade Schokolade..

The bird feeding lady.  The swans could have pecked her nose if they weren't on such good terms.

There is where J.S. Bach is buried in Leipzig.  We passed through on our way back.

That's all.  

A Story - we got on a train that we weren't technically allowed to take with the ticket we had (honest mistake).  But the super nice train lady (wearing Nike earrings) made an "especially special exception" and didn't make us pay a fine as long as we got out at the next stop (Leipzig).  Probably more stories to tell, but the mall is kicking me out now.

The End

Endlich ein Fahrrad

So I finally got a hold of a free bike.  My landlord has 7-10 bikes in various states of disrepair lying around, so he said if I could fix one and return it at years end then I could use it.  Most were ugly except this one.  It is a ten speed roadbike, much like the one stolen from my back at Uni.  I need to unrust the chain, change a few break pads, and a break cable before it is operational.  I love it.  I think I'll be even more attached to it after I work on it.  Oh, and I need to replace the bell.  Since bikes are used so commonly for regular commuting, having a bell and mud guards are standard.  I'm thinking of replacing the bell with a big horn.  I think that would be marvelous, if it can stand the rain.  The generator for the lights needs to be adjusted too.  In Germany, it is the law that your bike have lights if you are riding after dark.  They are basically just as strict with bikes as with cars since they are used so much.  That also means biking with too high of a blood alcohol level is punishable.  I think people mostly ignore that one though.

Under Construction!

See the little silver barrel next to the wheel.  That is the generator for the lights.

Typical

"Hey Slave"

Common Bavarian greating, "Servus," came straight out of Latin - means slave.  Not sure how that got popular.

the South Side - Erlangen style

Here's a look at my side of town.  I think it used to be a small city that got swallowed up by Erlangen.  These are on a walk I took from my house.

Construction on the church. excuse the lighting.

There was a guy in that car staring at me.

Typisch.

The river through town.  The line across it is the Herzogenauracher Damn.

We're on the upstream side.

I came back and saw this shoe on my landlords car.  Also the hideous chair in the back? 

Yes, it was in my room but I told him he could give it away =P

Did I mention that I work at PUMA now?  Those shoes are 5 years old.  Also turns out the standard sample size at PUMA is a US 9 for men's shoes, which means I can get lots, my size cheap before they are on the market.  Even other PUMA employees with bigger feet have to weight for production =)

I'll blog about PUMA soon.  For now I'm just getting comfortable.  Everything is fairly slow since my boss is on vacation this week and his boss is sick.

Bye,