Formal Friday

So this was fun.  At PUMA it is casual Friday everyday, so 2 other interns and myself decided to mix things up and promote suit up formal Friday.  This was the first week, and we had an impressive turnout of about 15 or so people in with more promised for next week.  It was fun to see reactions.

Nike Flyknit

So I realize that I work at PUMA but I can't help but recognize genius when I see it, this time from Nike.


This shoe is knitted, which means they can put more fabric exactly where it is needed and take it out where it's not.  It doesn't need lining.  The laces are wired directly to the outsole.  I imagine the materials are super cheap but super quality, and since you are not cutting the shapes out of a roll of fabric there is practically no left over scraps aside from a few inches of string.  They are coming out in July in time for the London olympic games and I can't wait to try on a pair.

Go here for nike's version.  There is another video and more thorough comments.


On a side less important note, it also looks sweet so they will be integrating the technique into their lifestyle shoes too.

Erlangen at Large

My body is still freaking out a little about being off schedule apparently.  Saturday night I went to bed at 10pm and then woke up, wide awake at 5am... so I got up and ironed 8 or 10 things including a pair of new pants I’ve been fighting to get the creases in the right place.  I think I worked on those an hour, changing the crease at least 6 times.  I have a much better understanding of the way fabric is fit together into pants now!

Tip for gentlemen, your mother-in-law will be impressed if you can iron.  You’re going to need her to like you, especially if your father-in-law is the shotgun type.

Anyways, I don’t have very many clothes here, but the things I do have look much better ironed (that includes a few nice T-shirts), so I may take this year and iron everything and become a pro. So after ironing forever I had breakfast, espresso and müsli, went for a walk then came back and crashed on my bed for an hour nap.  Post expresso? Yes, I told you  my body is still freaking out. woke up with 15 minutes to get dressed, in freshly ironed clothes, and make the 7 minute skate to a church I wanted to visit at 10:30.

The church was called ‘International Jesus Gemeinde.’  The service is in English and German.  I met a few cool people and enjoyed it overall, but still plan to visit other places.  I might want something more German intensive to challenge myself more.  Regardless, the guys there play soccer indoors once a week on a nice turf field starting up in a few weeks.  I’ll definitely be in on that!  I was surprised how many folks from the UK were there and had been there a few years, still without learning much German.  Then someone mentioned that SIEMENS is headquartered here in Erlangen.  The company operates in English and often has employees from branches come to Erlangen for three year stints.  Almost 1/3 of Erlangen’s population consists of SIEMENS employees.  Another 1/4 are students (many of whom are gone the month for vacation sadly).  In a city of 100,000 people that makes about 30,000 SIEMENS employees and 25,000 students.  That explains a lot of the city set up and architecture.

Years ago, Erlangen was a much smaller place, back when they built those classic old German houses with the dark wooden frames with white ...stuff... filling the gaps.  The university takes a very central location in the city bordering most of the oldest buildings.  The campus has lot’s of impressive looking buildings itself and a huge garden for lack of a better term where this time of year there are quite a few people sitting out, picnicking, and all that jazz.  Outside of that you start getting some skyscrapers (I use the term loosely, this is still Europe).  I was out exploring and found myself quite lost amidst a cluster of ominous 7 story buildings (I think there’s a code that says buildings can’t be taller than that).  All I could see in every direction was SIEMENS.  It was actually kind of intimidating.  Once you get passed that you get to my area, which is Erlangen now, but used to be a small neighboring town until it got swallowed up.  Here are some pictures from my skate around the city.  I also want to post some from where I live, and eventually some of Herzo where I work.  Time is limited though so be patience, as my sister would say.

By the way, I write these at home when I’m free and then post a day or two later when I get internet.  I can’t afford to waste internet time writing, so you’ll always be a few days behind.  Monday is my first day of work, and I won’t get to posting this till my work day is done, but from my blog’s perspective it’ll still be Sunday.

 Here is the lovely "Deutsche Bahn" train station where I arrived.

A very typical German intersection between the architecture,

sidewalks, poles, rocks etc.

Yard in the university.

Continued - lovely.

Germany is clean, but add on these sort of buildings and it just

emphasizes it even more.  So crisp! 

Typical city center street.  It's Sunday and all is closed, otherwise it's full of bicyclers.

Even the McDonalds looks nice.

This is where I want to go to church next week.  I'm not sure if E-werk is a club, or theatre, but 

that's where Jesus-Life Gemeinde meets.

Approaching SIEMENS territory!

SIEMENS

Ankunft und Alles

I think I already mentioned, but Irene put me off two days so here comes Wednesday, August 31st.

  

Anecdote 1:

On my way to the airport with my dear mother at 7:30.  I ate a banana on route, and just as I wanted to throw it curbside across a lane and a half of traffic, my mom goes and changes lanes to take the fun out of it.   It still flew into 3 pieces as the wind took it before hitting the ground though =)

Anecdote 2:

I fly to Newark, and with the rescheduling of my flight, I ended up in an ‘extra legroom’ seat.  Sadly it was about 1 hour in the air and hardly necessary.  The guy sitting next to me was about 65, turns out he’s flown to over 100 different countries and more than 3,000,000 miles.  That’s about 121 laps around the globe!  Over a million with Delta Airlines, and a million with Continental Airlines.  He says he likes Continental best.  I think I’ll keep flying Continental (regretting forgetting to register my last 3 flights on their frequent flyer program).

Antidote 3:

5 hour layover in Newark! I was sitting at a table for 4 with my chinese food and I see three people muttering in German, looking for a table in the packed food court.  I offered  the seats at my table and they joined me (it’s not peculiar in Germany to sit with strangers like it is in the States).  It was great to hear German again.  Turns out they were on their way to Vegas.  They were from Munich and should have had a Bavarian accent that I couldn’t understand, but they didn’t.  Despite the warnings I got from Osnabrückers last time I was in Germany, I have been able to understand everyone’s accents here just fine (well, admittedly a bit rusty, but otherwise fine).  Also, did you notice that I titled this section ‘Antidote’?  Sorry just messin’.  I’ll continue.

Anecdote 4:

I hate flying across the ocean.  It’s not the ocean per say that bothers me, more just that whole 8 hour in a plane thing.  As I’m boarding there, the flight attendant says ‘go there,’ pointing to the second row of first class.  I had just read on the website about first class seating reclining into a bed 6’3” long and was getting ready to be stoked.  When I asked for clarification, he meant that I should cross in front of that seat to get to the other aisle since my seat was over there =’(  Tragedy.  My seat didn’t even have the extra 5 inches of the previous flight. I watched TV shows for an hour, talked to the nice little German lady next to me for a minute (who was lucky enough to get hit by the hurricane on her visit).  Breakfast and dinner came and suddenly (well not really suddenly), with a few hours of sleep and a legion of goosebumps to my name, I arrived in Munich.  Note, somewhere between cold and sleep we passed from day 0 to day 1.

Breaking from anecdotes for a bit, I took a 30 minute flight to Nürnberg, jumped onto the subway for the city center (with 100 pounds of luggage), grabbed a train to Erlangen, and then found the right bus to get me near my apartment.  I walked the brief quarter mile and found the address I had written on notebook paper.

Anecdote 5:

I knock on the door, hear a shuffling upstairs, a window open, a head comes out of the window looking rather like Einstein with his wild gray hair, “Ryan? I’m Reinhard Völkel-Prohaska.  Just a minute, I’m taking a very important call.  I’ll be there presently.”  He then comes down in a bit, welcomes me, shows me around.  I’ll get to descriptions later.

Anecdote 6:

So I’ve made it to my appointment at the bank in Herzogenaurach (Herzo), the next town over where PUMA is located.  The young man helping my to open my account looked only slightly older than myself, was wearing one of the best looking suits I’ve ever seen in person, and had great English.  We decided to meet in English just so I wouldn’t miss any important details.  After the account is set up, he takes me to the teller to get me some cash, but some issue with my travelers checks she claims she can’t do it (and is quite obnoxious about it).  She was maybe 50, with dyed yellow hair (I think it was supposed to be blond).  They are bickering in German for a bit very fast and so I didn’t catch everything but she musters up her meanest voice and says something like “I’m very sorry, but I won’t do it!”  He steps it up immediately and says, “ I’m very even more sorry, because you have to do it!”  She turns away finally and gets my money.  With way too much cash in my pocket, I hurry back to my apartment to pay the landlord for the deposit and rent.  I grabbed some food from a nearby store, unpacked my things and hit the sack at 8pm, turned into day 2 and woke up at 8am.  Much needed since I’d only had 3 hours in the last 42 hours.

Day 2 is exploring the apartment, sorting out details with my landlord, skating 2 or so odd miles to the city center to get my bus pass (that PUMA is paying for, score!) that let’s me take all the buses in my city, Herzo, and anywhere in between.  Admittedly there is nothing in between besides 20 minutes of my life for twice a day, 5 days a week, for the whole next year.  It’s about $80 a month.  For those of you with cars, I assume it costs more than that?  Tried the scenic rout home, which was cool, for a while, until I was lost.  Fortunately I’d just acquired (Edward A. that word choice was for you) a map at the bus station and righted myself pretty quickly.  Longboards are the best thing ever for exploring.  Here are some of the sights along the way.  I’m pretty sure there were much more beautiful parts of the city, but theses are the pictures I took.  I’ll do more over the coming weeks.  Overall, a very lively and pleasant place.

Note: I don’t have internet, but I can get it for free at the mall in town so... I’ll be slightly less prompt than you’re used to.

Here is the air near Nürnberg.  Not the best location to shoot but it was more 

gorgeous than most country sides.

Here is my Landlord (Reinhard) with wife and Aunt.  

All three like wearing socks and sandals.

Here is the mall where I get internet.  Super nice.

 Walking down the street in the city center.

 The city hall, 'Rathaus Erlangen.'

 Playground in front of the Rathaus.

 Typical scene just outside of the city center.

On my way to getting lost.

Cool clock!

Inspired

This article was what set me on the path to being an engineer at PUMA. Open picture in a new tab, then click to zoom in and read away!

Shoe Design

So I was like, "I should learn to do computer graphics of shoes, since I have CS5 and all." Many, many hours later, after drawing on paper, scanning, illustrator, photoshop... we have the final rendering. Click on it for an up close. Here's the link for the tutorial here.

It's not all about the design, it's more about the rendering. I might have picked different colors otherwise but overall I like the shoes and would wear them. This is warm up to the co-op I'm doing with PUMA starting in September. Maybe I'll do a PUMA shoe next instead of just generic.

HodgePodge

Nothing in particular inspiring this post but I need to write again. The weather was actually fairly terrific yesterday. It only rained before I woke up and then again in the evening when I was mostly indoors. In between I saw the first dry roads this week and got to use my longboard.

My money transfer from the States finally came through after 5 weeks of being ridiculously frugal. I suppose that was good practice and will help my money last, though I immediately bought a scarf. Amazingly, it's predominately dark green with strong accents that allow it to work with clothes that are both in the gray/black/white family and things that are shades of brown. Usually that color combinations is contradictory because everyone knows that black and brown don't usually work together (or gray and brown, note that this website is on the brown side so there are no blacks). Most of my wardrobe can be broken into those two categories and the items that can go cross-category are particularly valuable. I mostly only packed brown though because I only had room to bring brown shoes.

And speaking of brown shoes, I set my scarf on my brown leather boat shoes that I wear everywhere and someone commented that it would smell like feet. Well, it didn't. Then I decided to smell the shoes. After the use those have gotten they deserve to smell, and they did, but they only smelled of leather (and I love that smell). No feet smell at all. Note that well, alway take the chance to have leather shoes.

Last week I found my home church for my time here. It's called FIT Gemeinde. Its a group of perhaps 20 people which is much smaller than other things I've seen but I think since I have 4 more months it will let me connect quicker and deeper. One of the things I didn't really expect to find in Europe, just from what I had heard, was the Holy Spirit and I figured I would miss him while I was gone. That was one of my main concerns for if I were to ever live here long term in the future. He is definitely here though so no worries. I guess it's like Elijah when he thought he was all alone and God's like "hey now, there's 7,000 other people following hard after me, not just you. I can draw people to myself. There's no place that is above me." I guess I should expect that God is awesome enough to make awesome believers all over the world in every culture. That said, there falls another barrier keeping me from living in Europe. Maybe I should make a list of barriers to help me better look at my time here.

Lastly, a family in the church invited me to Christmas and New Years with them so that will be enjoyable. I hear that in Germany they really celebrate Christmas, but very differently than we do. Lot's of Christmas markets to go to in every city. I'll write more about it as we get there.

A Mono-Class Society (in appearance)

Disclaimer up front is that my view of Germany has been very limited and there are probably large segments of society that I haven't seen yet.

Basically, my view here has been that everyone here seems to be in the same class. Talking to to people that's not entirely true. Generally people associate lower class folks with British names like (example given was Kevin). I have a few ideas why the class difference isn't so apparent.

1. Many of the minorities here are often still white Europeans and so to me they look German. It's possible that all the russian immigrants are poor for example but I just can't see it. The varying skin color in America makes it easier to quickly categorize groups of people and make assumptions at to what class they are in, regardless of how accurate it is.

2. It seems that everyone here has basically the same sense of style. Sure some people are more stylish than others but you don't have goth, emo, prep, hippie, lumberjack, as well as the style sets that tend to come with african americans. That means everyone looks the same still further. Once again it is harder to categorize groups of people by appearance.

3. Where do poor people live? Maybe they are all out in the country, or maybe just in the big cities? Anyways, I have seen no particularly rough, or rundown areas. Yes it's a small town (160,000) but it's definitely not like America.

So we should never stereotype people by appearance but I know in America we do it all the time. It's just peculiar here how much of a non issue it is. I'm taking a class called "Race and Equality in America." The prof and I are the only Americans. I think it will be difficult to convey to the class what America and racism is like because of what they are used to living in.

k later

Hair Cut - (and a social tip)

So I finally cut my hair which is the most interesting recent event so I'll write about it, both the intent and what actually happened.

So... I wanted short, stylish, respectable, not boring. Difficult combination I dare say, especially with curly hair. I decided to go kind of fringe (see this looking at the second set of pics), kind of caesar (with hair sweeping forward) and kind of faux hawk... all at the same time. I decided against leaving the blond rattail.

Mom cut it and it more or less went according to plan, and I like it. Exception being the fringe only half worked. Bangs are kind of too short. But I'll try again in a month and we'll get better I reckon. Good start though.

Also note I'll be seeing Prisca this weekend so if she's any sort of real photo major there will be documentation coming soon.

PS As a general rule that I've had reason to think about recently, "your hair looks so much better that way" or any compliment that compares the current appearance to past appearance isn't really a compliment, especially if the person liked their previous appearance... a rule I will always remember to apply especially when dealing with women who tend to read lots of extra details into your words...