March 11, 2009: Grasping Life by the Climbing Holds

I got up and made it to work at 8:30. Today I was going to spend the whole day in the factory assembling some systems, timing work steps and finding things to be improved on. The most hilarious moment of my week came about when I was holding my clipboard writing down some numbers and one of the workers said in a serious, professional voice, “Tom, could you hold me?” what he really meant was could I help him hold up a beam that he was working on. I lost my mind laughing inside my head. All day this kept me chuckling to myself. It makes me think that all the mistakes that I make in my German skills are probably equally hilarious.

After work I tried to get some train tickets to Paris to visit my friend Sarah’s friend Nancy. Unfortunately the tickets were sold out for both the outbound and return trip and they would have cost me 26 Euro each way on top of my Eurail pass. I unfortunately will have to go someplace else this weekend. I am thinking a trip to The Netherlands would be fun, some place other then Amsterdam. My Opa and Oma recommended the Delta Works, a series of MASSIVE dykes that stop The Netherlands from becoming the Sunkerlands.

All this business made me want to pull myself up a wooden wall using plastic holds, so that is what I did. I went to a small climbing wall in some out of the way neighborhood of Dusseldorf. Here I met Ollie, my climbing buddy from Klettermassiv, where I usually climb. We climbed a few routes before his buddy showed up to teach him what looked to me like industrial rope work, who else ascends using a triply redundant frog system? His buddy was wearing pretty much every product that Petzl sells and jingled as he walked. I was sooo jealous.
I made it home after a short walk, tram and train ride and hit the hay.