January 28, 2009: Vertically Entertained

Today was the earliest that I have ever been to work on a coop, 6:25. It was not too bad, said hi to the factory workers and enjoyed a coffee. I finally got another project to work on today so now I will spend less time looking up random engineering articles online.

Funny anecdote. There is a guy who I work with who knows English (a thousand times better then my German) but struggles along more then some. One of the things that I got a giggle out of today was when he was describing a processing step and repeatedly referred to this guy, who was grinding a piece of metal, with the wrong gender. For example we were standing right next to him, “now look how she does this step” or “she will spend all morning doing this.” After a few iterations of this mistake I kindly corrected him and now he has his “hims” and “hers” straightened out.

I left work at 3:10, because I showed up so early, and headed to the climbing wall. The wall was mostly empty except for my climbing buddy Ollie and a dad trying, terribly, to teach a crowd of rowdy kids how to climb. Ollie and I climbed for three hours and so hard that when I left the gym I could hardly turn the knob. A great day deserves a great nights rest. Goodnight.

January 27, 2009: Internet Down!

So it appears that Mr. NETGEAR, the owner of my Internet connection did not like me on his wireless. A way that I like to look at is that using your neighbors Internet for email and Internet is like borrowing a cup of sugar. However, in my greed I admit that I had upped my usage of the wireless to renting movies on itunes and torrenting movies. I think that this kind of Internet use is more like borrowing your neighbors sugar truck.

I got home and found myself with no Internet. Later I saw a guy on the opposite side of the courtyard with his window open shaking his fist at me. Alas I have no Internet at home now. Bummer.

January 26, 2009: Finding Things to do

Got up went to work and figured out that all the projects that I was working on needed other people to mail documents or finish a step in the construction process. I had a quiet empty day of reading articles on-line and chatting with coworkers.

January 25, 2009:Australia Day!!

I got up early and went for a run along the bottom of an old castle wall situated not far from my house. At the bottom is a small creek with a cobblestone path running parallel to it. The path meanders along the creek bed and occasionally crosses the creek with a little wooden bridge. This was nice, it was about 0 degrees Celsius and sunny out but it felt not too cold once the blood got flowing. I got back did the rest of my little workout and started my day. I was to meet Viola at 11 to get some German speaking in.

 

Just on time she arrived and we headed out to Kaiserswerth Park a neat little town north west of Düsseldorf right on the Rhine river. We walked along the Rhine and talked mostly in English for an hour or two then headed down town for some Starbucks. We walked along the Kö, a road lined with crazy expensive clothes and populated by old men and old ladies with fur coats and 2000 Euro shoes. Starbucks was a good time and afterwards Viola drove me back to Ratingen so that I could get ready for my next adventure of the day. Australia Day!

The same people from my previous adventure at the Irish Pub (Dusseldorf Expats meet up group) were hosting, together with the Dusseldorf couchsurfers a grand celebration of Australia Day on the shore of the Rhine River. I figured out where this was being held thanks to my great friend Goolge and has on my way. One S-Bahn and one U-Bahn trip later I found myself what I thought was quite close to where I was meant to be. I ended up walking for quite some time through a nice neighborhood filled with classy cars and classy homes. I walked past the yacht club and the outdoor pool, closed for the season of course, and finally and finally made it to a group of about 19 people mingling on the shore. They had a small portable barbeque and a decent size fire going.

 

“Hi, I’m Tom from Canada, is this the Australia Day celebration?” immediately I was invited into the circle and met with handshakes and “Hello I’m . . . from …” I met people from Pakistan, the USA, New Zeeland, Canada and of course Australia. There was Germans there too who knew people through the couch surfing thing or just wanted to work on their English. I would say the entire crowd was between 19 and 35 so I fit into the lower age demographic. Everyone had a different story to tell and it was great to meet people so excited about living in Germany. The Auzies made sure to yell the national anthem, sing songs and wave flags while we listened to Australian music and ate, from what I gather traditional Australian food, lamb and potatoes wrapped in tin foil cooked in the fire. I did not get around to trying the lamb, but enjoyed some baked potatoes and some beers. I met a nice girl named Patina from Germany who was quick to tell me the best clubs to go to and even offer me some German lessons, I got distracted by a rouge Frisbee and never got her contact info though.  After 5 hours of socializing it was getting cold and people decided to move things to a pub downtown.

 

I got a ride with a nice guy named JJ, a girl from Australia and a guy named Ryan from Mexico. We talked of Mexican politics and German beer and finally arrived at the pub. Here we continued the socializing until 23:00 when I decided to call it a night and head home because it takes me an hour to get home from there. I got home at 0:30 and hit the hay hard. 

January 24, 2009: Bottle Depot Findings

 

The goals for the day were to clean up, do laundry, return the bottles to the bottle depot, learn some German and finish Jurrasic Park. All the cleaning and washing went down in its standard fashion. I finished Jurrasic Park (a great book by the way) and gave myself a pat on the back as this is the first novel that I have had the time and motivation to finish in the past three or four years!

 

My trip to the bottle depot consisted of me attempting to communicate with a guy who did not speak English and I ended up pointing at the bottles shrugging my shoulders and looking confused. He understood this and led me to the spot where I put my bottles. As I walked back with him I realized that this was not just a bottle depot but a drink depot too. I looked around. All the prices here were crazy low. I found a 20 pack of 500ml bottles of my favorite Altbier for 10.5 Euro. I had been missing out. Anyways I did not have the motivation to walk home with 10L of beer at this point and I continued with my chores.

 

Time to learn some German. I realized by this point that most everyone my age in this country speaks English so I have set my sights lower then being able to carry a full conversation in German. I find the most frustrating thing about not knowing the language is having nice old ladies ask you something at the bus stop and not having a clue what they are saying or people in a store asking a basic question that I do not know how to respond to. My goal is achieve this ultra-basic conversational German in the next couple weeks. To begin I watched MTV Germany; I like MTV Germany because it is a nice mix of English music videos, German commentary and the odd German music video. The only problem is that the only commercials are these really annoying commercials telling you to punch a code into your cell phone in order to get a lame X-Ray scanner video for your cell phone to “impress your friends”. I maintain, as Reston told me once, that I refuse to be friends with people that buy 5 Euro X-Ray Scanner videos or pay 1 Euro every day to get a new quote delivered to your “Handy”. Anyways I also listened to some German tapes and looked over my text book in preparation for my German/English exchange with Viola from work tomorrow.

January 23, 2009: Tom’s On the Rocks

Today was a fun day. I left for work at 6:21 the earliest that I ever have. I left my bus pass at home and instead of missing the bus I decided to pay the 2.2 Euro each way and save the 30 min of my life that I would have wasted going home. Work was uneventful because not much was going on in my part of the factory for some reason. There is good prospects of some really fun work on the horizon though, so I am pumped for that.

 

I left work at 15:27 and headed home. I stepped off the bus and into the light rain. My next objective was to get some eats. I hit up the Aldi bargain supermarket. Here I got the standard German food, pork, bratwurst, cheese and a bottle of 2 Euro wine (not the cheapest one there). I got home and cracked the wine, fried up some pork and made some spaghetti sauce. It was great. After talking to my mom on skype I decided to check out the Ratingen nightlife and went in search of a bar.

 

This is when the good times began to roll. I walked up and down two of the main shopping streets in town which have café/bars dispersed between the clothing stores, bakeries and the dozen cell phone stores. Most of the places that I saw were either empty or filled with old people drinking wine on tables with white tablecloths, not my scene. I eventually saw a place that was filled with mostly young people and seemed to be pretty happening, Tom’s On the Rocks. I walked in and immediately was hot with the inevitable wave of cigarette smoke. Three out of every five people were lit up, no joke. Despite the thick smoke the bar had good music and fair prices, 3Euro for a pint. So I took a seat. About half of the way into my Wheat beer I turned to the two guys next to me and asked them about where the best bar to go to in Ratingen was. This turned into a two hour long conversation on topics ranging from type 2 composite pressure vessels to the legal maximum velocity for paintball guns in Germany and the US (240ft/s Vs. 300ft/s). After a beer or two they, Sasha and Markus, decided to take me to another bar, Comic Bar.

 

Comic Bar was really neat. The walls were covered in newspaper and house music was blaring. This bar was only slightly larger then my apartment and jammed with people. It was in the basement of a shopping center. I continued my conversation with the two guys that I met and met some more nice German folk at this bar too. We left at 1:00, parted ways, and I left for home.

 

January 22, 2009: Lazy Donor Day

Today was slow. Not too much went down, I enjoyed a donor with the head of finance out here. I read some Jurrasic Park on the bus to and from work. I got home and enjoyed a bottle of Germany’s finest and hit the hay early.