Who me, work?........Beautiful Berlin........

June 6 - June 12, 2005

Hello again,

I realize that I haven't wrote anything about the work I'm doing.....it's not that I
haven't been doing anything but my travelling is probably a little more interesting to
read about. So far at work I've been doing reaserch andresearch for articles concerned
with modelling and simulating wastewater treatment. I haven't really done much lab
work but I did get to visit a pilot project plant in Heidelberg. At this plant they are
testing out a new system for treating wastewater with anaerobic bacteria. Since it is just
a pilot project all the treated water is sent back to the local municipal wastewater
treatment plant. I look forward to doing some lab work later on. My supervisor is super
nice and helpful, at work and with other German stuff. I was given the option to work in
either English or German but of course I really want to improve my Deutsche. My supervisor
knows this and she explains things slowly and thoroughly and if I don't understand a word
she explains it in German rather than translating it right away, even if this means
spending an hour explaining the word constitution ;)


Last weekend was quite the adventure. Katie, my new roommate, her friend Steve and I
decided to go to Berlin. On the internet I found a cheap Mitfahr (ride share.....where you
catch a ride with someone who is going in your direction and then you just pay them for
gas) for 25 euros per person to Berlin leaving 1:30 Friday afternoon. Supposedly it is very
common for people to leave early on Friday so I had permission to leave work.
We were told that it should take about 6.5 hours to get to Berlin by car but we weren't
expecting all the traffic and accidents we encountered. At one point we were at a complete
standstill on the autobahn so people were getting out of their cars, socializing, going to
the bathroom, and of course drinking beer. We ended up getting to Berlin at 10pm. On the
ride over we booked a place at a hostel so we knew exactly where we were going. After
dropping our stuff off we decided to go downtown.....Berlin is sooo big though that there
are multiple downtowns.

The next day we went to the Jewish museum. The building itself is worth going to look at
since the architect designed the building to symbolize different emotions. There are
rooms in the museum that are just left empty to represent the inhumanity of it all. Steve
and I got separated from Katie in the museum and ended up waiting for her in the lobby for
over an hour. We did search the museum and ask the staff to look for her but we later
found out that she left with out us thinking that she had been in the museum way too long
and that we wouldn't have waited sooo long. Eventually Steve and I decided to go and we
toured around downtown. We say the Parliament and visited the glass dome on top, we saw
check point Charlie, a Holocaust memorial, and tons of other old (but re-built) buildings.
We eventually caught up with Katie (after I finally remembered that she had a cell phone
and we could just call her) and went for a nice and affordable Indian dinner. That night
some of the museums were open till 1:00 in the morning. We tried to visit the Einstein
museum but we got there at 12:30 and they wouldn't let us in.

On Sunday we  ended up going to the Einstein museum, we saw the Berlin wall, museum
island, and, before
heading off to catch our 'mitfahr' back to Stuttgart we went out for Thai food. At 5:30pm
in Berlin we were wandering around the train station parking lot looking for a driver
named Fernando in a red van but after half an hour we gave up and called the person who
was supposed to be picking us up. Turns out they sent me an e-mail earlier that day saying
that due to some rental difficulties they wouldn't be driving......as if I'm gonna check
my mail when I'm in BERLIN. For me this wasn't a problem since I still had 2 trips left on
my, prepaid in Canadian $, eurail pass. I could just hop on any train back to Stuttgart
but my friends ended up paying over $60 per person and one of them had to buy a bahn card
in order to get that price. Katie and Steve decided to take a night train because it was
cheaper and then they would be sure to catch the S-bahn to the university in the morning.
I thought that would be a good idea too but the train didn't arrive in Stuttgart until 9am
and I was supposed to be accompanying Tosca (my supervisor) to a meeting. I decided to take
the train that left Berlin at 7pm and got to Stuttgart at 1:00am. I knew the local trains
probably wouldn't be running at 1 in the morning, Sunday night but I knew I'd find my way
home. I ended up taking an U-bahn which I thought would take me to Vaihingen but it didn'T
go that far in the middle of the night. I ended up getting off at a couple stops before
and the conductor of the train, who saw that I didn't really know where I was going, made
sure I had a taxi before he took off. I got home around 3am and was up for work at 8.

On Monday morning Tosca and her supervisor Werner took me to a meeting at Eisenman Firm
20km away from Stuttgart. It was difficult paying attention since everything was in German
and also it took a lot of effort to keep my eyes open. I managed to get the gist of the
meeting and I was able to see how one develops a computer system to control all the
different parts of a wastewater treatment plant.

Bye for now,
Steph