Hallo Stuttgart

Let this be a fair warning, this post will be nowhere as visually stimulating as my last post. Since I got to Stuttgart, I haven’t had enough time or been in a position to take very many pictures. Which is sad and depressing, but hopefully forthcoming weekend trips will remedy that. In the meantime, let me regale y’all with my past week.

From Munich, I travelled by train to Stuttgart. My buddy and I had to haul my luggage up for flights of stairs, as Europeans don’t believe in devices so large as elevators in dorms. I have my own room with a sink, the most awkward set of storage known to man, and a closet with a door. I have no drawers anywhere, but shelves everywhere. I share a kitchen and bathroom with maybe 10 other people. There are three skinny fridges that beep when left open for more than 30 seconds. There are windows everywhere and they are usually open. It is also usually very dark in the halls, so I try to make sure I’m not so intoxicated that four flights of dark stairs would kill me. Another Wildcat is on the second floor in my building while another is one building over and the other is a three minute walk through campus. Having everyone so close together is really nice when we stay out late. Which happens often.

Near the dorm

After beginning to unpack my room, I decided to go get some internet. I had to wait in line to be helped by a student worker. My situation was very different than every other students’, so explaining what I needed was a bit of a challenge. Eventually, the dude I was working with figured everything out for me. As soon as I left, I saw someone I knew and immediately latched on to him. When you come from the same school in the same program while in a foreign country, you immediately become best friends. It’s like kindergarden all over again. That is when Varun and I started hanging out. I told him how to get internet for his room as well. We went to the same guy who helped me and it went much faster that time. By the time I had told a third friend about the internet, the guy working even knew our emails. The Europeans may be ahead of us in many aspects, but their internet is not one of those things. I am currently attached to a 3 meter Ethernet cord. This is pre-dial up, people! Quite a blast from the past. After we literally connected to the internet, Varun and I ventured to the city center to find something to eat. We found some currywurst and then people-watched for a long time. As we talked, we discovered that we both knew my cousin. Nerds like to collect around other nerds, it seems. We left the city late, but I managed not to get us lost at all. I felt very European.

The next morning, Tuesday, it was time for paperwork. And then some more paperwork, with a side of paperwork. We had to verify where we are living, that we are actual human beings, the whole shebang. Once we had filled in all the proper boxes, we filled in more boxes at the bank, and then more boxes for some good German insurance. I believe I signed my name 482 times that day. The next stop was the city center to register as a student. There was a group of us who had to stay back. We took it upon ourselves to find the building in a city we had never been in before, where most of us don’t speak the language. We got nice and lost and totally disobeyed the instructions given to us. We learned an important piece of information that day: When a German tells you to do something, you do it. Thankfully, we found each other and successfully registered.

View from the top of the dorm

Another thing I have learned here is that the phone system sucks. Either that or the communication is bad or I am just really bad with technology. So it’s probably all three. But my adventures with my phone are still ongoing. I can receive texts, but not send them. The help line is all German. So for now, I’m living with phone calls and texting on Wifi. On a happier note, my friend Marissa is on this German journey with me. We are the same major at school and spent a loooooot of time together this year. Her parents live in Switzerland, so her dad came to drop her off. He took us out to lunch and gave us a lot of good advice about being abroad. After eating delicious German food and drinking delicious German alcohol, we made our way back to the university. Marissa and I went to the lab where I will be working for the next two and a half months. There we met a PhD student who works for my supervisor. He gave us a tour of both buildings where I will be working. They are both very cool and very different from the labs I’m used to at the U of A. After so much excitement, we all went to bed, excited to start our research in the morning.

My first day in the lab was fairly uneventful. There was more paperwork and more signing my name on the dotted line. What I’m supposed to be doing is using polymers to print constructs using a 3D printer, but the printer is three months late. So whenever that shows up, my life will be 5372943 times more interesting. We are all hoping it shows up soon. The girl in charge of the printer, and also myself, is named Carola. She speaks really awesome English, but for the first day I was so confused because her English accent came off vaguely Australian…? I soon found out that she had studied abroad in Sydney. Everything made more sense after that. The other girls who work with me are incredibly sweet. They don’t speak a lot of English, but when they do, it’s always helpful and funny. I ate lunch with them and their other friends from nearby labs. Lunch is a big ordeal, taking about an hour. We eat and then we go to this courtyard area and people have coffee and smoke. Lunch also happens at 1130, which is much earlier than I am used to. I left at about 5, walking through a slight drizzle.

Look Dad! Not granite!

I went back to my room, changed shoes, and then met up with a bunch of kids from the program to take the bus from campus to the restaurant where the Welcome Dinner was being held. It was out in the suburbs a little, so the streets were small and the houses were picturesque. Marissa, Varun, and I ended up sitting with Varun’s supervisor and one of his grad students. They knew a lot about pretty much everything, and we all had a very good time talking about many different topics. We got back very late from this dinner, being one of the last groups to leave on account of great conversation.

The next day, I went back to work. This time, Carola and I were running an experiment that lasted two hours. So every two hours, we would walk from one building to the other, set up the experiment, and then begin it again, coming back two hours after that. In those breaks was some research on the computers. At about 5, everyone lost interest and the barbeque began. Each dorm has a party during the summer, and the one being thrown that day is always the best one. So my lab had a barbeque with about 15 people. I invited Varun and Marissa and we ate sausages and drank beer and laughed about stuff with everyone else. After we had eaten, we headed over to the party. I wasn’t expecting it to be a party party, but this thing was insane. There were hundreds of kids, tents sponsored by Red Bull and Jager, people on the roof, a stage where German rappers were performing. All the Germans thought that, being from America, I had been to parties like that one before. All I could do was just shake my head and look around in awe. Us Americans got tired and tried many times to leave, but everyone would just tell us to go get another drink. Eventually, we did get away from the chaos and went to bed.

Dorm party!

Friday morning was back to work. Carola and I continued to run experiments every two hours. At the end of the day, I was shown how to freeze dry samples. This fairly easy experiment involved liquid nitrogen, which I had never used before. I got to play with it, throwing it on the counter and watching it fizzle. I did a lot of the experiment myself, and even though I moved very slowly, it was nice to show that I can do something. Everyone was still tired from the night before, so I left at 3 and sat and watched tv until Marissa and Varun got out of work. We all met up later that night. Marissa had been out with a friend in the city center, so Varun and I joined her. We met them at the train station. They showed up with lemonade beer, or girly beer. Surprise! That was the only beer I have been able to have more than three sips of. (Spoiler alert: I had 7 sips.) We walked around a garden in the middle of the city. We came across the coolest, most badass playground I have ever seen. This was not one you would see anywhere in the U.S. It is what American lawyers would call “a liability.” It was two stories tall, with lots of ropes to walk across and rock walls to climb. It was very much German engineering. We swang, which never, ever gets old. Ever. There was also a zip line thing that you sat on and went down the line to the other side. When I rode on it, I got an extra push. When I got the other end, my direction changed a full 90 degrees. I also probably woke up everyone within a half mile radius with my screaming. But it was fun!

Train

On our way back, we got into a bit of trouble. At one stop, police got onto every car to see that we all had valid tickets. Students are supposed to ride free on weekends and after 6 pm. Unfortunately for us, our student ID cards had not come in the mail yet. Even more unfortunately, I had absolutely no form of ID on me because I am an idiot. So there was paperwork and phone calls and discussions to be had. I almost got a free ride back to the dorm in a police car, but we got it figured out before that became a necessity. Apparently it’s a fairly common thing to get this kind of ticket. All we have to do is show our student IDs to the ticket office and pay 7 euros to clear our very criminal names.

The next morning, we had four hours of intercultural training. I’m not really sure why this was necessary, but it was actually kind of fun. All the kids from the SUPER program were there, and we talked about different stereotypes related to all the countries we are from. There was even a sketch where Marissa and I got to pretend to be sorority sisters reunited after many years. We got quite a few laughs. After this, Marissa, Varun, and I went grocery shopping. It was definitely a different experience, because you really have to do things by sight instead of by reading the labels. But we desperately needed food, so we did what we had to do. We got lunch on the way, having donor kebabs. It’s a Turkish meal that involves shaved meat. If you think about what the meat actually is, you won’t want to eat it. But if you just eat it, your tastebuds will thank you. It was hot lugging all our groceries around, but it’ll nice to be able to eat breakfast this week! That night, we took some beer and wine to the gardens in the center of the city and sat on the grass and enjoyed the cooler weather. There were a ton of other people doing the same thing. I’m really hoping we do this again, as it was a lot of fun and seemed like a very European thing to do. And I am all about blending in with the Europeans and less with the Americans.

Shameless donor selfie

On Sunday, a group of 8 SUPER kids went on a trek to see luxury cars. With 6 guys, this trip was a long one. We started off at the Mercedes museum. This building is huge and has awesome architecture. The tour starts at the top of the building, which you get to from space-agey elevators. It has a spiral build with galleries on the flat floors and history snippets on the curved parts. It starts in the 1800s at the top with the invention of the Benz motor and moves down until the racecars on the bottom floor. I saw many, many cars I wish I could cruise around in. After many hours, we made our way over to the Porsche museum. This one wasn’t as big and didn’t have the world history of the Mercedes museum, but it had plenty of cool cars. There was also a car to sit in and take pictures in. This was the guys’ highlight of the trip. After 8 hours of walking, we were all tired and hot. We didn’t do much else that night but try to stay cool.

Mercedes-Benz Museum

The first motorcycle

Inside the Mercedes Museum

All the old cars

Mercedes racecars

Outside of the Porsche Museum

Porsche trophies

Model shapes

Marissa and me in our new car

More Mercedes

Monday was a holiday, so we finally got to sleep in and catch up on tv shows. We finally got hungry and made our way to the city center for some food at around 2. Most places were closed, but we found Thai food to hold us over. It was 95 and 50% humidity and we were dying. I can do hot, but hot with humidity I cannot do. We were sweating like pigs, but too hungry to care. After eating our hot Thai food, we went down the street to a gelato bar. Here we each got three scoops of gelato, all of mine being fruit flavors. We tried to use the force to refill our bowls, but had no success. The rest of the day we again tried to stay cool, staying in our rooms and lying without touching anything.

The next few weekends we have some travels planned, so hopefully I’ll have some better pictures and more exciting tales. For now, stay cool my friends, stay cool.

Forever and always,

Taryn

Hey! My car!