Germany 2009: A Look Back

Wow. I can hardly believe that it has been almost three weeks since I got back from Germany. I can also hardly believe that I spent my summer in Europe. I can't even begin to describe how incredible of an experience it was. I did more and saw more in nine short weeks than the vast majority of the world's population has a chance to in their life times. I took over 2,000 photos from more than a dozen cities in four countries. I walked more miles every weekend than I ever have before. And I spent more time on trains than any one person has a right to.

I want to take a moment and thank the University of Karlsruhe (TH), my host department: the Institut für Wasser und Gewässerentwicklung (IWG), and my supervisor, Brigitte Pfeifer. I also want to thank Melissa Woo for being an awesome travel buddy, as well as everyone else at the IWG and UK(TH)!

I had a blast this summer and I learned a lot, too. It was nice to see my family in Uettingen again and meet my two young nieces. I visited cities and saw things that I had only dreamed about seeing. It is still incredible for me to think that I climbed the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame de Paris, Prague Castle, and numerous other spire-toting monuments to the history of humanity.

For those of you who haven't had enough of my blog posts, I do keep another blog at: "http://techfortomorrow.blogspot.com/". And you are always certainly free to send me an e-mail at john.leland.mills(at)gmail.com!

Thank you again to everyone who helped support me and my trip this summer!

As a quick recap, here's a short list of some of the places I visited this summer:

+ Germany

- Karlsruhe

- Munich

- Heidelberg

- Würzburg

- Rothenburg

- Bamberg

+ France

- Strasbourg

- Paris

+ Austria

- Salzburg

+ Czech Republic

- Prague

Preparing For The End

Things have been kind of quiet around the blog lately, and that's mostly because things have been so busy around the Installation. I've been working almost 13 hour days trying to get everything finished before I leave on Saturday. Yesterday was my last day in the lab, so I was a little rushed to finish all of the experiments that I wanted to conduct. Today I gave my concluding presentation to the staff and colleagues here at the institution. I think it went pretty well. I didn't have time to translate it, so I did it in English, but I think everyone for the most part understood everything.

It's also been pretty warm in Karlsruhe the last week or so. It's supposed to get to 37°C (which is almost 99°F) at some point today, but I'm not sure if it will make it quite that high.

Other than that, there isn't a whole lot to report. I'm getting ready to fly home on Saturday, and at this point I'm kind of excited to get back state-side.

So with that said, "See you all soon!".

Trains, Delays, and Directional Misalignments

This has been THE weekend for the train. So great story, right....

Würzburg to Frankfurt = no problem. In fact, we get there a little bit early, thus allowing me to take an earlier train to Karlsruhe. Which never shows up. And so the Deutsche Bahn assigns another train to run the route. This is still about 15 minutes earlier than the train I was planning on taking, so I gladly hop on board. Please note that the time is now 21:50, and the trip from Frankfurt to Karlsruhe normally takes about 56 minutes.

So here we are, chugging along the tracks, when all the sudden we stop. The train captain comes across the intercom and says that someone near Heidelberg jumped in front of an ICE train and so the path from Mannheim to Heidelberg (a very busy stretch) is completely closed. Therefore, our train can no longer stop at Heidelberg and all the passengers on board who want to go to Heidelberg have to get off in Mannheim and take a bus the rest of the way. So we wait for almost 30 minutes in Mannheim for the buses to arrive. At this point we have to then wait for a train heading a round-about way to Stuttgart because they couldn't cut through the other side of Heidelberg due to all the tracks being full of trains waiting for the path to clear.

So we pull out of Mannheim and are again chugging along, my spirits rather high because we are now going to be going directly to Karlsruhe because all the other passengers took the bus. Great, right? HAHA! WRONG!

About twenty minutes later, the train again stops, and the conductor again comes across the intercom. With the most defeated voice I have ever heard, he informs us that the train got set on the wrong tracks, and we had been heading towards Stuttgart (i.e. following the train that we waited to pass in Mannheim). So we sit for awhile, all the while the lady next to me is freaking out that another train was going to hit us because we are on the wrong tracks. I tried to assure her that everyone from France to Russia was aware of our current position and that no one was going to hit us. This really did nothing but make matters worse, as she was now concerned about French and Russian trains hitting us as well as German ones.

We finally began backing up at an insanely slow pace. I made the mistake of investigating why we were cruising along at the pace of a fish through wet concrete. This is when I noticed that the back of the train had no headlights, and the stewards were having to walk along behind (/ in front) of the train and illuminate the path with flashlights to make sure that the tracks were clear. So our path back (almost the whole way to Mannheim) took twice as long as the way forwards.

Long story short (too late, I know), the train finally pulled into Karlsruhe Hbf at approximately 12:46 AM. That's right, almost two hours later than one would have expected. Everything said and done, I'm just glad we made it alive.

So with that said, "I hope nothing like that happens Saturday morning....Knock on wood.".