Always a New Experience. . .

Wow, what a week. It’s about 9:30 and I finally have time to start my blog, so bear with me if it gets a little weird. Well, it’s going to be weird nevertheless, because I had a very interesting, but strange week. I’m just going to start and we’ll see how it goes.

Seeburger See

So, as I said, Monday was my first day of my internship. I thought that was the case, but unfortunately there was a little bit of miscommunication and it ended up that Monday was only a day to come in, say hi, take a little tour of the place, and talk about what I would be doing. Then he asked when I could start and I said “Umm. . . Morgen?” and then I explained that I thought I’d be starting right away. But anyway, my internship didn’t start until Tuesday, so instead I went home at about 1 (we picked up my monthly bus pass too), ate lunch and thought to myself “great, another day with nothing to do.” So I took initiative and decided to take a bike ride to Seeburg, a neighboring town, not terribly far away. There’s a big lake there with a bike path that goes around it, so I rode around the path than came back to the point where I started (because that’s how circles work), grabbed a snack and sat on the dock for a while (now that I think about it that sounds like a very lonely and emo thing to do. . .). Then I rode back. It was great weather and I had a lovely time. The path is really quite picturesque, but sadly my camera just can’t do it justice. I rode through the small roads in the pastures and fields (which were actually paved). There were also lots of fields, which made it fun. . . when I was going downhill.

Finally. My Internship.

So, after two weeks of waiting I finally started my internship. And what a first day it was. I work in the Graslandwissenschaft part of the Agrarwissenshaft Facultät, or the Pasture/Grazing animal department of the School of Agricultural Science. So that means we work with farm animals, grass, fields, and stuff like that. My first day they had to do some field work, so I got to go with.

There’s three or for different projects going on in our department. I have worked with two of them so far, so I’ll explain them a bit before I go into detail. The first one is located on a farm about thirty minutes away from Göttingen near a small town called Dassel in the Solling region. There we are working with three different groups of fields, each with six small fields. Each field has either cows, sheep, or both on them. So in the A fields, the ones that we working on this week, we have 1000 kg of cows on one field, 1500kg one the second, 1000kg of sheep on the third, etc. We weigh them so that they eat consistently the same amount of grass, since the project has been going on for years, and we haven't always had the same cows or sheep. What we do then is monitor the biodiversity of the fields and the behavior of the animals. For instance, how has the types of grasses changed, the height of the grasses, or the amount of bugs? How does the behavior of the cows or sheep change when they are placed with the other species? There’s three people that are working on this project, one older lady and two people that are working on their doctorate. One of them is Mexican, which is pretty sweet, although he also can’t speak German well (or English), so it’s a little difficult to communicate, but we manage.

So, I worked on that project on Tuesday and Thursday. Both days we had to get the animals and sort them. Tuesday was the cows. We herded them into a little holding area and then forced them into a small walkway so that we could weigh them one by one and separate them into different groups based on which fields they needed to go on. That way we could get the weights correct. Cows. . . are always less than cooperative, so it was work. The Germans naturally had a very organized way of doing it, with every person having a different job that was important. For instance while moving it we always planned ahead to put people in the gaps so that the cows didn’t run off in different directions, and while sorting my job was to move the gate back and forth to direct the cows coming out into the correct spots. So that took the entire morning and then the afternoon I spent cutting grass samples and measuring the height of them, which was very tedious, but somehow relaxing despite my aching legs for the next two days afterwards.

Thursday I did basically the same thing, except with sheep. The sheep were actually a little more frustrating to work with. They were really easy to herd, but to separate into groups was hard. What I thought was cool was when the farmer called all the sheep from the giant pasture by yelling “Gei Komm!” or something like that and they actually all came. Then we weighed and separated them into five different parts of the barn. I had to open and close the corresponding doors. Sheep are really stupid, by the way, and for some reason they freak out when they are isolated like that. So they come out of the scale and run around trying to find the door that I am holding wide open, and then they finally run in side after a couple moments of panic, which may involve falling over a few times or running into the barn door. Pretty funny, actually, when that happens. That took the whole day, though, because there are more sheep. Afterwards we herded them to their pastures, which was fun and I finally got a bit of exercise. I had to run past the herd a couple times to block the way that they were not supposed to go.

Wednesday was a lot different. There was a Betriebs Ausflug that day, which is a thing that the whole Faculty does every year. We went to Kassel and did some random stuff. First we visited our sister faculty from the Kassel Uni at a farm where they are doing research. That was pretty boring, because the talks were very technical and it made it hard to pay attention (naturally I don’t have much of a farming vocab in German). Then we ate lunch with everybody; I had some very typical German stew and potatoes with Rotkohl. Then we visited a corn maze and got lost in there for a while. That’s when I got to talk with a lot of different people, which was great, because otherwise I wouldn’t have really gotten to meet everybody as quickly. Most of them work in a different building, so I don’t see them that often. Of course they are all much older than me so it’s not like I really hit it off with a few people, but I at least got to make some contacts. After that we visited a planetarium and were given a show about the stars, which was cool because he spoke very clearly and I could actually understand everything he said and learned some new words. Then we went home, finally.

Friday, oh boy, was that fun. I spent the whole day (half day actually, work ends at 2 on fridays) counting grass. Yes, it’s exactly as it sounds. I took some frozen grass samples (from a different project) and rinsed them to defrost them and get most of the earth out. Then I counted every single piece of grass in this 10X10cm sample that was still green. The project deals with a group of about fifteen types of grass. Chickens are put on the grass in cages for a certain amount of time so that they pick and scratch at the ground, then samples are taken later and we can see how much damage the chickens did and how well the different grasses grew back. Were going to have to figure out something else with the finer grasses though, because it took so long to count all those (up to an hour per sample), and we have at least fifty samples per repetition and they repeated the experiment three times. Yeah, talk about tedious work. My fingers also looked like prunes at the end of the day, which I really don’t like.

Yeah, so that’s it with the Praktikum. The people are really cool and now I have someone to consult about where I can find mexican ingredients. I’m gonna get my burrito if I have to make it myself! By the way we went on thursday to move some stuff into my host dad’s new office in East Germany and on the way back I had the most delicious Döner I have ever had. It had a special sauce on it (and lots of it) plus I requested some chili sauce too, so it had some spice. Soooo good! Afterwards my host brother didn’t hitch the trailer onto the back of the car properly, so the trailer broke off and hit someone else’s car. It didn’t do much damage, but it was pretty funny, since my dad is a policeman and deals with accidents like that all the time.

Nordsee!

Friday afternoon I went up just south of Hamburg to a small town where a friend of my host dad’s lives. His name is Ralf. We stayed at his parents place in this town for the night. That night I had possibly the most food I have ever had (that I’ve been able to keep down, I mean. Big Ugly, you’re going down after I get back!). There’s a random Brazilian restaurant in this town not big enough to even have a proper grocery store. They do this thing that they call Rodizio or Rodizo or something similar. Basically they cook meat on a grill with a rotisserie thing, then they come out with it still on the rotisserie and ask you if you want some of the meat. Naturally you say yes and the waiter slices/scrapes off a small piece. They do this all night with people walking around giving you more food until you say stop. The food was just so good I kept on eating and eating (there was veggies too, but the meats were the best part). They served everything from Kassler to steak wrapped in bacon. Truly one of the best meals I have ever had. I ate so much that I couldn’t even eat breakfast the next morning. Later that night I got into a political discussion with a German that was slightly under the influence. That actually went pretty well, I was proud of myself. Given he really didn’t know much. . .

Saturday morning early we drove the rest of the way to the Nordsee to pick up my host grandmother there. She has a leg problem and was there to vacation. I got to walk a little bit on the low tide beach, which was fun because there were spots that were like quicksand there, something I’ve never seen on a beach. Pictures are online, and it was fun despite the weather. We then picked up some fish and drove home, stopping in Hamburg to eat lunch. We couldn’t really go walking anywhere because of my host grandma’s leg, which was unfortunate. I did show them one of the houses where we lived there though.

Bus problems. . .

So basically, Germany is really good at making me feel stupid. I got this Monatskarte for the bus finally, which I had to apply for to get this big ID card that shows that I bought his student ticket, and a smaller actual ticket. Well I didn’t really get that I needed to show the ID thing along with the card, so when I got on the bus for the first time he asked where the rest of the pass is and I had to rummage through my folders to find it. The next time I showed him both and he said something about me not needing to do that, quite contrary to what the first driver said. I took his suggestion of putting the Monatskarte in the little slip of plastic that my ID was in, then the driver can see both. Of course I put it on the wrong side of the ID, so I got yelled at again. Plus I had trouble finding my bus stop in the afternoon and getting of at the right stop in the morning. Finally at the end of the week when I got everything right, I got off of work an hour earlier than normal (on thursday) so I wanted to take the 3:50 Bus. Little did I know that at that time there are two busses that go because of the school children. So when the bussed just kind of passed the stop because it was very full, I was surprised and very angry. I thought I’d have to wait for another hour. The little kids then explained to me that there was a second bus coming. Yeah, I felt dumb.

Kirmes

It’s Schutzenfest season. Many small towns have a shooting festival this time of year. It involves a wooden bird with which they try to shoot the head, wings, legs, tail and heart off in that order. Whoever breaks the heart on their shot becomes schutzen king then. Last years Schutzenkönig is always woken up on the festival day, mostly saturday, with a cannon! I contributed to the fest by playing in the Blasmusik band again. Lots of fun, got to wear the cool blue blazer again, which is always funny. The choir and the Fanfarenzug were also there. The Fanfarenzug consists of 1 bass drum, 1 sweet looking marching bell kit, 7 snares, and 9, yes 9, piccolos. These guys actually tune pretty well though so it didn’t sound as bad as it would seem. They wake you up at 6 in the morning by marching though the town screeching their piccolos and continue to march around town for four hours.

Ende

Well, I actually have more to say, but I’ll save it for a later date. It’s already 1:30 here and I have to get up at 5 thirty or earlier. (I did some other stuff in between me starting and finishing this blog, it doesn’t actually take me four hours) I’m already falling asleep, so good night, until next week.

Skez