Okay, It’s about time I get to writing this blog. I really didn’t have time last sunday to write it because I was hanging out with Zac, one of the two other Americans in Göttingen, which involved playing ultimate frisbee, so I was super tired that evening. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I was really just too lazy, plus I was not in the greatest of moods. But before I get to that, I should really tell you what I should have written in last week’s blog.
Birthday! Woo!
My birthday was indeed two Wednesdays ago, although really the celebration was the previous weekend with the half of my family that could visit. I was having an excellent week so far at work and I was in a really good mood by the time my birthday rolled around. I baked some cookies to bring to work like a good German would, and they were thoroughly enjoyed by my co-workers, although I really ate a lot of them, because the weather was nice that day, which meant that almost everybody was out working rather than in the actual institute (we have about three different locations where projects are going on outside of Göttingen). I also was out that day, but was back early so it was all good. That evening I visited a birthday party that someone else threw, because it so happened to be that he had his birthday that day too, less work for me. Not only did he have his birthday on the same day as me, but he also was turning nineteen, which was a funny coincidence, considering the chances that something like that would happen in such a small town. We had great weather that day, so they grilled some sausages and chicken breast. It was tasty to say the least. Yeah, so that was pretty much it, I got a card from my work and a little breakfast personal cutting board thing (if you know what I’m talking about than you’ve lived in Germany), and from my host parents I got a bonsai plant. Pretty cool little thing.
Week 1
I’m just going to call the week that I missed week 1 for simplicity. I got to work on a different project that week. It’s located in a field that’s a little farther away than the farm that I normally work at. What they’re doing there is experiments with different ways of mowing the fields, and seeing how that affects biodiversity which in turn affects food quality. There are 72 small squares with different grasses in each one as well as different intensities of mowing. That means a but load of sample taking. Tuesday and Wednesday we mowed with this machine that has two wheels and a these teeth in the front that move back and forth, cutting the grass all the way to the ground. We would have finished it all Tuesday but the darn thing broke (Technology, psh!), plus there was a ton of traffic that day, so we had to continue on Wednesday. Oh and by the way there is this 800 year old wall that is just kinda there like it’s no big deal. It’s pretty cool looking. Monday I was counting grasshoppers, but I think I talked a bit about that in my last blog already. All three of those days had absolutely beautiful weather, so I really enjoyed myself outside. Next week is looking pretty good too, so I’m excited for my last week working with Graslandwissenshaft.
The rest of the days were really just small tasks. I did some data entering, sample drying, weighing, and sorting, and other similar things. It was relaxing; I got to listen to music or podcasts while doing the tedious work. Which was good because my weekend was rather full.
Weekend 1
On Saturday I had planned to hang out with Zac for the afternoon/evening, but since my host brother and host dad were already going to a concert that evening, they invited us to go along. It made my host dad happy because he got to speak a little English again. The band was called “Swagger,” a band that played pretty much everything. They’re a cover band and covered everything from Peter Maffay to Rammstein to Black Eyed Peas. And they played A LOT from about 10:30 to 3 am, in fact. So, since we got back late, Zac just stayed overnight in the extra bed in my room and we hung out at my place the next morning too, until it was time for frisbee. I finally managed to work it out with the frisbee thing, and it was lots of fun. It was the first time that I really got to play on a serious team, as in they had legit drills and strategies, so I was pretty darn exausted. Not to mention I didn’t really know what I was doing, considering the instructions were always in German or broken English. I wasn’t really familiar with the sport vocabulary in both languages, so I was just screwed overall. Then I missed my bus, which made me mad because the busses come only every two hours on Sundays, so my host dad came and picked me up.
But that was just the beginning of the series of unfortunate things that happened to me over the next few days.
Last Week. . . oh joy.
So, where to start, where to start. . . On Monday the weather turned into a rainy cloudy cold mess. Fall is starting up and good days are becoming scarcer and scarcer. But of course the show must go on. We had things to do before winter shows up. We needed to move the animals to the third group of fields, which involves taking grass samples from both the field that they are moving off of and the field that they are moving onto (kind of like a before/after type of deal). So despite the rain I had to work outside, sitting in tall grass cutting the sample from the ground with my bare hands and then somehow managing to label the samples with a wet piece of paper. I did this 16 times before I could go home a cold and wet mess. Luckily I didn’t get sick, it was just a miserable experience. I especially don’t like the fact that it’s so quite since I’m by myself in the middle of a field and I end of thinking about things, which soon becomes non-productive thinking. It was just not the best of circumstances. Oh well, it happens.
Tuesday I went back out to the farm. The weather was still crappy and cold, but it was only misting, so a little bit better. I got through the work at least without having to worry about writing on wet paper, although it was still really wet outside. First we moved the sheep down to the barn where they got there hooves trimmed. That was pretty funny, because they basically put them in this sheep holding rack thing and then tighten it on their bodies in order to turn them upside down and cut the hooves. Just something about a device specifically designed to flip a sheep upside down amuses me. Well, we did that with every group of sheep (four times I herded them down to the barn and then back up to their new place to graze) and then also moved the cows to their respective fields, but they didn’t need trimming. After that I got to sit in a field covered with crap in order to take the samples. Again 16 samples, didn’t take but a couple of hours, but at the end I was displeased to discover that my iPod had fallen out of my jacket pocket. So I spent about forty minutes searching the three fields that it could have been in, and I found it again. Of course it was in the very last field. Eventually I managed to get home, although a bit late.
But that’s not the worst of it. I needed this whole time to talk to Professor Isselstein, the head of the Grasslandwissenshaften section of the Agrarwissenshaften department, about my auditor form which I gave to him on Monday to sign. So I was planning to do that on Wednesday, since I came back late (the due date was Thursday) With that little teaser I’ll move on to what happened on Wednesday.
I though I was going to be staying in the institute on Wednesday, but of course the other field (the one I worked on the week before, with the 800 year old wall) needed some help. I really didn’t have the right clothing so I needed to grab my rubber boots and my rain pants. Oh and I had to buy my lunch on the way there. Luckily I had my rain jacket though. So we soon left to the field, on the way putting a hole on the back of the pickup truck. We almost got stuck in the mud driving through the pasture to get to the research fields and ended up getting stuck in the mud on the way back. After shoving it out of the mud and getting the car all dirty we had to take it somewhere nearby to get it washed. Well, when we washed it we discovered a really big oil leak coming from the underside of the car and found that we were no longer able to drive it. So I then had to wait on someone else to pick us up from Göttingen which is about a 40 minute trip one way. When I finally got back, after hitting a fox I might add, I had already missed my bus so I went up to Prof. Isselstein to talk about my registration form and was not pleased to discover that I needed the signatures and stamps from all the departments that I signed up to take classes in. Lovely considering the due date was the next day.
The cool thing was that I got to work on this giant tractor thing that day though. It was awesome. Basically this thing was a giant mower that mowed the grass onto a conveyor belt that dropped it onto a conveyor belt that wasn’t moving so it could weigh the grass and then it shot the grass out the side with the second belt. I sat in the back of the machine waiting as the part of the mowed grass was blown through a tube to me (part of the grass is separated and comes to me, while the other part drops down to be weighed). I then bagged and labeled the grass and but it in a big sack. I really had to work fast, because by the time I stapled and labeled the bag, the machine was already on the next one. It was really lots of fun. The machine looks like a mix between something you’d see in a Doctor Seuss book and a horror film.
So like I said, the beginning of this week was not so good. In fact it was pretty awful in general, but things turned up. On Thursday I got to work inside and I went into town to talk to the student secretary about my auditor form. I got the deadline extended, so everything’s good with that. Then I got to go home early. Friday was basically the same, except I collected all of the signatures and prepared them, since the office closes early on Fridays.
I found an international church that I’m going to go to, which I’m really looking forward to because I’d be nice to meet and share fellowship with some new people. It’s been really hard trying to find people that I can actually connect with and relate to since I’m in this small town with a bunch of people that are younger than me and that I just wouldn’t be able to be friends with. Not because they’re not nice or anything, but just because they’re not really my type. Hopefully at this church I’ll be able to meet some cool people, because they are all basically in a similar situation as me. They’re mostly foreigners who have come to Germany for different reasons, but want to still meet some people, which is hard to do because of the language barrier. Plus they give a bible study in German for people that are trying to learn German, like me. So I’m going to go to that if I enjoy the regular service. I haven’t been able to go yet, though, because this weekend. . .
Relaxing, fun weekend. . . aahh. . .
Friday night my host sister came. She’s really nice and I enjoyed spending time with her and my host parents this weekend. My host brother is starting to get on my nerves a little bit. The twins were okay, but they didn’t really interact at all, just were on the computer or TV all the time. Marcel is much different, but he has lately been really getting on my host mom’s nerves (and I think my dad too). I really don’t understand it, because he clearly got thrown out of his mom’s house for some reason, and now he’s living by us with his dad, and annoying the heck out of them. He’s always complaining about small things, just digging and digging until someone blows up (my host mom usually, which just makes things really awkward for me), or blows up himself. I’ll give you an example: Just the other day my host dad made a home made pizza. It was awesome. It had cheese and tuna and pineapple and spicy peppers, just amazing. In fact he always cooks really good food. Well there happened to also be a little bit of ham on it as well, a good choice if you ask me, but apparently Marcel really doesn’t like ham on pizza and specifically asked for him to leave it off. Well he complained and whined and then finally just ate bread instead of this delicious pizza, just because it had a little bit of ham on it. Now this child (actually he’s twenty which makes it worse) is living at his dad’s house for free, and getting fed delicious food every single day, and he has the nerve to complain about it. Not just about that, but a bunch of different stuff. For instance, he complains that he wants to go into town to sit in the sauna but my host dad doesn’t want to pay for it. I mean really? His life is not hard, if I were in his position I would be sucking up to my family in order to not get kicked out a second time, but he’s borderline if you ask me. Of course, I don’t really have any say in the matter, and it’s something that I will leave for them to discuss. I just wanted to vent because it’s really frustrating sometimes, the things he says.
Anyway, back to the main point of this section. Friday night we played a German game similar to “Trouble” called “Mensch ärgert mich nicht.” and then I taught them Euchre since we had four people (me, my host parents, and my host sister). It was tons of fun even though I epic failed at the first game.
Saturday I hung out a bit with Zac and Trinitie, both Americans on this program in my area, and we talked for a while. Then I went home and chilled, which was nice. I got Starcraft 2 in German, which I’m pretty excited about, although the vocab is a lot different so I’m learning a lot of new words. It’s actually kinda frustrating sometimes when I don’t understand the hints that they give me on the mission. Eventually I figure that out, but as far as the plot line goes, it’s really hard to follow. Sunday we took my host sister back to the Bahnhof in Kassel and said goodbye, but before that we walked around a park in Kassel where a giant Castle was. There’s one castle on a hill with the statue of Hercules that has a huge fountain at the bottom of the hill. It only runs for about 15 minutes every couple hours or so I think, but when it starts it really goes. It’s just one huge fountain that forces water up above the trees, which are impressively tall themselves. With the sun in the mix as well they fountain was really pretty, with a huge rainbow forming on the side. It was really cool looking, just because it was sooo much water.
Ende
So, that’s the end of that. I don’t think I’m going to proof read so if there’s any errors, just deal with it, I don’t feel like going back. Oh, I must say that Blasmusik is going really well. I have my Trombone now and we’re actually improving quite a bit. I guess all the music was new before, but now we can play it much better. It’s tons of fun! Thanks for reading, peace out.
Skez
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