A Tale of Two Cities...and Four Really Full Stomachs

XXXL Trip

As I have mentioned in the past weeks, every time I eat here I am never quite full.  I could probably eat another whole portion of food and be fine.  This is what I call “European full”.  I haven’t been “American full” in 2 months, which is that point which we like to call a food coma.  However, my friends know of a restaurant in the state of Hessen which specializes in XXXL food.  Last Thursday we took a trip there and let me tell you, I was…pretty damn full.

We ordered two dishes for four people.  The first one was a 30cm burger.

As you can see, this is enough to make one person explode if they eat it.  However, I think I could tackle it if I really wanted to.  It would be tough but maybe…

In addition to this we also ordered a 1kg schnitzel.  

Schnitzel is basically a thin country-fried steak, or “bistec empanado” for those of you reading from the Motherland.  Now…since we started with the burgers my friends quickly realized that this might have been too much.  However, we had ordered and started eating so I said

Challenge accepted!

I’m pretty sure I ate about 40% or more of the scnitzel, just so we could take a lovely picture after we were done and rejoice that we won against the food, and we didn’t have to use the “loser foil” as my German friend called the aluminum foil used by people who don’t finish their meal.

However, this was not the end of our trip.  For the first time since I’ve been here I got to sightsee in another city.  Last weekend I went to the conference in the town of Simmerath, but we never got the chance to sightsee because we were always in the hostel.  After finishing our food frenzy, we drove the Audi down to the cities of Wiesbaden and Frankfurt.  It was rainy and we didn’t have much time, so mostly we took in the cities by car (and we didn’t feel like walking since we’d just had the equivalent of a small whale in food).  We did get out of the car to see the casino in Wiesbaden…

...and to walk around a small festival in Frankfurt…

…where we got to see the city from the top of a shopping mall.

Students!  Students!  Students!

My excitement level is pretty high at the moment.  I was awoken abruptly this morning by my phone ringing.  Turns out that one of the students arrived early in the morning and needed me to give him the address of his accommodations because he hadn’t written them down.  Sigh…but oh well.  All is well because students arrive today!  And tomorrow!  I’ve been at the Main Train Station (Hauptbahnhof) since 11:30am, and it is now almost 6pm.  I will be here until 8pm at least, and then I get to go home.  As tired as I am right now, it has been an excellent day.  I’ve met Bulgarians, Greeks, and will be meeting Russians and Ukrainians soon.  I am very proud of my work, because I feel like they are here due to my efforts organizing the program.

My home for the pick-up weekend

While I have been at the train station all day, the students have been leaving with my colleague in her car.  Great teamwork has resulted in…actually a good amount of me being alone in the train station.  But these guys are actually quite nice, and I am looking forward to hanging out with them in the near future.  Yes, I am the organizer for their program, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get to have fun with them either.  Most of them are around my age (20-24) and will very likely want to go out and have a good time, which I am more than welcome to help with.

Now it turns out that the last guy to arrive today was delayed an hour, so I get to wait here until 9pm and then Meike, my colleague, will drive me home.  I ended up spending about an hour with three Ukrainians, which was pretty fun even though we were all exhausted and just wanted to go to bed.  They got to leave…I got to stay.  I’m sure I will see them soon and they seemed like they wanted to go out soon, or at least hang out in the accommodations (which is not allowed, so we’ll see what happens), so I’m sure we’ll have our good share of fun.

The second day went ok, except that some of the students got off to a bad start with me.  I’m a very patient person, but I hate when people are rude to others, particularly wait staff at restaurants or bars.  As a great wizard once said,"If you want to see the true measure of a man, watch how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” (Sirius Black in Goblet of Fire, for those of you who can’t quite quote Harry Potter) Since I have already had unpleasantries with this student via email, this only made me feel worse about him. I should not have to be apologizing to waitresses for the behavior of others. Other than this it was quite a good day, and everyone is now here! All my hard work has paid off!

Summer Academy Week 1…GO!

The first day of the Summer Academy started off well enough.  However, once classes started we realized that the tent that we had set up outside was NOT going to work.  The problem: temperatures were reaching 85-90 degrees and the A/C system was not big enough to cool down the tent.   The second problem: there was too much natural light and the projector could barely be seen.  Thankfully, by Wednesday we managed to get a bigger air conditioning and the temperature also went down to the mid 70s.  The problem with the projector, we have realized, is pretty much unsolvable, though we tried to buy some curtains to attempt to block out the sunlight coming in.  This was a failed attempt cause the curtains were too small for the tent.

Now we are moving on with smaller details that we need to plan, such as a couple of student ID’s we have not received and some reimbursements that need to be issued.  In addition, there are a couple of details that need to be resolved regarding the trip to Brussels, Belgium next week.  The class International Economics will be going and my coworker Meike and I will be going as staff representatives.  This is great because I get an all-expenses-paid trip to Brussels.  We leave Wednesday and come back Friday.  After this I might stay in Cologne for the weekend with the new friends I made at the conference.  We will see what happens, but I’m sure it will be a great week.

Hamburgers and Romans are fun!

It has been a while since I posted here.  However, when there are long periods of silence it usually means I've been busy, so once I get to actually writing something I will have some good stuff!  Therefore, I have good stuff right now that I want to share with everyone.

Hamburgers...and I don't mean the German city of Hamburg


Last week, me and Daryl had the incredible craving for a burger.  However, we went to the supermarket and burger buns just weren't up to par.  Neither was regular cheese, so we decided to go a little differently and try to Germanize our cooking a little.  Instead of burger buns we each bought a different type of bread roll and we got some cheddar made in Germany.  Turns out that Wisconsin cheddar is about 10,000 times better than German cheddar, but we made some amazing burgers.  Fortunately for all of you, I have decided to start taking pictures, so...we have evidence!

And I give you...EVIDENCE!!!

Mine is on the left on a ciabatta roll.  We each had two.  It was great.

After eating this I was pretty much in a food coma for the rest of the day.  It's surprising how used I've gotten to smaller portions, but I cannot turn down a good, big meal if I can get my hands on it.  This really hit the spot, since we were desperate for a meal that would fill us up to an American level.  We...mostly did.  Mission Success!


It's an AIESEC life!


Finally, the chance has come for me to come to an AIESEC conference outside of the US.  I could not have been more excited, and on the way there we got pretty lost because my friend didn't feel like asking anyone.  One and a half hour drive took three hours, so by the time I got there I was starving.  Fortunately, dinner was wrapping up so we got to have a good dinner.  The conference was in the small town of Simmerath, which apparently only has a couple hundred residents.  This means that while we were there we were about a third of the entire city's population.  CRAZY!

The highlight of AIESEC conferences is the new people you get to meet and the crazy parties that ensue when you put 100+ college students in a hotel (or hostel in this case).  You get to have a day of leadership development and great, inspiring sessions, and then you get to kick back and...well, you don't really kick back, you just party until the next morning and then maybe get an hour or two of sleep, then go do more soft skills development and intercultural awareness seminars.  I love AIESEC...

There were AIESECers from 7 different cities in Germany, all of which combined to make the Wild West region, which Koblenz is a part of.  I had the opportunity to participate in the Talent Management track, which was particularly focused toward transition from the outgoing VP to the incoming VP.  Since I had already done my transition in May, I didn't get as much from the sessions as I had expected, but I am very glad I got to meet all of the people I met.  I will be visiting some in the next weeks, and maybe some will come visit me in the US.  And of course...we need a picture, and the first party was one of the funnest I have been to in a while, certainly the most fun in Germany so far.

Of course, as always, leaving the conference was the hardest part.  After sleeping four hours each of the two nights, I was pretty sleep deprived but I definitely miss all of my new friends.  However, God bless the Internet and Facebook.  After getting home, the usual friending frenzy began, and I came out with a bunch of new friends.  Gotta love social networking.  The best part about leaving, though, was riding in my friend Robert's car.  He got to the conference on the second day, so we got to ride back to Koblenz in his dad's Audi, which he had borrowed.  And let me tell you...that car is amazing.  In this car I went from the airport to Koblenz the first day I arrived, but I was so sleepy I couldn't fully enjoy it.  This time...wide awake!  Cruising down the Autobahn at 240 kph is pretty sweet.  That's almost 150 mph!  Perfectly legal...

Work, work, work...like an ant


After this great weekend, I had to get back to work.  Things were getting a bit hectic in the office because we are on our last week until the students get here.  Therefore, we have spent a lot of time finishing up our planning and putting the finishing touches on all of our things.  There are 30 students arriving from various countries, and we get to have our first meeting on Monday with all of them.  I will be at the train station most of this weekend to make sure they arrive well and then my colleague picks them up and takes them to their accommodations.  This will be great because I get to meet them, but it sucks a bit cause I waste my weekend at the train station.  I have a feeling this will involve a lot of me being on my computer playing video games during the time in between arrivals...we'll see.

Now I will have to cut off here, and I will include my other adventures from this week in the next blog post, which will most likely go up sometime in the middle of next week.  I have some good stories, and hopefully will develop more over the weekend when I meet all my students.

P.S. The Welcome Booklet is ready and can be accessed here.

Religious Holidays are Cool!

Many of you, namely my mother and my cousin, have been asking why there haven't been any recent updates to the blog.  I have to say...I was a bit lazy last week and didn't do anything.  So I will go for a little bit longer today and talk about the last two weeks.

Work has been pretty steady the last two weeks.  It has been a combination of sending the participants a bunch of forms they have to fill out and finishing up the welcome package.  Thanks to those of you who helped me decide what information to put in it, and special thanks to Mom who helped give me some ideas with the design.  Turns out my boss then went and changed a bunch of things, but...oh well. Womp, womp, we can't have it our way all the time.

This week will be pretty filled with work.  We are now in the process of getting all of our students enrolled, and helping any that have visa problems.  We only have two weeks until they arrive, at which point this will get a lot more interesting because I will have to get to know the 30+ international students who are coming here for one month.  About 20 of them will be living in the same area as me, so I hope this will lead to me having more fun in the weekends.  Next weekend is the AIESEC conference in a town a couple of hours away, and I am looking forward to it.


Event Planning at its Finest


Planning the Summer Academy has been an incredibly large amount of work.  It is quite unbelievable that this has been planned basically by two people and a third who did my job before I was here.  I was comparing this to my experience planning an AIESEC conference, which was planned by four people.  This has truly brought to my attention how much work I have actually been doing.  The Summer Academy is a more complicated event than a weekend long AIESEC conference, and there are less people working on it's planning.  But I have to say that I do love event planning.  The one thing I wish was different is the starting date on my job.  On things like this, I prefer being there from the beginning because the learning curve is so steep.  When I first got here I made mistakes left and right, but now that it has been more than five weeks, I know what I can and can't do.  Although, I gotta say...I hope to plan one more AIESEC event before I graduate.  We'll see what happens...


Hanging out in Koblenz


I have come to the conclusion that Koblenz is definitely not a party city.  To get to a party city we have to drive a couple of hours at least to Cologne, Frankfurt or Stuttgart.  Therefore, what we end up doing most of the time here is hanging out at people's apartments and maybe going to the clubs here once every couple of weeks.  However, last week two of the AIESECers decided that it was time to properly inaugurate their apartment that they had moved into recently.  So...they threw a nice, little party where I made some new friends and had good fun.


Holidays in Germany


Last Thursday and tomorrow are national holidays in Germany.  Therefore, I didn't have to work.  Woohoo!  I had the chance to get some much needed sleep and I actually spent a LOT of time sleeping.  However, I also came to think about why Germans celebrate national holidays for the Ascension of Jesus or Pentecost.  I guess it is because they are traditional holidays, but it is certainly somewhat surprising in a country where, according to a 2006 poll, over 25% of the general population is atheist or agnostic (including over 50% of people between 12-24).  Going back to the whole division of church and state, I'm not really sure how I feel about religious holidays in general, particularly because they seem to be biased towards Christians (at least here and in the US).  However, I'm not going to complain because I truly did need some days off.  I get to write this today and not have anything to worry about for tomorrow because I don't work.


Sports are Almost Over...


As you all probably know, I am a bit obsessed with sports.  Unfortunately, I'm not that huge of a baseball fan, which means that my sports watching is about to be over in a couple of days once the Stanley Cup Finals and the NBA finals are over.  I just want the Mavericks to win tonight so the Heat never win a championship with the Lebron-DWade-Bosh triangle.  Seriously, if you're gonna make fun of Dirk Nowitzki for playing sick, that is the last straw.  Neither Wade or Lebron have any class and they don't deserve to win a ring this year or any year.  As for hockey, I just want the Bruins to win.  It has been a goaltender's dream what Tim Thomas has had in this series, so hopefully he can continue playing at such a high level.  He just need his own players to score...

Sorry all, for the lack of pictures.  I'm being pretty lazy with my camera.  I'll try to take some more soon and then post them to here (and eventually, to Facebook...).