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.