Tag: Regensburg

I blame the heat.

On By StevenIn Life In Germany8 Comments

This week, I made a pretty big mistake.  On Monday, I bought this:

It had been a very warm pair of weeks- at one point, the temperature hit 35 degrees Celsius in the afternoon, which for you Americans is about 95 degrees Fahrenheit.  Since my apartment and my office are both entirely bereft of air conditioning, I was wholly unprepared for this.    One evening last week, it was so warm and sticky that I couldn’t sleep until 2:30 in the morning when a thunderstorm kicked up and started to cool things down slightly.

The portable air conditioner was something that I’d been thinking about on and off for months.  At  just under three hundred Euros, it seemed like a reasonable sacrifice.  I have a fan in the apartment which does great things for making it seem cooler, but it does little to actually cool down the ambient temperature of the apartment.  Plus when you hit the power button, those little shark gill looking flaps in the front open automatically, which is really neat.  I’m a big sucker for “neat!”

Enlisting the help of Jenny and her car, I got the thing on Monday after work.  It took both of us to muscle the thing up into my apartment-  it’s big and awkward so even though I could lift it, carrying it for more than a few feet becomes a logistical impossibility.  Once it’s out of the box, it has nice little wheels to move it from room to room, though.   Once it was unboxed, I set it up in the bedroom, closed the window and the door, and turned it on.  And waited.  Then I waited some more.

After it had been running for about forty minutes, I went into the bedroom to check on it, and I found that two feet directly in front of it were nice and cool, but the rest of the room was pretty much the same temperature.

The reason for this, as anyone who knows air conditioners will tell you, is because I hadn’t put on the exhaust hose and routed the displaced warm air somewhere else.  The exhaust hose that came with this device (not pictured) is wide enough to roll a small honeydew melon through, and this made it difficult to vent the thing properly.  If tried running the exhaust hose out of a doorway first, then a window.  The hose is so wide that in order to vent the hot air, I have to keep the window open so much that it entirely negates the point of having an air conditioner in the first place.   Jenny’s boyfriend Robert suggested duct taping the hose into the window, but that would make it impossible to ever open the window again.

Yesterday, Jenny helped me return the AC to the store. (She’s a very patient friend who is regularly amused by the inability of someone from Florida to cope with the heat.)  I had the thing for less than five days, and by the fourth day, the average temperature had dropped about twenty degrees anyway.   The weather here just isn’t usually all that hot.  I think that’s why this image is so funny:

I think when we hit our hottest days next summer, I’m just going to try putting ice cubes in my underwear or something.

Doors Become Windows

On By StevenIn Life In Germany

On most of my trips into the Altstadt, I walk past this wall.

It’s an old wall, older than the buildings around it.  It’s covered in graffiti. (I especially like the script along the top, which says, “Bunny, I love you!”)

Set in the wall is a door.  An old, wooden door with metal doorknobs.  The door is covered in old stickers and concert posters and still more graffiti.  I always imagined that behind the door was something like a broom closet, or the entrance to a tiny dungeon.

One day this weekend, I noticed some people had stopped at the door, and were peering inside.   They closed the door again before I got to it, and I didn’t look further.

When I came back later in the weekend, though, I pushed the door open gently, and this is what I saw on the other side.

In the middle of the old city, between churches and clothing stores, surrounded by cobblestone, is a lush green overgrown glade.  There’s even a very large tree inside.

If this were True Blood, there would be faeries.  I’m just sayin’.

Freude am Fahren

On By StevenIn Life In Germany

Every week-day, I ride a bus from my home near the Altstadt of Regensburg to a bus stop a short walk from my office in nearby Neutraubling.  That bus rides past BMW’s Regensburg factory.

I have always known that BMW is a Bavarian company, but I forgot about it until I got here. BMW stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke, which roughly translates in English to Bavarian Motor Works.  The blue and white in the logo roundel match the blue and white of the Bavarian flag.  The logo is also stylized to evoke a spinning propeller.   The company goes back about a hundred years, but they started out as two different companies.  Bayerische Flugzeugwerke made airplane engines, and Rapp Motorenwerke was a motor company.  When they merged, the BMW name was born.  The first BMW branded vehicle is a motorcycle; the cars actually came a little bit later.

As you can see from the overhead view, it’s an enormous sprawling facility with a test track.

Up until the week before last, I’d only ever seen the gates and the high fences that surround the compound.   There’s a tour available to the public, however.  You just have to schedule it.   Here’s some of the interesting things I learned on the tour:

  • This facility produces several models of BMW, but ALL of the BMW Z4 line cars are made here.
  • The facility is a complete production line including enormous (and very loud) metal presses that convert huge rolls of steel into car doors, hoods, trunks, and bodies.
  • The seats are manufactured in a nearby town, and are driven to this facility less than an hour before they’re installed into new cars- this means that a traffic snarl on the Autobahn can back up production quite easily.
  • The factory produces one car every minute.  They make 1100 cars a day.
  • Much of the transport of cars from one end of the factory to the other is completely automated-  lots of robots and sparks and giant tracks.   There are forklifts, but there are also automatic robot cargo things that would look right at home in any Weyland-Yutani cargo deck.
  • Robots handle welding and bolting and all kinds of other precision work.
  • There are four layers in the painting process: a base primer, a protective layer, the color paint, and clear coat.  The paint work is all done by robots, and the paint is electrostatically charged during the painting process so that the paint will adhere more easily.
  • While the seats and engines are installed by robots,  a lot of fine installation work is done by humans- the Regensburg facility employs nine thousand people.
  • Ten percent of the finished cars are sent out to the test track for quality control.  I suspect that would probably be a fun job.

The video is a little bit older, but you can get a sense of the Regensburg facility in this Youtube clip.

This next video was taken in the Munich factory, but it clearly shows the metal press machinery, the paint robots, and more.  I’m quite fond of how the robot arms open and close the car doors during the painting process.

Sehnsucht, I Has It.

On By StevenIn Life In Germany4 Comments

Over the last several months, I’ve read some fascinating information and theories on homesickness and culture shock/cultural adjustment. I didn’t know before I moved to Germany that there was even a cycle. It goes something like this:

  • Honeymoon Phase – This is what I like to call the “ooh, shiny!” phase. To borrow from Berkeley, “This phase is best described by feelings of excitement, optimism and wonder often experienced when you enter into a new environment or culture.” Anyone who knows me well understands that I actually spend roughly 70% of my life in this state.
  • Crisis Phase – This is where the acute homesickness comes in. Changes in eating and sleeping habits, irritability or sadness, calling home much more frequently, and a host of other depression-like symptoms can be attributed to this stage. This is the time when the different stuff feels a little too different, and you just wish you could be back in more familiar surroundings.
  • Recovery and Adjustment Phases – These are exactly what they sound like. You get used to things and you even out. Everything that seemed bad during the Crisis Phase doesn’t seem so bad any more. You start to integrate with your new locale a bit more. Some people adjust so well that they never leave. Some don’t really integrate at all, and become anti-social and reclusive.

Some variations on the so-called “cultural adjustment curve” use slightly different labels – Honeymoon/Negotiation/Adjustment/Mastery – but the basic cycle is the same.

According to the Great and Powerful Google, most people hit their Crisis Phase at around three months. Now that I think about it, I recall that I was definitely calling home a lot more frequently at three months than I do now, but I don’t remember feeling especially homesick at the time. Perhaps my cultural adjustment curve is just slower than most. The reason I bring this up now is because I saw the new Spider-Man movie tonight.

There is no time that I feel more lonely than when I’m in a movie theater filled with other geeks who I can’t talk to. In the US, I usually see this type of movie with some friends- people who speak my language.

I’m not just talking about English here, although that’s a big part of it. Whenever I hear someone speaking English in town, I always want to be part of the conversation, even if they’re going the opposite direction and I have no idea what they’re really talking about. I hear the language, and there’s a tiny part of me jumping up and down and screaming in a tiny voice, “me! me! talk to me! I want to speak English to you!” Yes, sitting in a crowded movie theatre with four German conversations around me that I can’t follow is kind of disheartening. That’s not precisely what I mean, though.

What I mean by “people who speak my language” in this instance is people who can dissect the movie with me afterward. When I see a geek oriented film like this, I want to nitpick in a geeky way. I want to have conversations with people who know the source material, the back story, the universe that film is set in. I want to talk about whether the mechanical web shooters are better than the organic ones, or whether we’ll see Original Recipe Spock in the Star Trek sequel or whether Smaug will look as cool in the upcoming Hobbit films as the Balrog looked in LotR. I want to talk about whether the sequel to this movie will cover a specific story arc, I want to discuss incidental characters and tiny for-the-fans details that not everyone will catch, and I want to gush about the things the movie got right.

I realized while I was walking home in the lovely cooling rain tonight that I have been profoundly missing this type of interaction. I’ve felt it to varying degrees every time I’ve gone to a genre movie here- superheroes, science fiction, Muppets, Sherlock Holmes- when I see these movies, I’m surrounded by a crowd of people who share my interests, and yet I am very much alone. I don’t know any geeky types here in Regensburg to join me for this level of obsession. Not in town around Regensburg, anyway. I have friends here in Regensburg, but nobody that seems to be as deeply into geeky pop culture as I am.

I wasn’t sure how to wrap this up, so I’ll close the post with an explanation of the title.

Sehnsucht isn’t only a well-known Rammstein song. It is a German word which roughly translates to longing, yearning, deeply missing something, or nostalgia. It’s a word which seems to be difficult to pin down or translate clearly because it describes an emotional state rather than something concrete. Sometimes it’s used to refer to a longing for a homeland. CS Lewis described Sehnsucht as an insatiable or inconsolable longing in the human heart for “we know not what.”

I do know what I long for, though- a specific type of friendship and interaction that has been missing for me here.

In its absence, I suppose I could be consoled by some tater tots. And a nice tasty Cola-Weizen.