North of Green

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At the University of Illinois, “North of Green” refers to the College of Engineering — the biggest college that is, naturally, north of Green Street. I actually enjoyed my time in classes that were south of Green. It was nice to be able to exercise more than just formulae and mathematics and physics; it was relaxing to practice French, or have gymnastics Tuesdays and Thursdays for an entire semester. Football games and most flash frisbee mobs were south of Green.

Norway is not.

I got the urge to go to Norway with the coaxing of [mostly] two people. One has a blog that I’ll mention in a future post — probably tomorrow or Wednesday — and the other is generally a travel buff who encouraged me to enjoy travel and not focus only on the cost of the trip. When I figured out I could get to and around Norway for less than I had originally anticipated, I jumped on the chance. Weather was an unknown, total trip cost was an unknown, what exactly I would do — other than the reason I wanted to go in the first place — was an unknown. Whether I would be able to see the Northern Lights was an unknown. Sounded like a good engineering problem, then: lots of unknowns and just a few assumptions to go on.

I landed in Tromsø, the Gateway to the Arctic, sometime after 9:30 PM on a cold, drizzly Friday night. I had been on three planes already, none of them Boeing, so I took a picture of a Boeing plane. Midnight sun had ended nearly a month ago, but even this late it was still quite light out.

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North of Green

Cheating on Rainier

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Until this weekend, the highest elevation I’ve ever hiked to was Camp Muir, one of two high camps on Mt. Rainier. At 10,080 feet, it’s the highest you can go on the mountain (permissibly) without ropes and a helmet. It’s also 615 feet short of the Hörnlihütte, a similar high camp on the Matterhorn. Sorry, dear, but I’ve moved on. Or have I?

I first read about the Matterhorn in the form of a mountain called “the Citadel,” or “Rudisburg.” This mountain was located in a town called “Kurtal,” both of which were dreamed up by the author James Ramsey Ullman in his book, “Banner in the Sky.” Maybe this is where I got my love of all things mountainous from; I’m not sure. But either way, the Citadel is for all literary purposes the Matterhorn; Kurtal is Zermatt, Switzerland; and Edward Winter of the novel is really Edward Whymper. I loved the book as a child, and it was… emotional — I can’t really put my finger on the right word — to see the city and mountain after imagining it for fourteen years. The trip was planned kind of on a whim. I decided to hold a hotel reservation and wait to see how the weather forecast would turn out. It started off (a week in advance) decent, then changed to cloudy, then the last day I could still cancel my reservation, it cleared up again. I meant to deliberate (i.e. flip a coin) whether it was worth the gamble — Switzerland isn’t exactly cheap — but forgot about the 6 PM deadline and realized only when I walked in my apartment at 7 PM that maybe I had just made an expensive mistake. Too late to change plans, I forged ahead and left Stuttgart at 4:50 PM on Friday, one hour and twenty minutes behind schedule.

I got to Zermatt around midnight, and it was already pretty neat. The town itself allows no internal combustion engines; nearly all vehicles are electric. They’re not silent, as the Wikipedia Zermatt entry states, but their sound isn’t that of a gasoline or diesel engine, either. Going to Zermatt means parking in Täsch, only a few kilometers up the Mattertal, and then taking a navette (French for shuttle) into Zermatt’s train station. After unpacking I slept for about four hours and then woke up to see just what the weather would be like — and whether my gamble would pay off for a sunrise shot of the Matterhorn. First, though, let me make something absolutely clear: I don’t think my photos here do the area justice. I didn’t capture (pun not intended, either) the mood of Zermatt or the incredible expanse of the Swiss / Italian Alps; I also had probably the lowest keeper rate of any place I’ve been to. I’ll try to do my best in explaining what it was that I saw, but bear with me here…

I roamed around my hotel, looking for a place to get a clear shot of the Matterhorn while still keeping an eye to the south and west to see if the sky would light up at all. By 6:15, the sun had clearly risen a bit and there really wasn’t much color, so I figured I’d just sit around and see what the Matterhorn would look like in the morning sun. I turned around to see how things were looking away from the mountain and saw some incredible colors starting to pop. So it was that my first “moody” sunrise shot wasn’t even of the Matterhorn, but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. I don’t like the crop on this, but there were roofs at the bottom of the frame… so I’ll have to live with this one. ;-)


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Cheating on Rainier

Enfin, le français! (aka the case for studying abroad)

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[Edité: ce que je voulais exprimer ici c’est que je ne parlais pas français tout à fait couramment. Le problème est que je ne sais pas comment le dire (ni en anglais, ni en français) sans faisant semblant d’être prétentieux. Donc le but d’avoir dit que je ne suis pas au même niveau qu’un français n’était que pour “setting up” le reste de ce poste; de parler une langue étrangère me manque (en Allemagne), mais c’est quand même le français avec laquelle je suis le plus courant — même si je ne suis pas un “vrai” francophone.]

C’est en tout cas précisément ça qui me manquait pendant mes six semaines (et sans doute les semaines qui restent) en Allemagne. A cause d’une multitude d’excuses, je n’ai pas eu le temps pour bien étudier l’allemand avant d’arriver à Stuttgart. Bien qu’on parle bien l’anglais ici et chez Bosch, ce n’est pas forcement naturel pour eux et pour moi ce n’est pas très… bof, je ne sais pas, cela ne me donne pas beaucoup d’occasion de m’assimiler à la couture allemande. Ca, je n’aime pas; je préférerais de parler la langue du pays dont je suis au lieu de reposer sur l’anglais.

Et donc c’est comme ça que j’étais très content quand il faisait beau hier et nous avons décidé d’aller à Strasbourg. Nous avons visité la cathédrale, qui a à mon avis une architecture et un dessin assez compliqué.

     

J’ai vu deux vélos d’un couple qui fait un tour (j’imagine) tout autour de l’Europe (or la France?)… j’aimerais bien faire cela si j’avais le temps. Actuellement je n’ai ni l’argent ni les fournitures pour un tel voyage, et donc je pense qu’il faut que j’attende quelques années (une dizaine, disons)!

Nous avons voir aussi un panneau qui disait qu’il y aurait un danger de mort (ou, en extrapolant, de blessure grave) si on ouvre la porte; curieusement, il n’y en avait pas un verrou! Hmm. (Je n’ai pas essayé si la porte s’ouvrirait — peut-être qu’elle est trop coincé à cause du temps, par exemple.)

C’était la première fois depuis mon arrivée ici où j’aurais pu parler dans une langue au part de l’anglais sans ayant trop de difficulté. C’est sur que je n’ai pas compris quelques mots sur les menus ou pendant la “guide audio” sur le tour en bateau, mais enfin je suis arriver à comprendre la plupart de la langue parlé. Et ça m’a beaucoup plu. :-) J’essaierai de continuer d’apprendre l’Allemagne, mais je me demande aussi si les cinq mois qui restent sera assez pour en bien connaître. Pour parler au niveau que j’ai en français, certainement pas — mais je pourrai comprendre au moins les trucs quotidiens!

La prochaine poste: un retour en anglais. Je ne parle pas le français assez souvent pour avoir la capacité de le faire chaque fois — je suis crevé après avoir écrit tout ça! :-D

Enfin, le français! (aka the case for studying abroad)

Nürburgring Rehash

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I saw a nice looking Range Rover a few weeks ago when we were at the Nordschleife. I walked around behind it to see if it was the HSE Supercharged, but I about lost my mind (one of my friends turned around to see what was up) when I saw the letters

“O V E R F I N C H”

written on the tailgate and hood.

I thought I remembered Top Gear mentioning this car a few series ago, but I wanted to make sure it was the tuning package I was thinking of. I just looked it up today, and indeed, it is what I thought it was. It comes with a revamped interior, a gun cabinet, and, for the first year of vehicle ownership, a liquor cabinet that gets refilled for free. I never thought I’d see this thing in the wild, but who knew it’d be at the Nordschleife along with equally-priced track-ready cars! Check out the reviews here and here to see what I’m on about.

Nürburgring Rehash

Sensation Explosion

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I thought Jeremy Clarkson was mostly joking when he made fun of automakers for having expensive accessories.

Until I visited the Ferrari museum in Maranello, that is. To the standard 13 € entrance fee you may add an audio guide, factory bus tour, and a large number of Ferrari-branded ornaments. Lots of bright, flashy stuff, but not quite as interesting as the Porsche museum. How did we come to be in Maranello, you ask? It all started last Monday with a double rainbow. Stuttgart itself is rather metropolitan, but just a half hour outside the city is a castle with a nice view of the lowlands around it. (Bosch Abstatt is visible from the castle biergarten.)

Having seen this scene — a vineyard in the foreground and two lazy rainbows in the background —  suffice to say Italy was the most logical destination choice (please see last paragraph), and so it was that we arrived in Bologna on Friday morning at 2:30. There weren’t a lot of tourists in Bologna during the day,

so we continued into Venice where there were.
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Sensation Explosion

Holding the line

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Köln. I wasn’t sure where my first tripped weekend (that is, away from Stuttgart) would take me, but this is what we decided to do. It was pretty sweet; I never knew how much I didn’t understand lines. (Disclaimer: this has nothing to do with illegal substances, so if you think this is where this post is going, don’t. The definition of “line” is wholesome.) Anyhow. You might think that by “line,” I mean something like this.


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Holding the line

Tight squeeze

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A few of my friends have commented that European countries are in general less convenient than is the US. At first, I kind of shrugged this off — what’s a little bit of inconvenience? Now, though, I’m beginning to understand how some of this affects me directly. (Not a bad lesson, mind you, just a change I hadn’t anticipated.)

When I was in France in 2005, I had to use a laundromat (to get to which I needed to walk seven minutes and take a tram for another five). This laundromat had dryers. One of the other study abroad students figured out that pushing the right combination of buttons would automatically add drying time… but that’s another story. My current apartment has a washer in the basement but no dryer. So ultimately, I needed a bag to tell me what was in it — and to dry my clothes the way my parents had only fifteen years ago. I’ve become very lazy… this is a silly (nearly moot) observation at first glance, but it makes me wonder — what does this imply about any complacency I may have professionally?

For the record, this isn’t a post meant to bemoan inconvenience. If nothing else, though it’s most definitely not nothing else, I’m learning to budget my time better, and that’s never a bad thing. (Ignore the inconsistency of my spending time here. Or spent taking pictures. Or spent trying to find a tripod. Or planning trips that involve only photography.)

I bought gloves (uh… yeah, pink — only color the Stuttgart Kronenstraße Rewe City had!) because my hands get really dry after doing dishes. I feel like my hands are small compared to, say, those of an adult, white European male, so I bought the small ones. They were way too small. It was impossible to get them off my hands normally, so I took them off inside out (hooray health in high school). When I flung one to get it to get back to normal, it decided to show me how it felt. (No, I didn’t decorate the apartment or buy its dishes — it’s a furnished apartment. And stop it with the pink gloves already!)

I still need to get out to the mountains and the rest of Europe. Stuttgart has plenty to see (… most of which I haven’t), but there are 2358 other countries in Europe and my list contains 2709 of them. Roughly 22 weekends left; ready, go! (in a while. Maybe a week. Or two.)

Tight squeeze

Deutschland — Woche 1

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I haven’t actually been here a week, but I’ve been away from work for a week so it seems like it’s been a while. I guess I’ve seen a bit of Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen (yes, I read all of that in German, too. Not quite.), but given that I’ve stayed mostly within Stuttgart in the last four days, I don’t have anything epic to show. Yet.

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Deutschland — Woche 1