World Cup is Here

Last week finished out pretty low key. Wednesday and Thursday I was naturally in the lab. In addition to doing things like titrate I’ve also gotten in to the Auswertung part of things – The analysis. So the computer does an alright job at finding equivalence points in the samples, but you still have to go through and analyze every sample you run to check for mistakes, plus you have to type in every equivalence point (3 per sample) plus the masses of the samples before and after and the net weight. So it can get time consuming, especially when the data doesn’t look right and you have to figure it out. But it’s actually not that bad to do and slightly nice to be behind a computer with numbers.

Now Friday was the day I’d been waiting for in Europe. The World Cup. The day started out awesome. I got there at 10 like I normally do and Steffen wasn’t there. The only clue of the day was a box that had a USB antennae program on it, so you could plug it in to your computer and get all the free German TV channels they offer (good quality and like 20 channels, for some reason including MTV in English). Then at like 10:15 Steffen taps on the window. Turns out he was at some big breakfast departmental brunch thing and brought a huge plate of like, thin pancakes and crepes and humus and fruit…it was boss. So then he disappeared for another hour. In the lab, there wasn’t much to be done…and as I walked by Steffen around 2:00 pm, he says “I have shut the plant down, why don’t you go install the USB thing on my laptop so we can watch the games, I need to go talk with Dr. Wozny (the head honcho here) real quick.” …awesome. So it started out that I got the thing installed on his laptop, but then he took his laptop to a seminar room with a huge projector and we watched it that way. After the game we went behind Matthias’s place to have a little barbeque, which included myself, Andreas, Matthias, Steffen, Yazmin, Övgü, her boyfriend, Claire, Martin, and some person from the lab I’d never seen before. The highlight included a 3 on 3 soccer game…they have these things like, basically like basketball courts but they're soccer courts. So Martin had one of those mini balls you can play with. It was me, Andreas, and Matthias (Foreigners) versus Martin, Steffen, and Yazmin (Germans, even if Yazmin is technically Turkish). We went down 5 to 0 but scored the next 7, and ended up winning 8 to 6. Afterwards we went back to the lab and watched the second World Cup game of the day. That night I got to Skype with mom down in Virginia, so I got to talk to extended family there. I also found out my uncle has got it possibly set up for me to come down to his law firm for a day and talk with the patent litigator. I am very excited about that, hopefully I can get some questions answered about the future.

Saturday was a relaxing day, didn’t do much as I can remember, until 8:00 pm when the USA played England. Now Claire is from London, so her and I had been going back and forth with some light trashtalking, which is always fun. I was donning my American soccer shirt and a small, about 1 foot long, American flag I was waving everywhere. We went to Matthias’s favorite little restaurant and sat outside, where they had a ridiculous flat screen TV. I got a good pasta dish with cream sauce and ham bits in it, so that was nice. After we tied England we went to a little club thing and hung there for a little, then went home. On the walk back some store owner was like “Hey Ami! Eins – eins! Das ist gut!” So they clearly didn’t think we were going to come anywhere close to tying them. In the Subway as I was walking to my train two Turks tried to clown with me by making a charge at me then saying “only fun only fun!” in German…but that was about the closest I felt to in danger.

Sunday Germany played and to be in a soccer country during the World Cup is something else. It was the first game, they won 4-0, and there were fireworks and things like that going off for like 3 to 4 hours post game. There was a public viewing in Olympic Stadium they kept showing that had about 30,000 people. I was watching the first half outside at the internet café I used to frequent. They had benches outside and again, a ridiculous flat screen TV. We ended up leaving at half time because above in the apartments somebody keep throwing noise makers and little popping things at us that were so loud my ears were ringing and I felt like I was under siege from above. It was bad, ridiculous, and oh so German.

Monday was my birthday, which was a fun day. There wasn’t much going on in the lab, and I did about 20 minutes of work the whole day. And that’s not me slacking, there just wasn’t anything to do. That night Matthias, Andreas, and I went to an Italian restaurant/bar to watch the Italy soccer game…all the waiters/waitresses spoke English, I couldn’t tell if it was English, Irish, or Australian accent, but this place was an English stronghold. The menu was in English first, THEN German. They had flatscreens on the wall for like, every booth. So it was basically like sitting in your living room, the TV was 4 feet in front of me. It was pretty ridiculous.

Tuesday was another slow day in the lab. I did some sample analysis but I made quick work of it. Matthias is starting some little experiment that he wants to do on his own since there is no other work around the lab, so I am helping me him run the samples and do the analysis. As I was leaving Steffen said there wasn’t much to do so I could show up tomorrow around like 11:30 instead of 10. Tuesday evening I had an impromptu Skype with Tylan and Vince which was fun, it was so nice to be able to talk to those guys for an hour. The highlight may have included this exchange:

Ty: “Did you see that goal by Maicon? My-con, Me-con, I don’t know how to say his name right.”
Me: “You got me, I don’t speak Portugese…”
Ty: “Mike, he’s from Brazil.”
Me: “Ty, they speak Portugese in Brazil…”
Ty: “ … “
Vince: “I wasn’t gonna say anything I was just thinking if Mike said it, it must be right.”

Wednesday I rolled in at like 11:15 am, haven’t done anything except analyze Matthias’s experiment results real quick, and write this blog entry. Pictures will follow when I get home, which include the first weekend of the World Cup.

Alright here is the picture album:
Berlin 6: The World Cup is Here