Week in Review - June 16th

-
One more week in Bochum! It's starting to seem more like home here, and I can do pretty much all of the "regular life" stuff with minimal problems. It seems dumb, but grocery shopping, going to the city, and even buying lunch can be way harder when you don't speak the same language as everyone else!

The Language

I'm still working on learning German (obviously), but I feel like I've gotten a lot better over the past week. Today I had a small moment of panic when I tried to pay for my lunch and my card didn't have any money. Apparently the cashier was asking if I was going to pay with cash or a card, but it took a few other people translating for me to actually understand.... Oops. I asked my boss a question in German the other day, and for transactions at ALDI and the drugstore I usually don't have to resort to English. Progress!

The Lab

This week, we helped a master's student named Christian on Tuesday and Wednesday. One of the PhD students at the institute has been researching a certain type of test from other engineering applications, and now we're trying to figure out if it will work to test our muck for tunneling. Christian is trying to figure out the correlation between the slump test "score" for a certain sample and its value for this new fall cone test. We helped him do lots of slump tests and fall cone tests, and it was so exciting. By the end of the second day, the three (or sometimes four) of us were working like a well oiled machine, and we got everything done early both days.

We also helped Daniel again with his slump tests and foam quality tests, and on Friday we continued reviewing one of the PhD students' thesis to help him with the English grammar.

Trump is used a lot in marketing here... Everything from big parties to beer ads!

Day by Day

June 10th

  • It was a German holiday, so Megan and I went to the lake for a festival! We didn't stay long enough to see the fireworks, but it was very cool to walk around all the vendors, carnival games, and food trucks!

June 11th

  • We continued helping Christian with his foam testing, and he showed us some tips and tricks to make the experiments more efficient and repeatable.

June 12th

  • More foam tests! We really got into a groove and were able to get a lot of things done.

June 13th

  • We only worked a half day today because the international office at RUB had organized a cultural day for us! We got to meet other interns and students from America who are studying in Bochum and the surrounding cities, which was (for the most part) really fun :)
  • We started off by traveling to Essen to see a mining museum. The coolest thing I learned is that this area was completely flat before the coal mining era, and that all the hills are the result of waste dumps! 
  • The group went to a cafe for a traditional street food dinner of currywurst and sweet potato fries before seeing a jazz concert! They were accompanied by an American pianist/composer and had a visiting American director, and I thought it was so funny that we traveled halfway around the world and happened to see a bunch of American musicians! The jazz band was amazing, and I really enjoyed the whole night :)

June 14th

  • We spent the day in the office reviewing Ivan's thesis again, and I still think that his topic is super interesting.
  • One of the master's students who works in the office with us invited us to his dorm for a beer pong tournament! Megan and I did horribly, but we had loads of fun and even got invited to the party afterwards.
  • We stayed out until 4am before I made the executive decision that it was time to go home. I get a lot of flak for being only 20 and wanting to go home early all the time, but I don't care! We had a great time anyways :)

June 15th

  • I spent most of the day napping to recover from the day before, but Megan and I did make it into the city center of Bochum for some shopping and ice cream! I bought running tights because my leggings ripped, and I had a hazelnut milkshake that was out of this world! 
  • My dorm also put on a Sommerfest that night, which was also pretty fun. We played a German drinking game called Flunkyball, which involves throwing a tennis ball at a Coke bottle until you knock it over. Our team won, and we saw some friends we had made earlier in the week too!

June 16th

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Venlo in Photos

-
Image
One of the people we work with in the lab told Megan and I that we could take the train to a few cities in the Netherlands for free, so we planned a trip to Venlo last weekend! Venlo is right across the German border, and it was only a 1.5 hour train ride to get there. Here are some of the pictures I took and things we saw! This cute little water feature is also a drain for the street! Those clever Dutch people... Everyone was sitting outside and enjoying their Sunday morning when we arrived, and the town looked so peaceful that we were worried it wouldn't be any fun! A bit later in the day though, the city center was bustling. I thought this was a church, but it might be the town hall! Everywhere we looked, there were Pride flags, and one of the streets even had the crosswalk painted to look like a rainbow :) Narrow streets with tall houses <3 Inside the cafe where we had breakfast! I definitely was not cool enough to be eating there... It was very hipst...
Read more

I ran a 10k!

-
Image
When I arrived in Bochum, I saw tons of posters for something called the Bochum Urban Trail, which is a 10k race that was held yesterday! I convinced Megan to do it with me, and we've been training for pretty much all of June. I have to say, it exceeded my expectations! We took most of our photos before getting all sweaty :) I knew that it was an urban race, but I wasn't prepared to actually run through the buildings! We saw so many cool places, like the Planetarium, the Ruhr Congress, an art museum, a petting zoo, and a bunch of local companies. We also got to run backstage through the Starlight Express, which is a roller skating show that's super popular here. It's sort of like Disney on Ice, except with roller skates and a different play to go along with it. We ran through a church! This photo is so blurry because I was still running ðŸ˜‚ There was also live music in a lot of the buildings, and some people even paused their run to start a dance party! ...
Read more