From the Begginningg

So I am now sitting here at a desk in Baden Switzerland.

I have been here for three and a half weeks now, and things are for the most part in order. Some are anyway. I don't know how often I will updating this, but will be my means to keep you all updated on how things are going and what I am doing on a big scale so that I do not have to repeat all the details when I am making individual phone calls and e-mails. I will also try to post most of my pictures on here. I have to get back into picture taking mode though, because on my last couple trips I have left my camera in my bag and let other people do the clicking.

Please read and view and tell others if I have forgotten to let them know about it and I enjoy to hear feedback comments back.

Anyway, summary so far:

I flew from Calgary to London for $250 with an airline called Thomas Cook. I booked through a website called Canadian Affair, and it is definitely worth looking into for anyone coming to Europe. Service was good, food was good and I had enough room in my seat. So I flew for 9 hours but with the time difference 18 had elapsed I think. I got about 4 hours sleep I think which I thought was fair.

When I landed at the airport I called a guy that I had known from Australia when I was there in 2006. We hadn't been really close then, but good enough that he was going to let me stay at his place and show me around a bit for the night. I didn't have any Pound coins (change in English money) to use in the pay phone, so I just used my credit card and thought I would take out money after. The first time I called I didn't get an answer, so then I wandered around and hoped that he hadn't forgot about me and that I wasn't going to have to spend the day and night in the airport, but when I called back again 15-20 minutes later he answered and directed me to his house. I later found out that I was charged $8 for each of the two 30 second phone calls I had placed. So I went to his house and had a cup of coffee (my second of the day because I had just had one on the plane), and then we took a train to Brighton. Once in Brighton we met up with some other people we had known in Australia to have another coffee (3 for the morning). After visiting them we wandered around the town and along the coast and stopped at a pub for a couple of pints on the beach (3 coffee, 2 pints total). We then went back to our earlier host's house where one of the girls was getting a tattoo done right there. There was another Canadian lad who was a tattoo artist and was traveling with his gear, and so he gave her a tattoo at her kitchen table while I played with a rubic cube. While we were there I had another beer and a coffee (4 coffee, 3 beer total). We were going to eat supper with them, but things were delayed and it was late and so we left without eating. It was late by the time we got back and got to bed, and I had to get up really early the next morning to drive to the airport and catch my plane at 6am. So I fly to Zurich, train to Baden (20 minutes north west of Zurich (Zurich is in Northern Switzerland (Switzerland is in the middle of Europe bordered by Italy, France, Germany and Austria))). At this point my body wasn't liking me. I had only slept for about 12 hours total in the previous 4 days and had only had one decent meal (on the plane) over that time span.

So I slept. It took me about 4 or 5 days to get my sleeping on a normal schedule. Anyway I don't know why I just wrote that much about those couple days, but that's what happened.

In the first three weeks of work I haven't done a lot. The first week I was just getting stuff in order with my contract and permits and reading some papers about turbines. The second week I was supposed to be learning how to use some software but the person supposed to teach me was also busy so couldn't show me alot. This last week I've started actually doing some things.

For those of you that don't know, I am working for Alstom Power on a one year internship. I am on the Cooling Team for Combustors in the New Development Group for Gas Turbines under the Thermal Division of Alstom Power. I think that's the just of it. I look at the airflow in a gas turbine (creates power) and try to make it better for new engines that are being made. What we refer to as "cooling air" is around 500 deg C, but that still does alot for cooling when compared to the "hot gas" of over 1000 deg C that is going through the engine.

We use computers to simulate how the changes we make effect the temperature and pressure and airflow in the engine, but we also have a big facility where we test it once and a while. For the next while I will be comparing the results that our simulations have given and see how they relate to the actual test results to make sure that everything is cool.

Weekends:

1. I got here on a Friday and I slept most of the weekend, but did a minor hike to a little castle in Baden.

2. On Saturday morning we decided to go to Freiburg in Germany, so we caught a couple trains and were there in the afternoon. It is in the black forest region of Germany, where black forest cake and ham come from, but we couldn't find either. We just cruised around the city Saturday and went for a hike Sunday in the black forest (wasn't that black).

3. We tried a special deal that the airline German Wings has called "blind booking". How it works is you get to choose different theme groups (Nature, Party, Culture, Beach, etc.) of cities with about 8-10 cities in them. So you pick a group and then the days that you want to travel and then you pay 40 Euro for the return flight. After you pay, you find out what time your flights are and where you are going. It's cheap and exciting, but the only thing that kind of sucks is that you have to fly out of German cities and the one we fly out of is 4-5 hours away on the train.

So here is how it went:

We left work at noon and ran home, made a lunch and grabbed our travel bags, and then ran to the train station. Train to Zurich. In Zurich we had planned to get a train that went directly to Stuttgart, but when we got there they told us we couldn't with the ticket we wanted. So then we thought we couldn't get a train in time to get our catch our flight later, but then we found one that we could get, so we ran to the platform. After waiting a couple minutes we realized we had went to the wrong platform and had missed the train, so we ran back, found a different train, and then ran there. Our train trip to Stuttgart took five hours and we had to switch trains 5 times, and at some of the stations we only had a couple minutes to get off our train and run to the other train that we were leaving on. All of this to get to Stuttgard and then fly only one hour to Leipzig. In Leipzig we were met at the train station by a nice German fellow with long blonde dreads. We had contacted him through CouchSurfing which is a website where people post that they have a couch that travelers can sleep on and hang out with them and stuff. So we stayed with them that night and then the next day we joined a different girl and toured around Leipzig. In the evening we trained to Dresden and stayed the night with this girl. The next day we had a sweet breakfast in a park and then went to a public viewing spot to watch the Germany vs England World Cup match. There were over a thousand German people with flags and painted up all piled up in front of this movie theater size screen outside beside the river in the boiling sun. It was good times and Germany dominated. As the game was finishing we hurried to where we met a guy to do ride sharing. It is a website where people post I'm driving from point A to point B and I have X empty spots in my car if you want to ride with me and help with gas money. So we did that with him to Leipzig, then flew to Stuttgart, then waited in Stuttgart for a couple hours and then got a different ride share ride back to Zurich. It is like 300km from Stuttgart to Zurich, but we did it in under two hours in this guy's BMW on the German Autobahn. I would guess that our average cruising speed was 170km/h, but we were driving 220 for extended five minute periods when the road was clear. Pretty sweet, and felt safe the entire time. When we got to Zurich the guy dropped us off and we went to catch a train back to Baden (it was 2AM Monday morning). But when we got to the train station it was closed. We had planned ahead of time and though there was a train but apparently we had mistaken the dates and there wasn't going to be anything for until 530AM. We asked at taxi and it was going to cost 84CHF (1CHF = $1CAD). So we quickly called the guy back that had driven us, and he came back and drove us the 20 minutes to Baden. When he dropped us off we went to pay him, but he didn't want anything and said he didn't mind at all. Nice guy.

Both Leipzig and Dresden were really cheap and cool cities and it was a pretty fun and adventurous weekend that cost about $130 total for everything. I will definately do the blind booking again. Maybe this weekend.

Anyway as you can see if you read my story piddered off at the end because I was tired of writing this and wanting to leave to do something else. But that was my three weeks so hopefully I can just do short quick updates in the future. Also if no one ever reads this, it is also kind of serving as my journal so no loss. Take care.

without wax