This is the dawning of the rest of our lives... On Holiday!

Guten Abent avid readers. I apologize for the delay in posts, but I have been very busy. I also have multiple posts in the works for all of you to enjoy!

Today, Monday, June 1st marks a German Holiday to be celebrated by all. It is the first official day of summer vacation for K-13 students in Germany. Many German families take off onto the crowded autobahns and head south for a weekend of warm weather and relaxation. As a group of abroad students, we got Friday AND Monday off… Woo Hoo. The big debate was where to go. There were talks of Switzerland, Amsterdam, and Prague. We met a man from Chicago on our pub crawl in Berlin last weekend that gave us a great piece of advice. By the way, his name was Gary and he sold massive amounts of produce to the USA from Europe. He told us that Amsterdam is fun, but you can do that in a day. The place to go is Prague. We scheduled the hostel, booked the train, and as of Tuesday, we were set to go to Prague Friday Morning. But wait, are we going to waste a perfectly good Thursday night with no class on Friday? Absolutely not!! We arrived at the T.V. Club at 9 pm and got our dance on until the sun came up…Litterally. Due to our longitudinal position it gets dark around 10 and light around 4 am.
WAKE UP! The 7 am alarm wrecks the beauty of the REM cycle. It’s time to go to Prague. After a coincidental run in with our professor, who sensed our late night shenanigans we were off to Prague, and he was off to Berlin for a CNN interview.
We arrived, checked in and immediately took a quick 3 hour power nap. After which we headed to the bar located in the basement of the Hostel. We met some cool people, a few Canadians, a Chicagoin, and a couple Brits. We sifted through the pile of brochures that we had and picked a few cool looking things to do, as well as ruling out weird things such as the sex toy museum.
THE PLAN: 10:30 am a FREE walking tour of the city by a very nice girl from New York. While we were waiting to depart, a woman leading a different tour group stopped me and asked me where we were from, I replied with Dayton, OH. She recognized the logo on my hat, which a lot of you know, I never leave home without. She went to Wright State U, a school in downtown Dayton and grew up in the “Oakwood” bubble as she called it. She had graduated and left the US to live life a little. It is such a small world. Then we saw a huge crowd of photographers and journalists. This must be important, so we just watched as two men surrounded by people walked around us. A man standing next to me yelled at these men who turned immediately turned and came over to talk to him. They asked him where he was from and blah blah blah, I’m a politician, blah blah, all of this was going on while security pushed me back away from these two men, whom I have absolutely no idea who they are!! As soon as they’re out of sight a british girl standing next to me was freaking out. I asked her who they were, and she replied the conservative party leader of Great Britain, David Cameron. I chuckled and thought “Whoop di do bazzle!” –Austin Powers reference.

We met a few more brits, Paul and Tasha, and a few more Canadians on our tour. We learned a lot of the folklore and history of the buildings, which I thought was very cool. If you look at my pictures on facebook, I will try and explain them as best I can. I apologize for the quality of the pictures, my camera seems to be on its last leg. After taking hundreds of pictures of very cool buildings and sights in the very crappy weather, we were ready for another nap… But there’s no time! We are headed to the pub crawl that tours the great bars of the city. Spencer, the bar tender from the hostel’s bar, told us to find a man named Issac, he has the best pub crawl in town. We grabbed the brochure and headed for nothing but a spot on the map and a name.
As we were leaving the tram we heard someone yelling, OHIO!? Startled by this, we all turn around. It was Paul and Tasha, the people from London that we met on the walking tour. They were going to the pub crawl as well! Perfect! As we walking in a group of 17 people, we were heckled by a man in shadows.
“That pub crawl sucks, you’re wasting your money” he said.
“Where is the good one then?” someone replied.
“With me.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Issac, I lead the good pub crawl through town” he replied.
Our stars have aligned and we have been united with Issac. We tell him Spence sent us, we get a reduced rate and off we go. We went to what I would view as the 3 sketchiest bars in Prague and then to a techno dance club. I met a kid named Mike that attends Michigan State as well as a few Aussies, and Cubans. The dance club at the end of the crawl was straight out of a movie. The DJ had the headset with the LED lights, the strobes were going, the fog was rolling, it was fantastic; let’s dance. Once again, the stars have disappeared and the sun is rising. Oh what a night.
(I will post a video that I took at the Club at the bottom of this page. )
Sunday was filled with more sightseeing and mediocre food, but I will explain that in a later blog about food. Part of the group met a very nice girl named Sarah who had an internship in Vienna and was in Prague for the weekend alone. She hung out with us for the rest of the night! Sunday night, we are off to the haunted city tour. Sounds like a trap to me, but what else do I have to do on a Sunday night in Prague? We walk up to the tour guide, tell him we’re from A&O hostel get a reduced rate and off we go. But wait, who’s that? Is that our friend Tasha and Paul from the night before? It is! So they tag along for the scary tour as well. This was probably the biggest tourist trap I’ve ever been a part of. It was quite entertaining, but I was ready for a beer at the end of it. Along the way we saw bars that had live musicians playing guitar and singing American rock songs. This was killing me not to play, it’s been over 3 weeks since I’ve played my beloved telecaster and this was rubbing it in my face.
The tour ended and we headed to a small Irish pub called the Dubliner with our new British friends and Sarah. The little hand reached the 1 and some of the crew was ready to call it a night. On our way to the tram we were approached by a man promoting his club. Half of the group decided to put the turkey to bed, the other half decided to go check out his club. Once again the sun was seen peeking up over the horizon by the time we got to bed.
Monday consisted of killing some time before our train and then a 4 hour train ride home to Leipzig. As we were entering the train station, who do you think we run into? Paul and Tasha! After a quick exchange of the nights events after we parts ways, we said our goodbyes thinking the city is a very small place indeed. We arrived in Leipzig on time, and I’ve never been so happy to see the 7 story communist architecture building I call home.
The exchange rate in Prague is pretty good. They use currency called Crowns, it is about 20 crowns to 1 dollar, which is startling when you order a big mac and you see the number 60 for your total. If you’re looking for a cultural adventure, I would not recommend Prague. It is very tourist oriented and you have to work very hard to experience the local culture, which is far from glamorous to say the least. The city, however, is very beautiful due to the fact that it is one of the few cities that wasn’t devastated by WWII.

"Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down this wall"

Guten Tag von Leipzig. Some of you may be waiting for my entry on food, I can promise you that is currently in the works! As we were sitting around on Friday, a couple of us decided that we'd rather not stand around and do nothing this weekend. So, we went to Berlin! We had no idea where we were going to stay or how we were going to get there, but we were going! We woke up early saturday morning and headed to the train station. We found a ticket there for 30,00. it was good until 3 am the sunday morning anywhere in Germany, on any train, with the exception of the ICE high speed rails, and it was for 5 people. The title of the ticket translates to "Happy Weekend" Pass. There were 8 of us in for the trip. If any of you avid readers have seen the movie Euro Trip, our trip was a bit like that. If you haven't, check it out, it's pretty funny. Anyways, it was a 2.5 hr train ride. We met a girl named Maja on the train, and she told us to go to Alexanderplatz and start searching for stuff. We decided to take a bus tour to see all of the sites in the city and maybe a hostel as well. We had the addresses of a few, but if any of you have ever traveled abroad, you know its very hard to find addresses. I got tons of pictures of a city with arguably the most history on the face of the earth. I will post these in an album on facebook as soon as I can. I will also share a few on here. Before the reunification West Germany used to broadcast TV and Radio so East Germany could receive it. Below is a picture where we began our trip!

So we left Maja at Alexanderplatz and decided to walk around and see what we could find. If anyone has been to Berlin, it doesn’t really work like that. It is a very very large city, with many tram lines as well as bus lines, but we’re doin it live, so let’s go! We had two goals, we want to take a tour of the city, and we HAVE to find a hostel. On we go into Berlin. We immediately find a bus tour with the open top. PERFECT! Let’s go! So we get into the bus, we see all of the major sites of the city minus the Olympic stadium. We can hop on and off as we please because the bus comes every 20 minutes. If you’d like to see my pictures of Berlin, you must look at my facebook album, because there are too many to post on here.

Brandeburg Gate^^

Checkpoint Charlie Now it’s around 3 pm, and we don’t have anywhere to sleep tonight. Now it’s time to find a hostel. We immediately ask where all of the pubs are and head in that direction. We find a hotel…Nien…Ask directions to a hostel and walk into the “city center”. As we grow nearer and nearer I begin to notice an ever growing police presence.

Now, as a college student with no place to sleep, and a backpack of clothes, you start to wonder what’s going on….not. We found the hostel at last, they’re full, dammit. We receive directions to the next and on we march. I begin to notice a still growing number of police officers. Now they’re in full riot gear…Hmmmm… this could be bad. As we arrive at the city center, there had to be at LEAST 200 police in full riot gear searching bags, and seemingly waiting for something. OK, seriously? What is going on? We found the next hostel. Nien, they’re full as well, AH! They speak English! We have them call around. They found us a hostel on the other end of town with an 8 bed room. PERFECT! To the train we go…. Oh wait, why are there so many cops outside? Political protests? Racism? Fascism? NEIN!!! It’s the last day for regular season Futbol DUH!

We arrive at the hostel at 7 pm, Frank is going to put it on his credit card perfect, where is the bar? Ah, perfect it’s in the lobby. J I order a beer and the others follow suit. What’s this says Frantz? It’s a brochure for a pub crawl, picks you up nightly in the lobby at 8 pm. Oh? This could be fun. Nick, what do you think? I think we need to finish this beer so we can get some food before the pub crawl starts! How convenient, there is a Donor place at the end of the stairs. (Donors are similar to Gyros, except they have a spicy Curry sauce).

It’s now 8 pm, we are sitting in the lobby having yet another Beer, Berliner, the local brew. In walks the pub crawl woman. Ya, we want to go. 10,00 Euro 2 free shots at every bar and VIP access (no Lines). PERFECT! Off we go, first objective, figure out how to get home, Check. I won’t go into too much detail, but we met 2 girls from Ontario, one guy from Chicago who buys produce, I gave him my card (thanks mom) and a few brits that thought they could drink. I think we know who won that battle. GO UD. We made it home at 2 am after a run in with the local pay to play girls and a late night Donor.

We checked out at 11 hoping to catch the train, with our “Happy Weekend” passes, to Potsdam, a small town with “cool castles”. We defiantly got on the train to Leipzig thinking that it went through Potsdam when in reality it goes around it; so, no Potsdam but a quick trip to Leipzig. We arrived at 2 pm, ate lunch at the train station, and made it home at last. I tried extremely hard to stay awake as long as I could by watching streaming shows like house and family guy. I think I made it to about 6 pm. I woke up at 12, “washed my hands” (peed) and woke up at 7:15 am to go to BMW. What a weekend.

Spare me the details

For those of you who are not interested in the logistics of the BMW plant in Leipzig, Germany, your going to want to skip this post and move on to the next in which i plan on writing about the food.

BMW DAY 1

I signed a non disclosure agreement with BMW due to the fact that we saw the BMW X1 that has not yet been revealed to the public, so i will skip over that stuff. :P

Now for the good stuff. The BMW motor car company employs 100,000 people worldwide. 2500 of those are located in Leipzig, Germany. 7,000 of the 100g are strictly engineers. They made profits of 330 million Euro last year. That is a 4.3% loss from last year. They anticipate this coming year to do about the same in lost %. They produced 1.3 million cars and 100,000 motorbikes. The Leipzig plant has a capacity of 700-740 cars per day. They are currently running one shift at 400 cars per day. They make the BMW 1 series and 3 series. The production process consists of 240 steps from start to finish with a time of 38 hrs.

Now that i have told you the raw data, i will try my best to describe the plant. A tour of the building can be seen in my previous entry.
Please throw away your idea of a conventional Automobile plant, this plant is anything but conventional. I will also try to include pictures from their website since i was not allowed to take pictures.
Here is a list of things that i noticed were different:

1. NO forklifts whatsoever!! They used automated trolleys that are guided with magnets in the floor along with a building layout. As seen Below.
2. NO line changeovers!! They can produce the 1 series, then a 3 series, then a 1 series, etc. AND!!! they can produce right hand and left hand drive cars the same way. The firewall of the car has both right hand and left hand drive holes and slots. When it comes time to assemble the drive systems, the workers look at the screen, if its a right hand drive they assemble it on the right, and plug the wholes on the left. That was amazing!
3. There is 22 pounds of paint on a BMW. a zinc coating, primer, customer ordered paint, followed by an E-coat clear coat that is baked on.
   
4. A customer's order can be changed up to 11 days before the projected delivery date.
   
5. Automation is used just about everyplace possible. In order to get the correct parts on a vehicle, a transponder is placed on the hood where the BMW logo goes.
   
6. BMW spends 3 Billion Euro per year on Research and Development.
7. The car bodies flow through the office of BMW on an overhead conveyor. It was said that the CEO always wanted to remind the employees what they're working for. This can be seen on my video on the previous blog entry.
8. The welding robots had a griping arm as well as a spot welding on the same robot head. As you can kind of see in the picture below.
9. Exhaust Assembly: The semi is backed into a loading dock that is located within 5 ft of the cell. No inventory!

There are probably more, but i can't think of them at the moment. If i think of them, i will add them. We have two more days at BMW in the Agenda. One of them has the possibility of us driving on their test track.

BMW

We woke up early on Monday morning to go and visit the BMW plant on Monday morning. We arrived by 9 am by a combination of trams and buses. After arriving we met the BMW staff that would be accommodating us. They were very nice and spoke english very well. We did an orientation of the company dating back to 1918 up through present time. We ate lunch in the company cafeteria, bratwurst and potatoes with a gravy on all of it, very good. We were then led on a tour around the entire facility. It is about 2 square kilometers, a very very large plant. They even have suppliers on site that moved there. I will write later on the specifics of the processes later, because we are going back tomorrow. I also don't want to bore all of you avid readers with technical mumbo jumbo. Anywho, my feet feel like we walked about 5 miles today, which is probably an understatement. Upon returning to the dorms i recieved a call from Anne, my student mentor, she wondered if some of us would like to meet her and her friends at the carnival. A few of us accepted the offer and had alot of fun on some of the rides. It was rather pricey though, around 2.5 - 5.00 Euro for a ride. We only went on two, and we had to twist Anne's arm to go on the "big" rollercoaster. We made plans for the upcoming weeks, a student club called TV on Thursday night. We returned to the dorm around 20:30 and here i sit drinking a beer writing this. Tomorrow its up early and off to BMW again.

If you would like to see the award winning BMW plant that we visited today, here is a great link.

http://de.truveo.com/BMW-1-Series-BMW-Plant-Leipzig-Germany/id/1045708591

Chuse
(See ya)

Class

Friday morning was a rough one to wake up for. We rode the tram to town, which is about a 25 minute ride. The public transportation is very easy to use much like most of Europe. My mentor was amazed that i drove my car 5 hours to dayton to catch my flight. We had the introductions to our Lean Manufacturing class and our History class.we then departed and went to the Cafeteria, which is about a 20 minute walk. The food is very good, and not overly priced at all unlike London was many years ago. After lunch we were set free in the city and told to find some differences and similarities between the two cities. We met a few very nice German girls that were handing out handy (cell) phone promotions. She said that we're all set with making friends cause girls love American guys, which lifted our spirits. :) After the guided tour, we went to a University sponsored dinner. I had spare ribs and fries, which were very good. My friend Dave had the best Venison i've ever had in my life. Others had Pork Legs or dumplings. A very good dinner to say the least. We then came back, showered up, and went out for the night. We were headed to a place called Killy Willy, pronounced Killy Villy. We were told that it was a good pub atmosphere. It was very fun. I did a shot of a liquor called Absinth, which is made with an herb grown in Holland that supposedly makes you hilucinate. It was a very very very potent Black liquorish flavor. and i did not hilucinate. Uck. We caught the night bus system home. It was funny being relatively sober and watching everyone look at us on the bus because we're such loud people. Even in an everyday conversation we speak very loudly.
On Saturday we explored downtown Leipzig going to the top of the tallest building to take pictures of the city and going to a cafe. We then came back, showered up, and went out for the night. One of our mentors, Cor, took us to a student dance club with a bar. It was underneath the tall building in town. It seemed to be an old bomb shelter or something. old red brick and completely under ground. it went down 3 stories to dance floor #1 which was US hip hop and dance music that was popular about 3 months ago. down two more flights of stairs was a Rock music floor, again, with american music. Down one more flight was the Alternative floor where they played heavier american Rock. I will take pictures of this place when we go back, cause i'm sure we will go back. I think alot of the guys enjoyed it because it was very loud, so we could be as loud as we wanted. Some of them even started a game of thumper on the table with some german girls, which is a VERY loud game. Good times were had by all.
Sunday, some of the guys went to the zoo. I chose to spend the day catching up on sleep, which i did. We then went to Champions sports bar, yes, the american chain bar, to watch the red wings and NBA playoffs. We go to BMW in the Morning. Pronounced BMV.

All of pictures up until now can be seen at:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2125105&id=21910137&saved#/album.php?aid=2125105&id=21910137&ref=nf

I began my trip on Wednesday May 13th, 2009. I had breakfast with my parents and then began my drive to Dayton. Seven of my fellow engineers booked the same flight from dayton to Cincinnati then Cincinnati to Frankfurt, Germany. I made it to Dayton with no problems, i got to see a couple friends before I was picked up by Frantz's mom. We met everyone outside of security and then cleared security. We were delayed 15 minutes leaving Dayton due to a ground traffic hault from Cinci. which worried us due to the fact that our lay over in Cinci is only 45 minutes. We arrived in Cinci, met up with a few other people and were one of the last people on the plane.
I was all set and ready to sleep on the plane. I had my simply sleep, i got a glass of wine, and i had my pillow and blanket. My body however had a different plan; it was not going to let me sleep at all. Needless to say i saw both movies and a few episodes of bad tv before our arrival in Frankfurt. The customs check inside the frankfurt airport consisted of a customs agent scanning passports, no paperwork of any kind and no immagration. We found our train, bourded, and found our seats. I immediatly fell asleep. There was lots of leg room and the seats were more comfortable then the airplane. I was woken up a few times by Brad who pointed out some very cool and a few very funny things.
When we arrived in Leipzig (pronounced Leipzish) we were greated by our professors and student mentors. My mentor's name is Anne. She speaks english very well and is very very nice. When realizing that i spoke no German, she said "we'll have to work on that". Which i planned on doing. We were issued more paperwork, train passes and internet sheets, etc. and then we were on our own with our mentors. We took the tram to our dorm, dropped off our bags, and tried to make it to the store before they all closed at 8 pm. We got our essentials and made it back to the dorms. I entered my room and was greated by an asian man that spoke about 3 words of English. We got directions from our new German friends and parted ways with them. On edge of shear exhaustion.... we decided to go find a bar. We found a nice cafe where we ordered the house beer by saying, "ouse bier bitte". After a couple beers we made our way home, after all, we do have class at 9 am.