Last post from 'schland....entering funemployment

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Hello, hallo, gude, moin, servus, morsche, was geht,


I'm here again with one final blog post from Deutschland. The last couple weeks have been pretty eventful, I've been to Romania, Madrid twice, and exploring around this area of Germany (Hessen). I also celebrated Thanksgiving with improvised but delicious pumpkin pie, drank several varieties of delicious Eastern European moonshine, stuffed my face with waffles at the Christmas market, and became unemployed.

Yesterday was my last day at work, which conveniently happened to coincide perfectly with the office Christmas party. My whole department went to a nice restaurant nearby for fancy steak and unlimited beer on the company's bill. It was the only time that I had ever seen my boss outside of work and it was really cool to get to know more about his life, over a beer or four. It even made me a little bit sad that I no longer have to be somewhere at 7:30am every morning, when I realized how awesome my boss was and how lucky I was to work in a lab with 8 other brilliant interns and a research budget each year of more than I'll ever make in my entire lifetime.

Now that I'm (f)unemployed, I'm planning on doing a fair amount of travelling over the next month or so. Tomorrow I take off for my first stop in Istanbul where I'll couchsurf for 2 nights, then on to Israel with my family and girlfriend for a couple weeks, including scuba diving in the Red Sea on Christmas and a day trip to the ancient ruins in Petra, Jordan. After that I have tickets to Budapest for New Years Eve to meet up with several good friends, and after New Years we'll go to Croatia together. From Croatia I don't have a plan yet, but I'm hoping to couchsurf, bus, and hitchhike my way through several of the Balkan counties during the next few weeks and ski in Montenegro or Kosovo where snow is plentiful and lift tickets cost under 10 Euros per day.

Anyways, the rest of this post will be about my last few weekends, and I want to conclude with some thoughts that I've had about beer while being in Germany.



Madrid
My first Madrid trip in the last month started out on a good note, with the best flying experience I've ever had. I flew on LAN airlines, on a flight from Frankfurt to Santiago, Chile, which had a quick stop in Madrid on the way. This meant it wasn't a little tweety bird domestic flight, it was a jumbo jet complete with TV screens in each seat and great customer service. And it wasn't just any jumbo jet, it was the newest, nicest, Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Somehow the Boeing engineers have managed to find a way to make airplane seats comfortable, and though compact they still have ample amounts of legroom. After flying Ryanair for my last few trips, I was very excited when the flight attendant handed me a full meal and offered me beer or wine, and when I asked for the price, she laughed and said "you look hungry, have a second sandwich, it's free". But the best part was the windows. They're much bigger than a normal airplane so even the person in the middle or aisle seat can get a bit of a view, and instead of having a window cover, they just have a button that makes it darker or lighter. At the click of a button, you can put on sunglasses without even having sunglasses. The flight was so nice, in fact, that I was sad to get off the plane when I landed. Of course that sadness ended immediately when I saw Ev, waiting at the airport to greet me.

Here's some photos from the trip (I forgot my camera, but I stole some photos from facebook):

At the beginning of a hike up to El Yelmo, the highest mountain in La Pedriza park outside of Madrid 

We made it to the top! 

Timisoara, Romania: 

The next weekend, I went to Romania with a few friends who are also doing the same internship program in Germany. I had wanted to go to Romania for a while after talking to a Romanian friend about it, and then we found a flight for 15 Euros, which was just too good to turn down. It was a quick trip, just Friday night to Sunday morning, but it was awesome. We couchsurfed with Iosif, who was an incredibly generous and awesome dude, and gave us a place to stay and showed us around the city. We spent the majority of our time drinking, eating, walking around, and talking about life in Romania. The exchange rate really benefited us too--German beer was about 1/3 of the price in Romania as it is in Germany, and restaurants served the most delicious food for a fraction of the prices we were used to. The short trip really made me want to spend more time exploring the rest of Romania.

The cathedral in Timisoara

Dank Soup

selfie in a club

Ev visits Germany

Ev came to visit for a weekend and we spent some time at Christmas markets around Germany, and also did a hike through the hills along the majestic Rhein River. Here are some phtos:

Castle

Ev tries to camouflage with the tree

a colorful village

Add caption

Madrid #2

I went to Madrid again last weekend to see Ev and to meet up with my friends Riggins and Matt, both of whom are spending the year in other parts of Spain. It was really awesome to see them and it was a great time to be in Madrid because the whole city was lit up with an amazing display of Christmas lights, and it was a holiday weekend so the streets were more crowded than anywhere I've ever seen before, which was a cool atmosphere.

christmas lights

Lawry C2 takes over Madrid

And that brings us up to date. I don't really have time now to write the section about beer that I mentioned earlier, so that'll have to wait until another time. I gotta go clean my apartment for a going away party tonight and finish packing, so I can make my flight to Istanbul tomorrow!


Bye, ciao, tschüss, auf wiedersehen, bis später!!!

The last couple of weeks: Felsenmeer, Mallorca, Burg Frankenstein, Miramar

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I've been on a few noteworthy adventures in weeks since my last post, including a day wandering around Felsenmeer, a weekend in Mallorca, a night at Frankenstein Castle, and a trip to a German waterpark.


#1. Felsenmeer

I'll start from the beginning: Felsenmeer. It literally translates to "rock sea", which is very logically named (as most German things are). Before going there, I had no idea such a cool place existed within a half hour drive of Darmstadt. Felsenmeer is located in the Odenwald, which is the forest surrounding Darmstadt, It originated as one sheet of rock that, through many freeze-thaw cycles, cracked and broke apart into the giant field of boulders that it is today.

The autumn in Darmstadt has been beautiful so far (1398493824 times nicer than the daily downpours of the summer), and I went on a perfect fall day with two friends, Minas and Marius. We wandered around and climbed on the rocks, picking our way through the boulder field surrounded by the oranges, yellows, reds, and greens of the changing leaves in the forest. The lighting in the forest made photography a bit tricky, but here's the best shot I could get:

Felsenmeer, near Lautertal, Germany

#2. Palma de Mallorca

Mallorca is an island in the Mediterranean, just off the south coast of Spain. Technically it's part of Spain, but based on the demographic of its overwhelming amount of visitors, it might as well be a part of Germany. It seems that many Germans visit Mallorca for the sole purpose of partying (similar to Cabo or Cancun for Americans), but the island also has ridiculously beautiful beaches, world-renowned climbing, excellent crystal-clear scuba diving, and a plethora of other adventure possibilities. I met Evelyn there for a long weekend, and though we didn't have time to participate in all of these activities, we did do some amazing hiking in the Serra de Tramuntana mountains and climbed around the rocky beaches surrounding the village of Banyalbufar, on the north coast of the island.

Mountains disappear into the sunset

White rock contrasts the turquoise water

And red rock too

The cathedral in the main city on the island, Palma

#3 Burg Frankenstein

Burg Frankenstein (Frankenstein Castle) is located on a hill in the Odenwald, just a 20 minute tram ride from Darmstadt's city center. Rumored to have "the best Halloween party in all of Germany", a group of Merck interns decided to check it out. 27 euros later, we found ourselves surrounded by monsters (and about a thousand other people) in the ruins of a medieval castle. Though it definitely wasn't worth the steep entry price, it was a lot fun nonetheless. There was a walk around the inner perimeter of the castle, where monsters would sneak up on people and scare them, or just lumber around in their intricate costumes. In the courtyard, there was a stage with some monsters showing off their costumes, and a bar. There was also a "torture chamber" inside the castle, which consisted of 3 monsters grabbing a random guy from the crowd, tying him up, pulling his stomach hairs and rubbing ice on his nipples and putting it down his pants. Not what I expected to see in the torture chamber, but pretty funny.

I noticed a couple of stark differences between this party and haunted houses in America, the biggest being that in Germany the monsters are allowed to touch you. Whereas in America they might chase you with a chainsaw but not actually grab you, in Germany they have no problem picking you up, throwing you in a coffin, and slamming it shut. This sounds like it should be terrifying, but the problem with this event was that it was so incredibly crowded that you could always see what's happening to the person in front of you, and know exactly what to expect. The monsters also seemed to really like stuffing hay down peoples' shirts, so I woke up with a bed full of hay the next morning.

selfie with a monster in my Rudolph-what-have-you-gotten-your-nose-into costume

Alexi gets locked up 

The monsters like to choke people

The torture chamber

#4 Miramar water park, Weinheim

Sunday was my flatmate Carsten's birthday, and his girlfriend decided to give him the awesome present of inviting some of his friends to an indoor water park for the day. Little did I know that German water parks are wild and unrestrained havens of awesomeness. Thanks to Germany's exceptional health care system (I actually have no idea if this is the reason), there are no angry lifeguards yelling at every person that walks by, and there is much more of a "do whatever you want, just don't be an idiot" attitude. What this means is that it is perfectly acceptable for 6 people to all tackle each other into a water slide and try to race down it. If you've ever been to a water park in America and tried to do anything other than sit in a chair all day, then you've undoubtedly been yelled at by the angry lifeguard at the top of every water slide who thinks they will someday rule the world. At Miramar, lifeguards at the top of water slides don't even exist. There's not even a sign with the rules, there's just a sign that says "if you fall off your tube, don't panic."

So, naturally, we spent a good portion of the day racing down the various water slides, trying to flip each other off of our tubes in the dark tunnels in order to take the first place. There was one slide that was like a giant toilet bowl, where you drop into a funnel and swirl around it until you fall through the hold in the middle. We figured out that if 4 people go into the funnel at once, you can run into each other, causing one person to go flying. Though the toilet slide was awesome, the best slide of them all was the Hurricane. I've never seen a slide quite like it before. The hurricane begins at the top of an extremely long staircase, and there is no water slide in sight, only a giant, person-sized tube sticking up out of the floor. When you climb inside the tube and the slide operator shuts the door, ominous music starts playing. With no water and no slide in sight, you have no idea what is going to happen next, until all of the sudden the floor drops out from under you and the next thing you know, you're going around not one, but two semi-vertical loops! It was awesome.

The entrance to the Hurricane

One of the hurricane loops, from outside

Catching Up

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Hello, world. About 5 months ago I told myself I would write a blog to document my adventures around Europe, so, finally, here it is!

For the last fourish months I've been doing an internship at a pharmaceutical/chemical company, Merck, in Darmstadt, Germany. Darmstadt is a nice city with a population around 150,000 and a big technical university. It's in western Germany, 15-20 minutes by train from Frankfurt. I'm working in a pilot plant for industrial waste water treatment, where there are currently several experiments going on about how to remove toxic chemicals from contaminated water. I'm in charge of a 1,000 L membrane bioreactor (MBR, type of waste water treatment plant), so every day I have to run analytics on the quality of the effluent and reprogram the computer which runs the MBR to optimize the process. And I also have to figure out how to fix any problems that occur, which happens quite often. Soon we will be getting a UV-reactor and will start experimenting with using UV light as a pretreatment for the conventional MBR process to break down chemical byproducts of liquid crystal production for TV and computer screens. It's cool to have real responsibilities and legit work, but it also really sucks to have to be there at 7:30 every morning, I liked my college schedule better.

Apart from the early mornings, Germany has pretty sensible working regulations, so I get 15 vacation days for my 6-month internship and I have a limit of 37.5 hours per week If I work more than 37.5 hours then the overtime counts towards extra vacation days. This has given me some really awesome opportunities to take a ton of long weekends and travel all over Europe. To catch up, I'll briefly summarize the 9 countries  I've been so far, and from now on I'll try to write a new post after every trip.


#1: West Coast, 'Murica - Vegas, San Diego, Sonoma, Seattle area
The adventures began long before even getting to Germany. A couple weeks before graduation, as the semester's work was wrapping up, I kicked off the adventure season with a trip to Vegas with a few friends to see some of our favorite DJs. After Vegas we were back in Claremont for the last week of classes, and as soon as classes were done we immediately headed down to San Diego, where we rented a house on Mission Beach to participate in the Claremont Colleges' annual senior week festivities. Needless to say, it was a ridiculously good time. Scuba diving, snorkeling with sea lions, boogie boarding, surfing, skating up and down the boardwalk, and too many kegs to count. After San Diego we were back in Claremont for a few days to graduate, and then drove up the coast to Sonoma, where a good friend of mine has a vineyard. 8 or 9ish of us chilled at the vineyard for a few days and kayaked down the river, treasuring our last few days together as a group before everyone jetted off to opposite corners of the world. After that I flew to Seattle with my girlfriend, Evelyn, and we met several other friends at Sasquatch music festival. Sasquatch was amazing, and then I spent some time at Evelyn's house on Bainbridge Island and we went hiking in the Olympics and scuba diving in the Hood Canal. After a week on Bainbridge, I flew home to Iowa for a few days, then a quick stop in Washington DC to see my grandma, and from there was off to Germany!

I done did good in kollege

#2: Iceland - Thorsmork and Reykjavik
Before I made it to Germany I had a quick 3.5 day layover in Reykjavik, Iceland. The airline Iceland Air has a really cool deal where you can stay up to a week in Iceland on a flight across the Atlantic without paying any extra. As soon as I landed, I got right on a bus to the mountains. I went on 3 beautiful all-day hikes and stayed in a little mountain hut all alone. On one of the hikes, I hiked up to a glacier on Eyjafjallajokull, a huge volcano that erupted in 2010. It was a really crazy wonderland of white snow all the way to the horizon and giant spires of red and black volcanic rock rising up out of the snow. The snow, ice, and rock is so insulating that there is still heat from the volcanic eruption just a few meters inside the lava piles, and while climbing on one rock pile, I found a hole with hot air coming out. I dried my boots and cooked a grilled cheese sandwich over hot lava while surrounded by a glacier, it was amazing. Since Iceland is so close to the arctic circle and I was there a week before summer solstice, it never got totally dark out, so every night between midnight and 3, I was treated to the most amazing 3 hour sunset/sunrise combination. I'll definitely be back to Iceland again sometime.

Lush valleys, glacier-capped volcanoes 

#3: Germany/Austria - Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Munich, Neuschwanstein, Cologne, Berlin (x2),  Mannheim, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Mount Pretzelhorn (Tirol)

I've been a bunch of places around Germany, thanks to the amazing public transportation systems which make the US seem primitive and undeveloped by comparison. My dad came to visit early in the summer and we went to Frankfurt and Heidelberg, where we explored a castle and walked around the cities. Then I spent a weekend in Munich with Evelyn and we went to Neuschwanstein castle for a day--a fairy tale-like castle in the Bavarian Alps--which was really cool. We hiked up a mountain above the castle and had some really amazing views of the castle and the surrounding mountains. Then I spent a weekend in Cologne for a conference for my internship program, which turned out to be a giant party. I spent two weekends in Berlin, one during the summer with Evelyn and one just a few weeks ago when my sister came to visit from Israel. Berlin is a really cool city, lots of hipsters but still a super chill vibe. I've also spent a few weekends at home in Darmstadt, where there is a really amazing group of international Merck interns who always organize events and day trips. But the best weekend in Germany so far was definitely Oktoberfest. I took a day off work to meet some friends in Munich and it was the first time Ryan, Matt, and I had seen each other since graduation. We all got there a day before Oktoberfest started so that we would have a day for an adventure in the alps. We went on the most amazing hike, from Eibsee in Germany to Mount Pretzelhorn in Austria, laughing, philosophizing, and communing with nature the whole way. At one point we went off the trail and found a tree house hidden in the woods, and we ended our hike muddy and sweaty at a fancy bar in a 5 star hotel. And the next day was Oktoberfest. We got up at 8am to get into a beer tent and drank liters on liters for the rest of the day.

buffooning around the Alps on the border of Germany and Austria

Caitlin and I in Berlin

#4: Gent, Belgium
I went to Gent for a weekend to visit Evelyn's roommate from Pitzer College. There was a big annual 10-day festival when we were there, which meant bands playing in the streets and 8-10% abv beer being sold everywhere.

The best idea ever: urinals on the street during the festival in Gent

#5: Thun, Switzerland 

Switzerland is the most ridiculously beautiful place in the world. I went with Evelyn and we stayed at a friend's house, who was staying there for the summer. The first night we ate homemade cheese fondue which is the best food ever, and the next day went on a long hike from Griesalp to Murren via the Gspaltenhornhutte (pretty close to the city of Interlaken). The hike took about 8 hours and was incredibly steep (~4200 feet elevation gain, mostly concentrated in one steep section) but gorgeous. If you're ever in Switzerland on a sunny day, you should definitely do this hike. We walked along a glacial moraine and up to a ridge with at least 7 glaciers and the epic jagged peaks of Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau within the 360 degree view. We also ate fondue again that night, but this time a meat fondue which was just as amazing as the cheese fondue the night before. The next day we went on a hike to a really beautiful lake, Oeschinensee.

a nice mountain

The most beautiful piss of my life

#6: Sicily, Italy - Catania and Taormina

Ev and I bought a blind booking flight one weekend and ended up in Sicily. Blind booking is a program offered by Germanwings Airlines where you can choose which category of city to go to (beach cities, party cities, historical cities, etc.) and you don't find out which flight you will be in until after you pay for the ticket. So we booked a flight to a beach city and ended up in southern Italy. The water was as warm as a bathtub and perfectly crystal clear. We took advantage of the conditions and went scuba diving one day, and although the Mediterranean sea life isn't that exciting, the visibility was incredible and there were cool rock formations and a few interesting creatures. That night after diving we were able to see Mount Etna erupting, which is a big volcano in Sicily. It was the only time I've ever seen lava spew out of a mountain. Pretty awesome.

The beach in Taormina, where we went diving

underwater in Taormina

Couldn't get a good photo in the dark, but the red is lava flowing down Mount Etna

#7: United Kingdom - London, Creamfields, Edinburgh

For Ev's last week before she headed to Spain to start Fulbright, I took a week off of work and we went to the UK. We spent a day in London with a friend from Pomona, Amade, and then took a bus to near Liverpool where we would spend the weekend playing in the mud at Creamfields music festival. I've never seen a place covered in such a thick layer of mud before, and apparently we didn't get the memo that mud boots are essential at British music festivals. Though dirty, the festival was incredible and the lineup was about as good as it could possibly get. Then we went to Edinburgh for a few days and explored the city and took a boat to the nearby Isle of May, a sea bird reserve just off the coast from Edinburgh. We also ate a lot of haggis which is surprisingly delicious for something that contains at least 4 internal organs. After Edinburgh we were back in London for a weekend, where I was able to catch up with some friends from when I lived in London 8 years ago.

Isle of May, Scotland

Tower Bridge, London

#8: Amsterdam, Netherlands

At the end of September/beginning of October, there was a German holiday which gave me a 3-day weekend, so I took the other 4 days off that week and did a trip to Amsterdam and Madrid. In Amsterdam I met two friends, one from Pomona and one other intern from Merck. We had a great time wandering around the city, frolicking in the magical Vondelpark, and spent some quality time in many of Amsterdam's unique coffee shops.

Somehow I ended up with only one photo from this trip, the I amsterdam sign at night

#9: Madrid, Spain

I flew from Amsterdam to Madrid to visit Evelyn, who is now living in Madrid. We explored the city, ate a ton of tapas, and went hiking in a really cool area outside of Madrid called La Pedriza. It had similar rocks to Joshua Tree, but was a bit more lush and way more crowded. On my first day in Madrid I also saw Matt, a friend from Pomona, who was passing through on his way to start an English teaching job in Caceres, Spain.

A castle, somewhere in Spain

That wraps up the year so far, but I'll continue to post when I go on more adventures (I'll try to post more than once every couple months from now on). Hopefully this blog will inspire you to travel more as well, because if I can travel this much on an intern salary of 900 Euros per month, then you can too. Being too tired or too poor is no excuse, you just need to live a minimal lifestyle and forget that ridiculous paranoia of strangers that growing up in the USA instills in us. You gotta be willing to occasionally jump in a car with someone you just met and give up that 5-star hotel room service to crash on a random person's living room floor. And don't forget, YOLO.