Blog Fail continued

For all those wondering, it gets cold here in Germany.  And it snows.  It's been snowing on and off since Sunday night and it hasn't broken 30 degrees yet.  Did I mention winter was here?  He ain't packin' up any time soon by the looks of it.

Last week was my first week back in Germany and it just couldn't wait to get started.  Seven guys from the US, all Netzsch regional sales managers, came to Germany last week for pump training.  Guess who was in charge of most of the training.  The American.  Lucky for me, we all speak English.  American English at least.  We went through assembly, disassembly, competitor analysis and a few application visits to a biogas facility (farm) a wastewater treatment plant and a paper mill.  All went well except with this one guy.  He wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders.  When you ask too many dumb questions people start wondering if you belong here.  I have strong doubts about this guy.  Moving on though.  The best part about colleagues coming to visit is going out to eat.  I ate out for lunch and dinner every day that week.  Lucky for me because I didn't have any food in the house when I got back from my break in the US.  I ate damn good that week and all on the company's wallet.  All for the sake of entertaining our guests.  I was too busy chatting up the waitress, but that's beside the point.

We ended the week on Friday by going out to dinner in Munich.  Our development team and all the Americans made for a grand total of 13.  First came the biers, then came the schnapps.  Then dinner.  Schnapps first.  I snagged one of the bottles that they came in, each one containing exactly two shots.

It's not expensive or anything like that, but it's got a nifty top that you can close back up, as if you were going to save your second shot for some reason.  I've seen it beer bottles before, both here and back in the States.  Nothing new, but still pretty cool on a single-serve schnapps bottle.  After dinner a bunch of the guys decided to go find a club.  I tagged along with the crew that opted to turn in early since I had to be up, and functionable, for a soccer match the next day.

Blog Fail

I have committed complete blog failure.  I let it go stale and now it's like some abandoned car on the side of the road that hasn't been repossessed yet because the township doesn't want to pay to tow the shit heap.  It's been over a month since my last update and it wasn't even an exciting post.  Neither was the post before that, or before that.  EPIC FAIL.  Last month I went back home to good old Pennsylvania for the first time in 7 months of being in Germany.   It's pretty wild that I've been out of the country for that long.  In some ways it doesn't really feel like it's been that long.  Kind of like how a semester of school can go by so quick.  Then you start studying for finals and realize exactly how much crap you "learned" and now have to re-learn just to pass the test.  It feels like that except I don't have the test to worry about.  I might kill someone if there was a test.  Thinking back on all the stuff I've done since being here and all the things I've learned on and off the job and then putting that into a timeline makes me see that it really has been 7 months.  Seven great months.  Sure work gets in the way and sends my morale on a nosedive from time to time, but the weekends have a way of muting all that.

Being home was nice though.  I've been given the privilege of the German vacation schedule which means I get 30 days per year.  Eat that!  I took a good chunk of my vacation time to come home during the holidays and visit friends and family.  Three weeks of no work and staying with my parents let me shut off my brain and tell stress to piss off .  I got to go out to lunch (or dinner) with friends.  I FINALLY finished the mammoth Stephen King book I've been reading.  I even made it out snowboarding thanks to a friend that had some extra gear I could borrow since all mine was still in Germany.  I promised I'd go snowboarding in the Alps, with proof of course, and it looks like I might have a chance of doing that in a few weeks.  All in all it was nice to be home.  I will say that it absolutely sucked hearing how good the Eagles were doing all season only to watch them get butt-raped two games in a row, pissing away their chances in the playoffs.  Same old birds.

I've been stashing some things to talk about on this blog.  Right now it's all on paper but it will eventually makes its way into the next post.  To be continued...