6 months in one report

There has not been much blogworthy over the last half a year - not that I haven't been kept busy though.

NYE in Berlin - with Hong and Marlene we toured Munich during Christmas, went to Frankfurt to see Liang and then visited the massive NYE party in Berlin, on Unter den Linden under the Brandenburger Gate. Impressively crowded for Germany, the 1 km party had a stage at each end of its length and some pop bands provided hours of entertainment. The fireworks were good, but not up to Sydney quality. A highlight was our DIY (well, we bought and lit them) fireworks at 4 a.m. after the official fireworks at midnight.

Karneval (early February) in Aachen / Cologne - my colleague Stefan lives in Aachen, which is up in Rhineland where they celebrate Karneval, generally dress up and go crazy for a few days. I went with Renat, a friend of mine from Munich, up there, and spent on night in Cologne and the rest of the time in Aachen. Captain Sparrow seems to be a popular dress-up theme these days, otherwise the evergreen clown suit also makes frequent appearances. The highlight of the festival is Rosenmontag (the Monday), where a 7 km long float toured through Aachen and threw lollies and biscuits at the crowd. This really turns the idea of serious Germans on its head.

Skiing - I have been quite busy this season - 11 days of skiing and they were all day trips. The snow was quite good this season, and although it wasn't very reliable, there were quite a few weekends with good snowfall and the chance to ski on some fresh snow. The conditions of the German ski resorts remain, however, quite poor, and Austria remained the region of choice for me this season.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Iasi, Romania

Image
In April 2008 I was sent to Iasi, Romania for one week, in order to work more closely together with our colleagues at that site. There is also offices of Continental there, although it is very much a developing location and as such the scale is completely different to what we had in Germany. As you can see, the office block is basically a 3 storey portable. Most of the workers are recent graduates out of the univerity in Iasi. Actually, I believe that is one of the attractions of setting up an office in Iasi - a company like Continental would attract a lot of interest from the uni graduates there, as it would be one of the few options to stay at home and have a technical engineering career. Iasi is actually quite a small city, but it appears much smaller if you only consider the airport. It is an international airport because it has ONE daily flight back to Vienna. Work aside, we had a little time on some of the weeknights to look around the city and experience a bit of Romanian cultu...
Read more

Formula Student Germany

Image
The weekend after the Formula 1 race at the Hockenheimring, another motorsport event was held there which interested me. This was the inaugural Formula Student event in Germany, equivalent to the Formula SAE competition in Australia. Basically, students design and race small cars in a once a year event. My old team from UNSW was invited here, so I had to go and cheer them on! Note, that is NOT how Germans usually spell Sydney. The quality of the competition was fantastic, there were so many technical innovations considering that this is the first German competition. Beautifully made carbon fibre monocoques, a CVT, carbon fibre steering wheels with digital readouts, well styled bodywork, and what appears to be lots of sponsorship money. The winning team from Austria, TU Graz, had a redbull logo on the front of their car - just like the Formula 1 team! The UNSW team did an excellent job, and made it to the design final, which consisted of the 6 most well designed cars. When the endurance...
Read more

Koenigsee

Image
When my high school friend, Dzung Vo, said that he is coming to Munich with his new high spec camera, we decided that we would go to Koenigsee for the weekend. I learnt a few things from him about photography, and I took as many photos as my battery will allow. Which turned out to be about 210. I have posted a few photos here. You can find more on this Flickr set page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lokmanho/sets/72157594348965719/ On the Saturday we took the last electric boat cruise over the lake to St. Bartholomew, where there is a church, a hunting lodge of King Ludwig I, and an ice formation called the ice chapel (which I tried to reach but had to turn back due to shortage of light). When we arrived, we found out that the last boat trip back left almost immediately! Fortunately, we met another group on our boat that had a special booking to leave at 8:30 p.m. after dinner, and we had dinner and travelled back with them. They were quite an international group, and I wondered what kin...
Read more