Friends & Good Ol' Times

I recently visited my German host family from high school. As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I spent my last semester of high school in Germany with some of the fabulous people below. (Not everyone could make it over the weekend, so watch out for the second edition of this photo at some later date!)

The weekend was full of biking and canoeing along a nearby river, later looking at vacation photos from Portugal, and catching up over good food, including the typical German afternoon cake and coffee.

As we told stories, I thought about how much that final semester of high school influenced where I am today. Without a doubt, spending it in Germany played a huge role in me double-majoring in German, later traveling and studying in German-speaking countries, and setting the stage for future endeavors, such as my post-doc.

This week, the higher education publication The Chronicle printed an article on the current state of German departments at U.S. colleges and universities. (Hint: it's not good.) The article, entitled "Don't Ditch Deutsch", laments the diminishing number of German departments offering traditional literature courses, as well as the diminishing number of German departments overall. Those departments offering fewer literature courses are instead opting for more "practical" business and other professional German courses. (Why can't we offer both?) I, for one, cannot imagine my college experience without our German department, and studying literature was a huge part of that experience. Writing for those German lit classes even improved my scientific writing, much to the surprise of my purely technically-minded engineering peers.

Given the current state of affairs, the author argues for the integration of German topics into related courses: Marx in Political Science, Jelinek in Women's Studies, and so on. Whether this approach works (or is even needed) depends on the institution, but I think we can all agree that losing our German departments and our German teachers would be a substantial loss indeed -- not only at the universities, but at every level of education. Offering fewer opportunities to learn German means offering fewer opportunities to make a difference in the German-sepaking world. And after all, you never know where one single course may lead.

Read the article while it's still paywall-free here.

Dinner on the Balcony

This is my view every summer evening, for as long as it is warm enough to eat outside. It certainly is nice to have an apartment with a balcony!

Evolving Roles

It's official: I have my first academic advisee. As of this week, I am advising an undergraduate environmental engineering student who is writing his thesis (in German) on soybean biodiesel conversion processes in Brazil. While I've mentored and managed both college and high school students before, this is my very first involvement with the writing of a thesis. As an undergraduate, this student is still learning how to do "real" research, so I will be helping him with all the major aspects: from the literature search to critical analysis to scientific writing. I may be a tad excited.

Betriebsausflug: a field trip about ... windows?

Bright and early Monday morning, I boarded a chartered bus to a town I had never heard of: Marktheidenfeld, Germany -- 100 miles northeast of Stuttgart and 50 miles southeast of Frankfurt, basically just south of the middle of the country. Why, you ask? It was my department's annual "industry field trip" and this year we were headed to the "solar management" company WAREMA.

What exactly do solar managers do? They manage the sun's rays, of course. And what does that mean ...? WAREMA designs and manufactures blinds, shutters, and awnings, as well as window treatments to protect against too much sun and even to ward off insects. This all sounds rather bland unless you've experienced German window technology -- and yes, it is both technology and an experience.

Let's look at blinds, shutters, and awnings. German blinds basically look like what you would see in the U.S., the only major difference being that they are more frequently operated by remote control than the typical American household blinds. Shutters, on the other hand, are not clap-shutters but rather heavy-duty blinds. They are operated via pulley or remote control, and resemble the rolling metal doors of garages or store entrances (when the store is closed). Awnings are far more common in Germany than in the U.S. and are also operated via remote control.

Rolladen: Germany's shutters, or heavy-duty blinds. (Imagine the snow.)

View of Rolladen from the outside.

Looking at the top Rolladen picture, you may notice the metal handles on the windows. I have been told that U.S. windows are "old-fashioned": do we really still open windows by sliding them up and down? What happens when they get stuck? Don't we want better ventilation? German windows have handles that operate in two directions: when the handle is vertical, the window opens from the top outward (usually a few inches); when the handle is horizontal, the entire window opens just like a door. There is one drawback, however: there are no screens. This may be fine in the winter, when opening the window for fresh air, but in the summer? Hello, mosquitoes! I joke with my roommates: they will never have to worry about mosquito bites -- the spiders take care of their share and the remaining mosquitoes take care of me! Actually, American screens wouldn't work well with German windows anyway. The screen would have to cover the entire length of the window and doing so would impact aesthetics, not to mention ventilation. (Business opportunity, anyone?)

After touring WAREMA's production facilities, which despite my lack of photos were actually quite fascinating, we returned to the bus and drove onto Würzburg, about 25 miles southeast of Marktheidenfeld. The big attraction in Würzburg, aside from the Main River, is the Marienberg Fortress. We stopped for an hour to explore the fortress grounds before continuing on our way to the local Biergarten for dinner. It was rainy gray day and everyone was in a rush, but I still took my time to get a few pictures.

The "refuge castle" as seen from the fortress.
If I ever return to Würzburg, I definitely want to tour the castle.

Würzburg from above, and from behind the flowers.

Würzburg, the Main River, and beyond.

Some of my work colleagues, thinking "Briana is still taking pictures??"
(Well yes, because where else do you see fairytale cottages like the one below?)

Cottage for the park service? Hobbit summer home? I simply don't know.

Soon it was time to board the bus again. I left the fortress grounds with a general impression of the area, but I would really like to return to wander around more and also tour the castle. I'll just have to add this medieval town to my growing list places to visit, or revisit, as the case may be.

Where does the next door lead?