After about five hours of sleep, we woke up bright and early (at 6:30am) and boarded the Tram to go to Faurecia. To be honest I wasn’t expecting the visit to be as cool as it was. Faurecia is a company that focuses on clean mobility and the plant we visited produced exhaust pipes. The head of communications introduced the company and then an engineer talked to us about how the company minimizes mistakes and how it goes about production. Then an engineer came and took us on a tour of the company. First we toured the facilities in which they test the durability of their products. Also, I didn’t realize how much they care about the sounds the car makes. He showed us an audio room that was really cool. It was soundproofed and had foam triangles on the walls. Then we toured the plant, which was also cool.

Then we went back to Konigsplatz, the main tram station in the city and was set free for two hours. I went back to the hotel, changed out of my business clothes, and went back into the city. I got noodles for lunch at an Asian restaurant. We all met up again and made our way to a church to meet our tour guide for a tour about Martin Luther and the protestant reformation. Our tour guide was really nice and emanated good vibes. She was really passionate about what she talked about which made the tour the best one yet. We proceeded to do what was essentially, a church crawl. We walked around and visited five churches that the tour guide told us about. After, we me up with a professor. Both the tour guide and the professor were very curious to know about religion in the United States. We had an interactive discussion where they told Christians to go to one side of the room and non-Christians to go to the other side. This was very interesting to me because I feel like this would have never happened in the U.S. but it opened up the opportunity to learn a lot about the other people on the trip and to have discussions about faith that would not normally happen.

This discussion the end of the program for the day, but for dinner we went to a traditional German restaurant. I got ¼ duck with red cabbage and potato dumplings. I was not crazy about the meal as a whole, but I did like the duck.

Observations: The streets are so clean here. Religion is an important part of German history. I did not see many females at Faurecia at all. Also, in the plant there were only two women’s stalls and apparently, many more men’s stalls, which makes sense demographically I guess. I did not see one woman in the plant, itself.