Today we expected it to start off like many of our days: wake up, eat breakfast, meet up, take some sort of transit, go to a typical site visit (with varying companies obviously).
So we did just that, up until the ‘typical’ site visit. We get to H&K and we’re waiting just outside of the entrance, all of us slightly confused as to why we’re waiting and then Dr. Feick tells us that our tour guide only speaks German and we’re waiting for the translator to arrive. At this point we all realized this was going to be a difficult tour to follow.
We were right. The translator did a good job but it was hard to concentrate when the guide was talking in German because I couldn’t understand him. The factory itself was really small and it didn’t look like there was a lot going on. Additionally, this made the tour slightly boring as well.
After our H&K tour, our only planned event for the day, we decided it was time for some sort of lunch. The SGL group was going to grab food from the little window shops closer into town, and I tagged along with them.
Since there were several different shops, with different types of food, we were able to have somewhat of a choice. I ended up getting pizza with Lexi and Ally. The man serving us asked where we were from and told him Pennsylvania and apparently his cousin now lives in Raleigh, NC which we thought was pretty cool. After getting food we made our way back to the hotel.
My group went back to the university to work on our project more, but unfortunately there was basically no space to work so we just went to one of our German group members’ apartment.
We went at 1:30ish and we didn’t get back to the hotel until 9ish so we were there for a long time! We finished our presentation for the most part and decided that we’d practice our presentation that night then reconvene the next morning and work at any issues we found. We also got pizza for dinner (oops I had it for lunch too), but this was huge! We got 3 pizzas for the 7 of us and it was plenty, it was so good too!!
After we finished there, we met up with people at the hotel and went bowling. It was a lot of fun and nice to have been with most of the group. After the game ended, a few of us went to play pool afterwards. I played and of course, scratched a few times (had to live up to the nickname)!
And with that we went back to the hotel to rest up for the big presentations the next day.
-Gemma