This day felt like the shortest yet! Probably because it was. With the latest start and one of the earliest ends on the program stuff, I had considerable free time this afternoon. The weather was consistently horrible, with endless rain and cold temperatures.

To start, during the trip to the Grob factory, I challenged Ryan Martin to a game of chess, as he has been honing his chess skills, and I was able to handily beat him (no offense Ryan, with practice you’ll easily be able to beat me. Or you could do it now if we do a blitz game.)

The heart of the day was held in the Grob campus. Yes, campus, as the complex of offices and factories was enormous, with gigantic machinery and over 1,000 employees. This is where the title of the post comes from, because “groß” is the German word for large. Grob manufactures machines which produce components of automobiles such as engine parts and battery housings and sells these machines to OEMs. Additionally, some parts such as the rotors used in an upcoming electric Range Rover are made directly at Grob. With a strong emphasis on E-mobility, Grob is looking towards the future macro trends a lot more than Hoerbiger, which will cause Grob to most likely win out in the long-term.

After visiting Grob, we went back to Augsburg, where I used German to help me find new nice pants after my last ones broke. Unfortunately, the cheapest was €60. Oh well. I also got some pretzels and dinner and did my laundry at the laundromat that took forever to find. I tried to get a new sim card but the sellers didn’t understand me much (I don’t think they had good understanding of English OR German) and when I tried to use the sim removal tool, it latched on and stuck in to the little hole, meaning I’ll never be able to remove my sim card with my phone ever again. Uh oh. Please please phone companies, standardize a virtual e-sim (already exists and the latest iPhones don’t have physical sim slots anymore) that allows me to easily switch carriers without much hassle!