Extreme Sleep Deprivation Part II

So I may not have been tired on my way through Manas this time around, but I started off on the wrong foot to continue my journey in the same manner when I got to the Bishkek commercial airport at 5 AM having gotten no sleep whatsoever.

The whole day was a textbook description of experiencing reverse-culture shock. I was constantly barraged by the extreme cleanliness of the Istanbul airport and the restaurant attached to the hotel I stayed in in Germany. Did you know the Istanbul airport is full of nothing but women? It's true! Because I was used to there being practically no women downrange it really seemed like they were everywhere I looked (and this continues to be the case as I write this while I am currently visiting Israel). Anyway with a relatively long layover in Istanbul, and a shuttle from Frankfurt to Sandhofen, just north of Mannheim, I was very ready to pass out and did.

Being back in Sanhofen was also very strange, but in a way unrelated to the reverse-culture shock. Firstly, CTC is no longer storing people in the Weber, it's all about the Adler hotel, now. There are good things and bad related to the change, anyway it was only for one night. Also, being in the same place first in summer, and then again seven months later was interesting to see. 

After my out-processing in Coleman Barracks, which consisted basically of my filling out some forms and giving my opinions on how the program can be improved, I was on my way again back to the Frankfurt airport. Hearing Israeli's speaking Hebrew on their way back from a trip to Italy in the Rome airport (which coincidentally was also full of women) was like music to my ears.

Alitalia is very concerned over the people nearing their 40s who still play their original gameboys.

By the time I got to the little hotel near the beach in Tel Aviv that I was staying in it was 5 am again, and I had a hard time sleeping. By Saturday night, I had gone since Wednesday morning with nothing more than 10 hours of sleep total...

It's good to be back, civilization.

Government Shut Down

On the very day that I watch the episode of The West Wing in which the opposing party jerks the Bartlet White House around in the budget negotiations to the point of nudging the President over the edge and him ending negotiations by welcoming a government shut down, I get the worst news we could possibly get here. We will in effect see a government shut down of funding for Army Education Centers across the board. Starting Tomorrow, the Ed Center will shut down. Here's the pivotal scene:

The actual funding process for the education centers is pretty complicated and I don't want to bore anybody, but much like the West Wing, or a real government shut down for that matter, we don't have any idea when it'll be over. The predictions are all around "a few days". Unfortunately, this will mean the closing of the education center and all of its services to service-members and civilians at KAF and throughout the country (at least - haven't heard yet about Iraq, Kosovo, Qatar, Kuwait etc.). This means no computer lab, no testing center, no counseling services, no classrooms, no nothing.

It also means no work for me. This could be a blessing or a curse. I would welcome a day or two off, but I can't imagine going for more than that at KAF without work. Crushing boredom exists just around every corner as things currently stand, and without work the wave of ennui will be overwhelming. I guess I'd get more sleep in those couple of days for sure... And I'd get in some super gym time... Maybe it won't be so bad. No, it'll be terrible if it lasts even a full week so go education center funding!

Bartlet for President.

Moving the Computer Lab

It was decided long before I came to Kandahar that the computer lab was in the wrong place and instead it should be located across the deck one building over. It was rough going, but we did it.

View from my old desk.

As can be seen in the picture above, the computer booths in the Ed. Center are very large/ The booths were made out of lots of wood and were made to last. Whoever built these things decided to build them nailed and screwed together every which way so the only way to move them was to strip a lot of wood off and really rip them apart. Here are the highlights (pictures were taken on the Ed. Center's camera by Dee, the education services officer - pretty sure the flash was turned off so it's sorta blurry).

So first we unplugged everything and got it out of there. Then it looked like this:

But as you can see, there are still wires connected.

Those wires were built into the computer desks.So we got to the nitty gritty. There were a lot of jokes made about Jews doing manual labor... to be fair, I started it.

Assessing the situation.

Into action.

Christian takes a break.

Paul steps in.

No no no! This one goes here, that one goes there.

Meanwhile, decisions were being made about how to wire the new computer lab.

"I say we wire it over there"

"No! Up there!"

"Over there!"

While they were arguing, Brandan climbed on top of the roof of the deck.

Basically, he's spiderman.

Mission Accomplished.

While all this was going on I was still trying to get the wire's out from the desks.

Knees starting to hurt.

Finally it was all ready for the hardest part - actually moving them:

Starting to come together.

Dee and Major Wishart in the new computer lab, sans computers.

Now it's been nearly 2 weeks in the new computer lab and the new location has got its perks and drawbacks. Here's the new view from my work station:

The end.

The Little Things

When there have been no blog posts on this page, it's not as though I'm doing nothing waiting around for something to write about. Things are still happening, none of them are important enough by themselves to write a full post about. Here's a few of the little things that go on around here.

Sandhofen is the name of our little suburb north of Mannheim. It's a collection of about 30 blocks with a tram line that connects us to downtown Mannheim, and farm or factory in every other direction (and the military base). If you check out the webpage for our little enclave you'd see that there's not much there. In those 30 blocks, there's our hotel with a Mcdonalds/gas station across the street, a couple of mini marts and like 10 restaurants, 4 or so of which are Italian.

Jordan and Erin enjoying the authentic German restaurant in Sandhofen

The crew.

We've recently re-implemented into the CTC training process Tuesday go-kart outings. There's this indoor track with lots of turns nearby and on Tuesdays that happy hour is like $20 or so for 20 minutes of go-karting. It's wayyy faster than American go-karts that are similar in size. I came in second on our last run.

The track

Me and Cheryl preparing to race

I'll beat you next time Raymond!

Speaking of diversions, there are signs around Coleman Barracks (where the training takes place) for a paintball play area and Raymond Wilson, the CTC employee who organizes our go-karting expeditions says that there's paintball on Saturdays... Will be investigating further before the weekend.

Kramer Textilpflege

This past weekend I traveled around Germany seeing some sights.

The rails... they beckon to me.

On Saturday I and four other CTC colleagues went to Worms for the day. It's a small town (pretty much doable from a tourist's perspective in a few hours). Worms is famous for being the site of Martin Luther's trial after having essentially started the protestant movement from the Catholic Church. There are memorials to him all around.

Martin Luther - total badass.

We also saw some extremely large churches around the center of town. One of the two churches was bombed out in WWII and was rebuilt in a really modern style. When we went in to see the church there was an organ concert going on and it was very nice.

Not too many people were there to enjoy it, but it was a good sermon.

Also not too many people there to enjoy the organ concert, but it was really good!

Then we ate thai food in the central square and went to a GREAT ice cream place right next to that organ-concert church. Seriously it was really great ice cream...

My view from the Thai restaurant

Oh, Devin...

Mary and Becca choosing which flavor they want.

After walking along the river a tiny bit (and seeing a statue of an ancestor of the HR professional here at CTC who plundered the people of Worms of their gold so much that to memorialize him they built a statue of him throwing a lot of gold into the river), we walked back to the old town.

You know who might need this gold? The Rhein River...

Finally we saw the couple of Jewish sites in the city. The Synagogue in Worms is the oldest in Europe (because its foundations are so old - in actuality it was rebuilt in the sixties or something). Rashi studied here before moving back to Troyes and they make a big deal about it with the museum. I was surprised to find out that the Synagogue has a regular service (every other Shabbat, according to the docent).

We also stopped by the Jewish cemetery which had graves dating back almost a thousand years.

Part of the Jewish Cemetery. It's surprisingly well preserved, for 1000 years old...

That night me and another CTC trainee went to see Harry Potter 7 part 2 in Mannheim (it was my second time seeing it). As in Israel, there are assigned seats as though you are going to any other theater performance, but there was no intermission. We had to find a special showing in English because dubbing is really popular here. If the roles were reversed, and German/Czech/whatever language television was really in-demand back in the states, I would prefer subtitles. I like to be able to hear how it's meant to sound... but who cares what I think anyway?

Look at this:

You didn't know that the Kramer family has had a dry cleaners in northern Mannheim since 1851???

The following day, me and the same guy I went to HP with (henceforth to be referred to as Jordan) had a whole long day planned out. We left the Hotel at 7 AM, and took almost 4 hours (because local trains are super cheap) to get to Stuttgart where the Mercedes-Benz and Porche Museums are. I liked the Mercedes museum better because it was bigger and had a lot more history and a lot more cars to see. I'm sure my Dad will be jealous when he sees the pictures because he loves antique cars.

Tell him without ME, there wouldn't BE any Paramount Studio!!!

What was really interesting was that the Mercedes Museum didn't gloss over the WWII period as many  similar museums in Germany do. They are very open (and apologetic) about their involvement with the Nazi regime and use of forced labor. I liked that they were up-front about it.

After seeing those two museums we took a train to Ludwigsberg. This is a tiny little town.... with the LARGEST CASTLE IN ALL OF GERMANY!

Note that I'm as far as the courtyard will permit, but the palace still extends outside the edges of the picture.

Holy crap was it big! We didn't go in. A tour of this place could take all day. We just enjoyed the grounds and the courtyard. They were having some sort of festival so that was enough for us.

He's singing "That's Amore". Weird, right?

I was very enthralled.

Then we took a sort of hike/path through this park on the way to a smaller palace with its own private lake and what seemed to be a private chapel.

It seemed like it was out of a movie. A private chapel on an island in a small lake in the woods.

Finally we took the train/tram back to the hotel and arrived after 11pm. It was a long day.

What do I even do all day?

Good question! Every day, I usually wake up between 7:30 and 8 in my tiny little room at the weber hotel here in Mannheim. I'll postpone getting out of bed as long as possible and then go down to breakfast (which is automatically getting paid for so I feel obligated to eat it.).

Don't be fooled, it's smaller than it looks.

Many different cheeses.

At 8:30 Ladell Heath (the deployment coordinator for CTC) picks up everyone to go to work at Coleman barracks a couple miles away.

Thanks for schlepping us around, Ladell

Work, sweet work...

In case you forget whose fire escape this is.

We spend the morning training in the training room and then go to the DFAC (Dining facility) for lunch which costs $4.25. This includes everything - basically like in a college dining hall.

See our rag-tag bunch of trainees in the training room.

Devin, deciding to get the ice cream for dessert.

So something the DFAC has that I find fascinating is the POW/MIA table. It's constantly set for one on a raised platform and everything on the table is meant to be symbolic of something involved with the experience of being a POW/MIA (Prisoner of war/missing in action). For instance, the slice of lemon on the plate represents the bitterness of their experience, and the salt on the table represents the tears of their loved ones... it's really powerful and a constant reminder that while we are in a peaceful place here in Germany, it's still very much a part of the military.

The caption below the silhouette of the POW says "you are not forgotten"

Some time between 4 and 5pm we leave. I've started going to the gym on base when I can and then walking the little over a mile back to the weber hotel. Home sweet home! In the evenings I spend time in the lobby where we get internet (no internet in the rooms), and find someone also with ctc to go to dinner with. There are a bunch of places that are the standard places to go for us around here. There are Italian, Turkish, and German places all nearby.

And that's basically what I do every day. All of this I wrote while Shakira lounge musak is playing over the hotel lobby speakers.

The hotel lobby.

The Hotel Lobby Soundtrack:

This weekend I think the plan is to take another day trip like we did last weekend.

Hiking in Heidelberg

For Saturday, I and four other trainees from CTC decided to go visit Heidelberg. We met in the morning, took the tram to the Mannheim train station, 15 or so minutes on the train to get to Heidelberg! Can you believe it? Figured out how to take public transportation to the old town. Did that.

Now our goal was to visit the famous Heidelberger Schloss (schloss means castle). The problem was that it was a bit of a hike halfway up a mountain to get to it. 

View of the castle from the old town.

So we hiked it.

The steep hill to get to the top.

We got up there and saw a pretty awesome castle. It was half destroyed in 1620 and several times since then so it's got this cool half-ruins sort of feel to it. The weather was nice, everything was going pretty good. There was a little museum and a great view of the entire city.

After coming back down from the mountain we strolled around the old town for a while and window shopped at all of the little tourist-y vendors around a big church. We found a restaurant and had a late German lunch on the river that goes through Heidelberg,  which is a tributary to the Rhein (which flows through Mannheim, have I mentioned that?).

Since I was going to spend this weekend in Brussels, but then those plans fell through I was able to meet up with my airplane friend, Emily (who was going to be in Heidelberg the whole week). As we check out the pedestrian bridge near our restaurant, I see a large group of student-aged people coming along and then she was right there with that group! So we met up earlier than our original plan. She had said that I should explore the hauprtstrasse and that we would meet up and go on the philosopherweg. I had no idea what any of this meant so I just went to the castle and checked out the bridge.

Emily is a part of this program called RISE. I'm sure it stands for something, but I am sick of Acronyms, so what it is is this program that offers internships to students all over the world studying sciences in the effort to try to get them to move to Germany for to get their Post-Secondary degrees. They were all fun people she was with. Problem was, they all wanted to go up to the castle! I didn't mind going up again, after all, it wasn't that hard. Then I found out what Philosopherweg was. It's a promenade along the opposite bank of the river's mountain called "holy mountain". It has paths all over it that lead to the top. And we were going to hike it...

View from the castle of the bridge where we ran into each other with the holy mountain presiding over the picture. See that little break in the treeline at the top there? That's where we're headed.

The half-liter beer that I had ordered at lunch was already disagreeing with me a bit, but I suppose that was just too darn bad. It wasn't so terribly hard a hike, and I enjoyed it a lot, but it was still a sweaty and tiring mess. At the top there is this ancient guard's tower with some great views of Heidelberg along the way. Then between the two summits of the holy mountain there is a WWII era amphitheater used by the Nazis. It was all an overgrown mess... take a look:

Seig How! ...are we all going to get down from this amphitheater in the mountains!?

Then at the second summit of the holy mountain we saw some ruins of an ancient monastery (probably has something to do with why the mountain is called holy). Between the amphitheater and the guard's tower there is this little mountain-top restaurant/beer gaarten. The group ate there. I had kaesespaetzle (cheese noodles - varying shaped noodles with cheese and onions - it was great!) at Emily's insistent suggestion.

Waldschenke apparently means "gift of the forest" This was supposed to be a candid, but Alex caught on.

We hiked down the mountain (by this time it's getting dark) and made it down to the river. At the bridge we all split up. Took the train to Mannheim myself and got back around midnight.

Emily Hart, Heidelberg's biggest fan. Josh Kramer's legs' worst fan!