My apologies for the self-centered nature of this blog post. Hey, check out this picture I took with my camera from the plane as it was leaving Cleveland a few weeks ago:
Pretty excellent quality considering the altitude and the window...
I suppose I should face the fact that I'll be away from home for a long time. The longest I've ever been away before this expedition was just three and a half months (my semester in Israel). It's exciting to be going, and the night before I left for Germany I was looking over my parents scrapbook from their big long Israel experience and it was over a dollar a minute to call home in 1980! Now with skype being dirt-cheap and email and everything it is a whole lot easier.
Exhibit A: Grover Goes to School with Mom and Ilana. Every year in late-summer, my mom reads to the Kramer kids from this lesson-teaching tome. Such favorite lines as "I hate baloney!" and "Two new friends in one day?!?!" will forever live on in Kramer lore. We jokingly were saying that we would read it before I left and last night I remembered while on skype with home. So we did it via skype. The hilarious results can be found below.
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.
Right, so now I'm back in Mannheim. Back to the good ol' Weber hotel (pronounced veber). Today I had my first actual day of training and I understood hardly a word of it. Likely because I didn't go through the regular orientation like everyone else did. I'm supposed to do that another day.
Let me fill you in on some of the cool things we did at Grafenwoehr, where I got my TSIRT (Theater Specific Individual Readiness Training) Certification so I can go downrange. Most of the training was highly boring. A lot of first aid and IED (Improvised Explosive Device) training that hardly applies to anyone like me who is not allowed to leave the FOB (Forward Operating Base). By the way, did you know there are a lot of ACRONYMs in the army? Yeah, Abbreviated Coded Rendition Of Name Yielding Meanings are extremely common here!
We also got a history of the goings on of the conflicts in Afghanistan and the reasons for the way the military is doing things the way they're currently doing them. That was pretty informative and reassuring, just to know that they have a better idea of how to fight the insurgency now than they did before.
That night we stayed at the nicer hotel in the base at Grafenwoehr, and I saw a commercial that really struck me. Imagine a gruff looking cowboy moseying up to a saloon and drawing his six-shooter. He then proceeds to shoot off of the hitching post, a line of energy drinks. Finally large words flash across the screen - "Drop the Energy Drink! Reach for a Water!" with military logos all across the bottom of the screen. Apparently energy drinks are so popular (and unhealthy) that they produce commercials for not drinking them geared for the soldiers. What a concept!
The last thing we did was the MRAP rollover test. The MRAP family of vehicles has replaced the humvee as the primary vehicle used in Afghanistan and everyone going "downrange" has to do this test. Here's a video of the MRAP rollover training.
Here's me with all the gear on, ready to roll-over.
Tonight we went to this little Italian restaurant (owned and run by Italians) around the corner. They didn't seem to be busy and were happy to have us as customers, but they forgot my Tagliatelle Salmone so it came late and they felt bad so we got free house-made limoncello (lemon liqueur). Then we went further around the corner and had gelato. Italian night in Mannheim.
