The blog post to end all others (part 1)

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Apologies for the hiatus on the blog posts, I promise this will be the blog post to end all other blog posts. I’m stuck in the Bologna airport for quite a long time, so I’m going to bang out as much as possible in these next few hours. I’m going to break them into several separate posts to make it all a bit more readable. This first one can be a quick summary of what I’ve been up to in Strasbourg since the bike trip. A quick series of highlights:
I got an internship at a geothermal research plant
I visited Germany again, and was reunited with their gloriously unhealthy cuisine ( most notably currywurst and sneeballein)

First, my internship; I love it. I have no idea how I managed to land the position, but thanks to our internship coordinator at the Syracuse Center, I am working with the GEIE (a really complicated acronym that means geothermal in english), which is a joint French-German research lab that is trying to make geothermal energy a viable renewable energy resource in the future. This is all very complicated however, and since I don’t speak French, let alone Geologist French, I more or less just translate their website. Still, its been a fascinating chance to learn about a renewable energy resource, and amazing French practice to boot. Not only am I translating, I commute with one of the scientists for about an hour and a half each time I go, which has really helped my conversational French skills. We mostly just complain about Sarkozy, striker tactics (My least favorite is Operation Escargot, where the truckers drive about 10 miles per hour and block the highway) and highway speeds being too slow.

In Germany, we visited Heidelberg on a day trip with our whole program, so it was back on our big purple butterfly bus for another song-filled bus ride. Once we arrived, we visited an old castle that is now basically ruins, which has actually made it more famous. Apparently some French painters found them quite appealing, painted some famous pictures, and thanks to their popularity, they saved the building from being demolished. I wasn’t overly impressed by the ruins, but I was impressed by the largest wine barrel in the world. For perspective, this wine barrel was more or less two stories tall, and probably contained a few swimming pools of wine. Unsurprisingly, these German kings liked to drink, and by drink, I mean 3 liters a day. Also unsurprisingly, these German kings weighed over 400 pounds, which meant that their statues’ were hilariously obese. They apparently demanded a “tax” from all the vineyards of a certain percentage of the harvest, and then just dumped it all together into the barrel. This barrel was a more or less perfect metaphor for everything that is screwed up about monarchy as a system of government, and that was by far the most interesting part of the trip.

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