I have been hearing many stories from people and everyone'z background is very diverse. Sometimes funny, sometimes profound.
Like one guy from South Africa was telling meth first day at the hotel that he took a drink of what he thought was tropical juice but it was tomato. Disgusted, he poured himself another glass of what he took to be guava juice. Again he was stymied and just stuck with orange juice. I joked with him about no longer being in tropical coastal Africa.
Another one from China was telling me how it is different because he has never used a knife and fork (only chopsticks...he said even the McDonalds give out chopsticks). I later observed him eating at a meal and he was balancing a huge piece of chicken on a spoon and taking bites out of it while taking small bits of rice onto his fork.
The guy from Vietnam went to university in South Korea and has told me a lot about the differences between the two in terms of technology, research opportunities, as well as the culture and physical landscape. He just got accepted to a PhD program at UC Santa Barbara for organic solar cells.
The girl from the Ukraine showed me a set of pictures from when she was in Chernobyl for a university project on measuring radiation. She lives in Kiev which is relatively nit far from the site. The city itself is completely deserted it is very spooky, no cars or people and the buildings are just shells since the concrete couldn't be reused due to radiation absorption. Trees can be seen growing inside the buildings. Her career focuses on the reuse and disposal of scrap tires and she was telling me about the lack of expertise in the Ukraine in this field. Apparently there is only one expert in all of the Ukraine on this topic and she was excited to come to Germany to see what kinds of scrap tire reuse projects exist here so that she can study with more experts before completing her thesis.
Some of the people come from parts of the world where higher education isn't very common and this program is a great way for them to leave their countries and pursue their professions in a place with better funding. The man from Indonesia told me that he already plans to move here with his wife and child after the research program. Some people, lime the girl from the Ukraine just wants to get the experience so she can take it back with her.
It's hard to fit into an email all of the different people because they all come from such different places.
People are very open to collaboration and everyone has already exchanged emails so that we can contact each other in case we need any help or professional consultation in the future.
For the expert meetings unfortunately my rendezvous with the energy minister fell through. During these meetings we will all travel to different parts of Germany for a couple days to have different meetings. I had to choose a couple different ones so I will be meeting with one expert for solar buildings, one for wind energy research, and one for biomass research. All of these institutes do applied research for industry application, I'll definitely give you more information on that later. I've already been offered to do research for projects or even to pursue a PhD at a couple of institutions that we have visited and have been collecting business cards like crazy.
On Thursday we were at the Clausthal University and looked at a bunch of research on car disposal. They manage to find ways to recycle at least 95% of a car in order to resell or reuse the recuperated parts for further application - from zinc and gold removal to reworking the scrap metal to make new cars. We got to tour a couple facilities including fuel cell labs, zinc removal processes, and the reducing of certain parts to powder in order to run it there various extraction methods for different materials.
They also do work on recharging cars and they had a Tesla (that electric sports car that is sold in Boulder) that they were modifying so that it would charge in 30 minutes (instead of 4-8 hours).
They also do a considerable amount of biomass research especially reducing biomass (like crop waste) into liquid fuel - lime Rumpelstiltsken making the princess spin thread into gold.
Then the icing on the cake - we went to the Volkswagen manufacturing plant. this isn't the only one, but according to the tour guide it is the largest car plant in the western hemisphere (about the size of Monaco). It's powered by two 450MW power plants (enough to supply power to a city of 1,000,000 people) and turns out about 3,500 cars per day (the line is 7.6 km long and each car takes 3.5 days to travel through). The factory is so huge that we had to take a special car-train to make the rounds. The employees get around the factory on monographed bicycles. They do everything there - we saw the raw steel get sent into enormous presses that shaped the frame of the cars that are then snapped into place by precision robots (they have 1600 robots just for this process). It all seems a bit Willy Wonka style in Rube-Goldberg-ness as well as vastness, our car was pretty much the equivalent of a glass elevator. We saw a lot of processes all the way down the line to employees driving the cars out of the factory (they are making Golfs and Touaregs). There are 48,000 employees at pretty much every step, although a lot of processes are robotic, human oversight is still needed and they are still doing the painting and certain other steps that don't require precise alignment or exceedingly heavy lifting.
The town where the factory is located, Wolfsburg, is centered around the factory. If it weren't for Volkswagen this town would not exist.
As if this wasn't enough, after the factory we went to this Volkswagen theme park. It's this huge park where I imagine the remainder of local people who are not employed at the factory work. We were practically the only people here in this enormous space that showcased all off their models and subsidiaries - past and present, their design projects, their sustainability efforts, and the company history all through slick and expensive interactive technology. I was blown away by how each exhibit was laid out (what's more there were no lines and I was able to try out everything).
There were pavilions all over the complex that showcased their top of the line models from Skoda, Séat, Audi, Lamborghini, and Bugatti (fastest and most expensive production car ever made - 1001 horsepower). Each of these cars had its own building. I went to the Audi one and had a one-on-one tour of their high-end sports car. I got to sit in it (not drive - it is a $200,000 sports car after all) and turn it on. They also had an exhibit about the rest of the Audi line with very visual explanations about different technologies that go into making the cars safe, secure, environmentally friendly, reliable, etc...
The sustainability exhibit was crazy - they had huge multitouch screens that showed different efforts across their product lines to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. They had one set of screens of experts talking about sustainability and each time you would ask a question to one of them, all of the other head should turn to listen, (if you touched one of the listening heads while someone was talking they would turn and look at you as if annoyed). They had a model waterfall that was also a multi-touch projection screen with bubbles that could be touched to show different keywords about their water resource use. Then I saw a short film (not really sure why it was in this exhibit but it was very well done) in a 360 degree theater. It was only me and the South African guy in this huge theater where you stand and turn around to look at different parts of the scene (there were some expansive mountain landscapes that looked amazing).
Yesterday we were at the university of Göttingen. It is an agricultural university so not exactly my field - we learned about climate research that they are conducting on soil quality, crop yield, and its effects on livestock yield and production.
We also got a tour of Carl Gauss' house/observatory. In case you didn't know, Gauss was a 19th century astronomer, physicist, and all around genius. I've studied a couple of his laws/theorems mostly dealing with the changing of atoms due to temperature changes (Gaussian curve). They've kept his observatory completely intact including his telescope in its original position inside an observation dome. It was very mechanical and used pendulum weights to move in time with the night sky.
Now we are heading to Bremen, in the north and have a couple free days for since it is the weekend, more updates later!
Location:Bahnhofsplatz,Brême,Allemagne
