June was crazy: Switzerland, France, Germany, Estonia, the Netherlands, + Greece (via Sweden, Germany + Serbia)

I wrote bits of posts during the travel, but never uploaded anything because a detailed description of my 15 hour journey to France, which should have taken less than 9, didn't seem too read-worthy in the end. I also spent some time working on a series of post about croissants, which I have shelved due to a change in my commuting route, but it will probably surface again at some point.

This massive post will catch you up to July 4th weekend with just the highlights from each stop! Google tells me the whole ordeal was about 10,000 kilometers!


France
Transport drama will always be associated with France for me. The above delay was due to in part to it being a holiday weekend, typical French train/rail problems, and other conference goers unknowingly swiping my reserved taxi. I eventually gave up on trying to find the taxi and found a bus, which took me to my first academic conference.

The door kept opening and closing while the bus
was moving for the whole hour-long ride

The conference topic was Service Management and the venue (or at least their restaurant) could have taken some notes (or invested in a better dishwasher and an exterminator). After the conference, I took a train (first class! for only an extra 10 euros) to Paris and then another to

Köln, Germany

This veggie loaf was actually disgusitng, but the first course
of cherries was delicious

On the Paris-Köln train they fed me and there was wifi, so I think the extra 10 bucks was worth it.

In between all the work conferences I've been going to, I've managed to fit in a little bit of ultimate as well. Aside from the twice weekly trainings, agility and strengthening workouts and extra throwing, my team has gone to (and performed quite well at) three tournaments, Disc Days Cologne,Windmill Windup in Amsterdam, and Skyline Cup in Amsterdam.

We won DDC, or at least the women's ultimate portion of it- the tournament also had Double Diisc Court and GUTS competitions as well as a frisbee dog showcase during halftime of the open final (so much for getting away from being "that sport with the dogs"). This was our first tournament with the out of town players, so we were able to work out some kinks and get in some good team bonding, we all have plaid warm-up shirts now, embroidered with a lime green "Z" for Zürich! If you want to read the German Frisbee Association's account of the weekend, it can be found here (in German).

So much style!

Parnü, Estonia

Time for Estonia, my second academic conference, and first conference presentation! On the way, I changed planes in Stockholm, so I could have my breakfast of champions: a Wienerbröd and Pressbyrån Coffee.

This conference was on the Baltic Sea and was also about Service Thinking. There were some useful sessions on paper writing and publishing. My presentation was the very last one of the conference and I think it went okay, or at least people told me they liked it; however, sanitation and water issues are not what these people are about, they were more into transportation, tourism or technology. The gala diner was at an old time farm and consisted of hearty food and homemade beer followed by traditional dancing, which the attendees had to participate in - this is consistent with one of the main tenets of Service Management: Co-creating value with the customer.

One of my advisers dancing! 

Parnü is a cute seaside town. Order the burrito at the Italian restaurant, if you are looking for adventure.

Awesome doors aren't just a Tallinn thing!

Rice, cheese, chicken and pineapple.
The salad and fruit on the side were excellent!

I took a bus to Riga, then a flight to

Amsterdam, The Netherlands
for a short stop at Windmill Windup, a massive tournament that I have been to three times before. Windmill was my first encounter with European Ultimate and it has been cool to see it evolve.

Good ol' Windmill!

I was in Amsterdam for about 24 hours. I was initially going to skip this tournament, but realized that I needed to play with my team against good competition before we go to Worlds. The three games that I was there for were really great preparation and I am glad I was able to be there. Aside from playing, I got to (ever so briefly) catch up with friends from other teams and countries. I also found out that someone other than my grandmother and other bloggers reads my blog (Hi, Herm!)

I also ate some stroopwafels!

The tournament organized an online contest to see who could most accurately predict the final rankings of all the divisions before the tournament started. My march madness brackets have been slipping, since I can no longer follow college basketball as easily as I could from the US, so I saw this as a chance at redemption. I got the second best score out of over two hundred entries! This is largely due to my team being seeded considerably lower than where I thought we would finish, which was second! I was frantically checking my phone for live tweets of the final during a session at the next conference that I went to in

Thessaloniki, Greece
I was sort of conferenced-out by the time I got to Greece. I could start to tell in Amsterdam that I needed to not be around masses of strangers for awhile, but I still enjoyed the food and the presentations. There was a special session on Base of the Pyramid research, where I presented my master thesis work and got to see what other service researchers are up to in this area.

Plus! All the signs are in Greek. I didn't know that things (other than formulas) were still commonly written in the Greek alphabet.

I don't know what this is, but it seems old and important.

Public viewing for the Greece-Columbia match. The local beer could not Fix the team's performance.

A store that only sells Feta (and Feta accoutrements, I assume)

(Air) Serbia
I traveled to and from Greece on Air Serbia, since they had the latest connection leaving Amsterdam that would get to the conference on time. And by that I mean it was scheduled to land at 2:35 AM and I needed to be at a session at 10. Of course the flight left Belgrade 90 minutes late, so I got to my hotel at about 4:30 and skipped the first session, which was fine. Air Serbia is in the midst of re-banding. Instead of just going down the isle asking, "Beef or Chicken?" there were menus distributed, which informed me what my choices were. I had found a menu from a previous flight in the seat pocket and both of the entrees were beef-chicken combos, so I was a little disappointed to have to choose between "air dried beef" and chicken.

Clockwise from bottom: My air-dried beef (cheese was a little tasteless), great ice cream from the Belgrade Airport, the menu from the previous flight (Maybe the plane was so late because they were making such complicated platings).

Luzern, Switzerland
The final round of the Swiss National Championships was in Luzern. We had to beat the other team from Zürich in order to make it to the finals, but that didn't happen (we let ourselves get down something like 6-11, tied it at 12s, and lost on universe), so we ended up getting third place. It was gross and rainy and a little disappointing.

Between the two days of play, we stayed at a teammate's house with a nice cherry tree and an awesome view of Mt. Pilatus, which I visited with my mom a few years ago (also visible from the fields).

Frankfurt, Germany
The last of the preparation tournaments was the Skyline Cup. This tournament had big ambitions, but it was its first year and scheduled at the same time as a big mixed tournament in Dublin and the some German national tournament, so the level and number of teams was not what anyone was really hoping for, at least in the women's division. The games were good for practicing staying onside during the pull, and refining a few plays and defenses, but we were never really tested.

After the tournament, I stayed in Frankfurt an extra day to meet with some German players in the sanitation game. I will hopefully be able to track some of their projects for case studies, as well as working together on some publications and putting together panels. It was really interesting to see how their offices work, since I could conceivably want to work for one of the organizations someday.

So, that is all for June and the first bit of July. I will probably have something up soon about what I do when I am not on the road, my recent trip to Germany to watch the World Cup Final, and my upcoming work trip to Kenya. Bis Bald!

Marseille and Bordeaux, France

06-07/09 USM: Uppsala, Sweden (coaching)
14-15/09 SM Dam (Women's nationals): Linköping, Sweden
21-23/09 Burla Beach Cup: Viareggio, Italy
26-29/09 eXtended European Ultimate Championship Finals: Bordeaux, France (watching/volunteering)
04-06/10 Oktoberfest Hat: München, Germany

I left Italy in a car with two other ultimate players who were headed to France. We did some sightseeing in Marseille and continued on (minus the guy who owned a car) to Bordeaux with a covoiturage (a carpooling website in France).

 This should give you a view of Marseille from the cathedral from all angles.

I decided to make a bridge between Viareggio and Munich with xEUCF because I don't have that much going on in Stockholm and it would have been a lot of trips to the airport, so I thought I'd just go watch some higher level club ultimate in France. As a volunteer, I kept time and the score of games, recording the assists and scores of each player. I was able to trade games so I could watch some matches of Sweden's VIF - I have several friends who play for this club, but most of them decided (for reasons of varying legitimacy) not to came to France - and Russia's Cosmic Girls with whom two of my Swedish Fish teammates were playing. The men tied for 5th and the ladies got 4th; both were disappointed in their performance.

An entire Swiss team going to the bathroom together before a match. Unity!
(the only photo I took at the fields...)

I spent the first two nights in a vacant VIF hotel room (some of the players could only come for the weekend) and moved to the free volunteer campsite for the rest of the tourney. I'm pretty sure there were fewer mosquitos at the camping than in the hotel!

After the tournament, I met up with some folks from the Frankfurt team for some sightseeing and crepes, before taking a morning train to Germany.  This was random and incredibly lucky. I was just going to find a hostel near the train station, but the wifi at the camping and hotel were really bad, so I was walking around the city center looking for internet (or a hostel) and ran into someone I knew on the team from Frankfurt, who lives and plays in Stockholm now, and their team took me in for the night!

Overall, volunteering was an okay experience. I met some cool people, but I watched so much ultimate it all just blended together. Someone asked me afterwards what the best game I watched was and it took me quite awhile to come up with an answer.

End of Semester

The end of the semester was really hectic. One morning there were 5 exams, some of which were open book. My testing seat looked like this:

The tests were generally frustrating; they covered half day seminars from the beginning of the semester and wrong answers were negative points. So the tests were short, but being exam ready on five different topics was rough.

That afternoon we went to an incinerator. It was pretty cool. Below you can see the giant claw that moves the garbage from the intake area to sorting belts. At residences recyclables are put into yellow bags and other stuff into blue bags, then they are optically sorted at the facility. I wanted to see the optical sorter in action (I had learned about a similar facility while at NCSU), but it wasn't running the day we went. We did get to look at the flame in the incinerator, although it didn't resemble anything we had learned about in our combustion couse. The loose trash, which doesn't get sorted is moved around using a giant claw (see video)... worst arcade game/prize ever?

bags to be sorted

optical sorters

It wasn't all work! People cooked for me! Anto made a delicious Indonesian meal and Caitlin made me a half-birthday fruit salad.

 


I biked with my mustachioed coursemates down to the new carrousel in Nantes to watch the Bastille Day fireworks, which were the most graceful I've ever seen. They were syced to delicate techno.

After the final IEP presentation (it went ok... I was poorly prepared) and a final night celebrating in Nantes (most of my friends went to an old shipbuilding warehouse that has been transformed into Crepetown), I took a train to Lyon where I met my cousin, her old exchange-sister, and Emily in Lyon.

Hipsterized fountain horse

We took naps at a roman amphitheater. The cathedral was beautiful and at the top of one of the huge hills. It was also a double decker: below the main level, which was full of mosaics, was another that was dedicated to Mary and was painted in pastels: blues, purple, green. So pretty!

Floor of the top level of the cathedral

We also visited some nearby beaujolais vineyards. The area isn't very touristy, so our actions were mainly dictated by our quest for food. We saw a church steeple and walked towards it, thinking there would be something there. There was a restaurant (closed), bakery (closed, but they deliver!), and a pharmacy, where the nice lady understood my poor french and let us know that there might be something in the next town over-- 5 km away. So we hiked there through the grape fields and there were two restaurants! One was closed and the other was open, but just for drinks. The kind men there informed us that there was a supermarket not too far away. It was next to a park, so we had a nice little picnic.

pretty house

little cousin in search of food

After the girls left for Paris, I met Max, a French intern that I worked with in Germany, for a hike near his grandparents house at the start of the alps, in the Massif de la Chartreuse. Aside from the hut with dozens of boar's feet, the views were stunning. After the hike, his parents took us to the lake that you can see from the mountain.

  

View of the lake from the summit

View of the summit from the lake

I flew to boston via Munich the next day. During the layover, I picked up a copy of my favorite newspaper and did a complicated interview/Fragebogen (survey) in german, which boosted my german-speaking confidence, which was sort of low after the trip to Baden-Baden. 

Thesis Presentations + IEP

Last week at school was pretty chill. We had some conferences to attend Friday, but most of the week was free to attend the thesis presentations of the cohort before us. There were some really great/interesting presentations/internships. It gave me a lot to think about with regard to what I want to do for my thesis. It is interesting to note that one of the presentations that everyone said was the best and "inspiring, even" did not get an A (I missed it), whereas good, but not fantastic ones that I saw did. I noted what questions were asked so that I can be ready to stun the jury this time next year. Several of the projects were in or required travel to Africa or Latin America, which could be fun.
At the first presentation, I took a full page of notes. At the rest of the presentations on the first two days I jotted down a few lines on each. By the third day,  I had pretty much taken to practicing my handwriting and taking down great quotations.

I don't yet know what I want to do for my thesis. We have so much freedom. I think it is more difficult to present, if you do a more business-focused project, rather than a research based-thesis; however, the evaluating juries consist of one faculty member from each consortium school, which means that the audience is really diverse and somewhat non-technical and purely technical report will be lost on them. Additionally, the engineering professors ask trying technical questions (as they should - it's your thesis defense), while the businessy guys propose horrible alternatives to your work. One management professor suggested transmitting hydro-produced electricity from southern-central Africa to Europe, nevermind the fact that you'd be building transmission lines trough countries with 2% electrification rates or that similar renewables programs in northern Africa are having trouble... Europe's demand for non-fossil derived fuels is more important.

 Each evening we had to stand beside the poster we had created for our Integrated Engineering Project (IEP) for two hours. This was poorly organized. No on knew who was evaluating us or how many profs were grading. On the last day, there were 17 posters and 1 professor who had to evaluate everyone's spiel, no one else was in the building, but we still had to stand attentively beside the poster on the off chance that someone walked by. We presented ours 2.5 hours into the session and there were several more to go after us. No one should have had to wait around for that long... my feet hurt so much, that I couldn't go out for the 4th of July.

Nevertheless, our project is pretty cool, we looked at a landfill in Mexico to see what the solid waste management practices were and what we could do about it. The results: barely existent and not much, but we have designed a fairly elegant solution. I'm just a little worried that we have expanded the scope too much and won't have a consistent level of quality in all of the aspects.

The most frequent question was "Why is it green?"

Some of my classmates organized an international dinner for the presenters and the jury members. It was fun to hang out with the older cohort after they were done presenting and soooo delicious. The first dish to disappear was the two Spanish tortillas (due to the large presence of professors from UPM?) followed closely by the homemade Mexican tortilla. Luckily the Mexican tortilla filling last much longer and I was able to create a baguette-taco. I made sweet potato-pecan couscous, an assortment of peanut butter and jelly/banana/honey sandwiches, and (eggless) chocolate chip cookie dough truffles. I stole the following photos form other social media sites:

Before

After

Dessert! Chocolate Cheese Cake, pineapple cups, apple crumble...

Concert and Dancing. (and lots of leftover baguettes)

I'm headed into a week with 8-16h classes every day + 5 exams and a field trip on one day! Yay Wednesday! Then the next week we have one more exam (that we know of, so far) and the final deadline for IEP with the paper, documentation and presentation of the semester long project due.  Then I'm (probably) off to the south of France for a few days before heading back to the States for 3ish+ weeks!

Baden-Württemberg + Paris

Hi. So, I haven't updated in a while because I was mostly just doing school work on campus. Leaving campus to go to the grocery store was a rare and extremely exciting event... I didn't think my musings on whether to buy bio applesauce or to spring for the pear-apple mix would be that interesting. My trusty readership has asked me for updates and I finally went on a little trip, so here ya go:

Last weekend I met up with a friend from highschool in Baden-Baden, Germany. This old resort town is known for its hot mineral springs with healing powers. We hiked part of the Panoramweg up to some cool castle ruins then back down through the city where we tasted the hot springs. 68C and very salty. I didn't really have any aliments that needed healing, but I (surprisingly) did not feel sore the next day.

First time in Deutschland as pork eater. 

Sunday, we headed to Freiburg where we checked out the cathedral, the Schlossberg park and its Aussichtsturm, and an organic  brewery. One thing that I really enjoy about crazy views like the one from the tower is that you get an idea of the energy situation of the area. We could see wind turbines, solar panels, and a biogas storage bubble.

Get out your 3D goggles- this was taken with the 3D panoramic setting on my camera... I don't think it worked. 

Afterwards, I  headed to Stuttgart to catch the night train to Paris. I spent my layover watching the England-Italy game and the Italian's celebration afterward was quite impressive. Driving around, waving flags and honking for over an hour. I can't imagine what their celebration was like when they defeated Germany a few days later. My favorite participant was the guy who just drove his Ferrari around: not honking or flag waving.

An uncomfortable train ride later, I woke up in Paris -- 3 hours after I expected to arrive. (There was one routing option where I could have changed trains in Metz and arrived at 7:30, but for some reason I opted to just stay on the same train). I got some breakfast, journeyed to the domestic train station to stash my stuff, and set off on foot to explore. I got a little disoriented (there is the Arc de Triomph and a smaller model of it in some park and my phone sent me to the miniature) and walking took much longer than I expected. I ate a a fancyish picnic lunch and took care of some business at the Swedish embassy (they have surprisingly little security).

Strawberry, mint, pepper ice cream.

I spent the rest of the afternoon chasing down the actual Arc, but didn't want to wait in a two hour line for a free ticket (I'll book online before I go next time) and catching random glances of la Tour Eiffel. I also hit up a grocery store with an american section and scored some bagels and soft baked cookies.

 

The trip reminded me just how awesome Germany is/can be (or maybe I was just glad to be outside of Nantes for a change). The jury is still out on Paris....

Just three weeks left in my semester and oh so much work left to be done. I'm giving a poster presentation on our semester-long project on Monday: "Analysis of a Municipal Solid Waste Landfill in Jalisco,

Mexico and Mitigation Strategies." (Yes, the title is a bit grammatically unsound, but our tutor insisted). I also need to arrange for my travel back to the US and around Europe for the summer. 

A+, cj

(that's short for à plus tard -- until later)

Cartel Prep

I've been practicing with the handball team in preparation for the Cartel, a tournament at the end of April between all of the Mines Ecoles in France (+ a few in Spain and Germany) where the schools compete in all of the sports for which they have common teams (read: not ultimate). You get points based on wins and losses and whether the event was a team or individual competition. This year it's in Ales, which is near the Med, and we have the two days after the competition off, so I hope to do a bit of travelling around afterwards.

I'm really enjoying handball, even though I'm pretty bad. Luckily (?), most of the team is new to the sport so we are all learning together. {All of the team sports compete at the same time, so most of the girls who were on the team for the regular season will play with other teams at the Cartel (soccer, rugby, volleyball)... there are only so many athletic girls at our small engineering school, they all play several sports -- when ME3 arrived on campus, we were all recruited heavily by the soccer and handball teams, even those of us who have never played sports before} You need the sort of body moves/fakes that are useful in basketball, which I don't currently possess. I finally felt like I was getting the hang of things the week before last and I sprained my left ankle taking a shot during a drill, but it's feeling much better now. At practice last night my shots went were I wanted them to about 60% of the time (I dropped 10% and the rest were off target), which is like a huge improvement... I've been trying to get my shots to go "bas" for so long. My ankle is kind of messing up my approach because it's in a brace and (like in ultimate) you push off with the foot opposite of the arm you are using, hopefully when i more to a smaller brace, it will be less of a hinderance. Here I am getting the handball equivalent of "skyed" during our first scrimmage:

More photos of the game can be found here.

The girls on the swim team for the Cartel are injured so I may be swimming in the 10x50m relay race with Emily (another ME3er who I convinced to play handball). We've been to the pool a few times and while I am slow, I'm not as slow as I expected after 6 years of not swimming competitively.  My cap and goggles are really pretty colors though, so it's all good.

So you can probably look forward to a post about the Cartel and our subsequent travels in the south of France.