The First Ride

30-Aug-08

This morning, I rode my bike to Bonn. It was, without doubt the best road ride I’ve ever done. I forgot my camera.

Having heard it was possible to bike from Köln to Bonn on bike paths, I decided to wake up early Saturday morning to give it a go. I stretched while eating my granola and yogurt and assembled my gear. I put on my new padded bike tights, undoubtedly the most expensive piece of clothing I wear that I’ll try not to be seen in, and after I regulated my tire pressure, I hit the road. After a few minutes I was on the bike path and after a few kilometers I was out of the city.

Riding a bike early in the morning is a fantastic sensation. Your legs feel fresh and powerful, the air is crisp and calm, and the fluid clicking of the chain and sprockets is relaxing and exciting at the same time. After a few kilometers of weaving with the paved path along the Rhine, it opened up to fast fields of grass and corn that appeared infinite because of the heavy fog. Visibility dropped drastically but was mostly restored when I took my sunglasses off. I sped down the path taking in all of the scenery. The fields, the river, the slow barges. It was all so picturesque.

The path to Bonn on the east side of the Rhine is a daisy chain of quaint small towns linked with wide open bike roads. At that time in the morning, the first town was asleep but as the kilometers and minutes ticked past, I saw the typical German town awaken in a sort of quasi stop motion animation sort of way. The early birds walked their dogs. The gardeners prune their shrubberies. The bakeries erect their canopies. The towns folk return home with fresh bread and sunflowers in their bike baskets. It was as if I had biked back in history or into another world. It was exactly what I would have expected to see in a small German town, and I was really surprised. I asked a couple wearing wool sweaters and walking their dog for directions and rolled down the cobblestone road past the small church and cemetery.

As I went on, I passed families out for a Saturday bike ride, a weathered old harbor harboring old weathered gentlemen, a herd of goats, and more beautiful scenery than I’m able to account. It was all so fresh, so typical, yet so extraordinary. Only the pain in my legs kept me connected to the real world.

Including scenic stops and getting lost, the trip to Bonn took about two hours and I rode about 40km. In Bonn I grabbed a cheesy pretzel and a chocolate croissant, I joined the old cannons that overlook the river from an old fortified picnic bench, and I started to think about how I would describe the last two hours. Fantastic.

Mobile

As of 1400 today, I am mobile. I just purchased a 10 year old road bike from a middle aged gentleman in Horrem, about 30 minutes out of Koeln. It has a steel Italian frame, Gios, and the complete Shimano 105 component set including pedals and shoes! If I was going to build a bike to have here, this would have been it, more or less. I just road maybe 10 miles or so and it feels great! I'm still not convinced a road bike is the proper tool for the European inter-city commute but it fits well and I got a great deal so I'll ride it. Europe just shrunk a bit. Happy trails!

-H

Radio

26.Aug.08

When I’m in my room, I listen to EinsLive, a local radio station somewhere in the 80s or low 90s in the FM band. It is a pop and rock station so they play a lot of American and European hits, chart toppers, and they generally do a good job at picking songs. I enjoy it more than radio stations back in the States, perhaps because there are no commercials and they also play more European music that doesn’t make it to America. One of the big things I like about is the news bits in between. Based on my listening experience, pop stations in the States keep their listeners up to date with the latest celebrity information, and the life details of the DJs and what they did last weekend. I don’t care about celebrities’ marital status or children’s names and I certainly don’t want to hear exaggerated tales about a DJ’s weekend. EinsLive has breaks in the music with interviews and news about politics, economics, science, and people. It’s fantastic.

I think the hype of something has a lot to do with the public opinion towards it. There are lots of people that became celebrities mostly because they inundated the media market with images and stories. People see and hear so much that they want to see and hear more and a celebrity is born. This effect also applies to music. Songs that would otherwise be considered not good but get a lot of air time and hype are regarded as good. In my last weeks in the states, I heard something on the pop music station that was terrible. At first, I assumed it was a satirical spoof of a song because it was so ridiculous and bad. Beat, lyrics, everything. Then the DJ came on and said “Today’s BEST music.” I shed a tear.

That song was played often and people actually requested it! Maybe I’m just getting old and the kids these days have evolved to appreciate forms of music I may never understand, or maybe the artist and song were poured onto the general public by the barrel. I digress.

The German folks are really into conversations. Many of my friends here said they got into deep conversations about politics within minutes of meeting their host families. They seem to take pride in being informed on what is going on globally and locally. That got me thinking: what if we stopped running clips about celebrities misbehaving and replaced that airtime with news, economics, science, and serious interviews? What if our pop music stations and trendy TV shows had important information rather than garbage? Would the kids talk about important political and social issues? Would people spend less time observing bad roll models? Perhaps. I’d like to see what would happen.

Batman

24.Aug.08

“Knight of Darkness”

I just got back from the newest Batman movie with Philip and one of his friends. The whole movie was dubbed in German except the name “Batman” (apparently “Fledermausmensch” doesn’t have quite the appeal). I’ll describe what the German movie going experience is like:

As the film just came out a few days ago, we phoned ahead and got a reservation number, 22, which we used at the window to get our tickets. The theater had a two piece curtain that separated at the middle when it was time to see stuff. We spent the first half an hour or so learning what we need to buy and what movies we will need to see in the future. The first commercial was for cigarettes, something we don’t get in the States. It was cowboys riding horses in the great planes of America, herding cattle, and looking over majestic canyons while sipping on cancer. Interesting side note: all tobacco products need to have a big label on them that says in black and white (literally) that smoking is bad. I’ve seen “Rauchen kann toedlich sein” which means “Smoking can be deadly” but there are also labels that say “smoking harms you and others around you”.

The movie was good but I had to concentrate to understand what the people were saying so it wasn’t quite as relaxing as the original version would be. The other difference I found interesting was a “Pause” right in the middle so we could get up, stretch, pick up some more sweets, and discuss the first half. House lights on, curtain closed, elevator music playing, the whole thing. A few minutes later, we got back to our seats and watched the rest. Interesting.

-H

Concerts and Düsseldorf

This is a sweet manhole cover in Düsseldorf.

I caught a Sitar/Guitar and Indian/Asian Percussion concert the other night. It was on the ground floor of an unfinished building so the benches for the 30 or so audience members were on bare concrete floors and there was temporary lighting hanging from the bare ceiling. The music was relaxing and would have gone great with that Indian flat bread and hummus. The whole scene had a cool vibe to it. It was a free concert and people in the community gathered where they could find space just to enjoy some international music. Cool stuff. I got a CD.

My second concert experience this week was a bit different. I saw the advertisement for gospel music and I dashed out the door to the U-Bahn to make it to the old church in time for the performance. It turned out to be a youth choir (middle-high school) singing songs that reminded me of my middle-high school Catholic school days. It was kind of comforting in that respect but also a little disconcerting. All of the songs were in English. They did a fantastic job with them all but I was a bit disappointed that they didn’t sing German songs. Who is going to propagate German traditional songs through generations if not the Germans? Sometimes I think there is too much American influence abroad and I worry about cultures losing their potency of traditions and such.

I went to Düsseldorf today with six other Americans in the CBXY program. Düsseldorf is known as the fashion capital of Germany and we saw evidence of this claim in the windows filled with hip and trendy mannequins. And the cars! I saw a Ferrari 599, a new Bentley, more Porsche Turbos than I could count, an original Mercedes Gullwing, a Maybach, an Alfa Romeo Guilia, and a Mercedes Benz 190e 2.5-16v Cosworth. The streets were really crowded with people, tourists and residents, and there were a lot of restaurants, cafés, and brew houses in the Altstadt (oldtown) where we spent most of our time. The city has a nice waterfront area as well. Delightful day trip.

-H

Nighttime in the City

After a concert in the city, I took the long way home on foot to take advantage of the crisp, after-rain air. There's something quite relaxing about a damp evening and a consistent footstep, like the beat to the music of a sleeping city. Ahhhhh. Here are some pictures I took:


Cool shapes and lines.


Different angle.


The Dom.


The Dom. Front facade.


The Dom, but I forgot to smile.


The Dom Bridge!
Have a nice day,
-H

German vs. Engineering

There are lots of different things in the world, and some of them are similar. Profound, I know, but allow me to explain. I have spent a sizable bit of time learning how to engineer stuff and do math. For those who may not be familiar with this sort of thing, a good portion of engineering and math is understanding rules and applying them to translate a situation into something that makes sense. That is a broad sweeping generalization but we can apply it to a specific example.

We’ll take something simple, like an airplane, and we want to know if it will fly. We first make assumptions about the situation: the air is normal, the plane won’t randomly fall apart, and the rules we use are correct. If we have the specs of the airplane, the problem is essentially complete. Will it fly? Of course, the rules and specs tell us it will.

Ah, if it were only that easy. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for us to look at specs and rules and see something meaningful. Sooooo, we must simply translate the answer into a form that makes sense. More specifically, plug in the airplane specs into flight calculations (based on our rules) and ultimately find that the weight is less than the lift, or something.

Same with math. If we are solving a problem (rather than proving relationships or some other theory type thing) we are simply using rules to translate what we have into a more recognizable form.

The way to get good at math or engineering is to really know the rules and formulas. Know, like understand where everything comes from and why it only works a certain way (tangent: that is why mathematical proofs are important). You’ve got to make the rules your own so you can command them to work for you. A fundamental understanding of the rules allows for adaptation and flexibility when solving problems. The opposite of that is only understanding how to get an answer for a specific problem. This is not good; rarely does one encounter an identical problem. It’s much better to be flexible.

However, at the moment, I am a German language student and I find many similarities with the styles of learning. We are learning grammar, the logical and mathematical aspects of language. We learn new words, verbs, and constructions, different rules that can be applied to different situations. Like in engineering and math courses, we learn the rules, and practice examples. The only way to really remember a grammatical construction is to understand the rules behind it and a good understanding helps the speaker to be flexible in building sentences and phrases.

When I encounter a text or conversation in German, it is similar to an engineering problem. The answer (complete understanding, or English translation) is mostly right in front of me. I have the specifications (the German sentences) and the grammatical rules so all I have to do is literally translate the German into a form that is more recognizable. My goal is naturally to know all of the rules so I am equipped to handle all sorts of German language. As rules get used more frequently (both German and math), they get engraved into the brain and the translation happens quicker, with the rules being applied instantly in the subconscious. That is what I would call language fluency or mathematical competency.

As languages go, German is pretty logical and I’m enjoying working at identifying rules and practicing on my host family. It would seem engineering and languages are not as different as they are made out to be. Well, at least in learning styles.

Fantastisch.

-H