Marty's world

It’s time for the other named party to have their say on this blog. Not that I have any complaints about Rochelle’s posting, they’re great and I even log in occasionally to see what I’ve been up to. However, they lack the Marty perspective so, presuming somebody wants to hear my perspective here it is.

Today I went to a training of the University freiwillige Feuerweher (volunteer firefighters). Earlier in the week I had noticed them working at the station and armed with a prepared speech of “Ich bein Feuermann aus Neuseeland” and not much else I went up and asked to look at their equipment. Communication was difficult but I got the idea that they wanted me to return at 7:30 am on Friday. So not knowing what I was turning up to I arrived to discover they had found a firefighter who spoke a little English and they expected me to attend their training. It was great fun, very different gear to New Zealand: no Breathing Apparatus, no Level Twos (high temperature protective clothing) and no water tank on the truck. In fact they had no pump running off the truck engine; instead they had two portable water pumps, the larger one being an adapted microlight engine. I guess this might be because they have to manoeuvre amongst a rabbit warren of buildings many dating from about 1910. As might be expected, running out the hoses and setting up a standpipe were pretty similar to NZ. At the conclusion of the training they presented me with a jacket which was awesome.

As Rochelle has earlier said “they don’t all speak English”. It’s amazing what this has done to me; I just keep quiet and hope nobody talks to me, which obviously doesn’t help improve my German. The phone often goes in my office for either Alex or Sabine and I’ve started answering and faking it for as long as possible before I’m forced to say “Mine Deutsch ist nicht gut, sprechen English?” One caller had the grace to sound surprised when I said this, which was nice.

I’ve been sampling the local beers and generally have to say they’re fantastic, but I have two warnings for people wishing to do the same. Firstly, Diät means diet; not knowing this I sampled a less than great Pilsner. Secondly, they drink sweet beer! Lolly water! Syrup! And it comes disguised as a dark beer which makes it all the more disappointing. So, I’ve made enquiries and the way to avoid such a disgraceful waste of hops is to ask for an Herb Bier which means a sharp/tart beer. Previously, I’d actually avoided the Herb beers thinking they were the German equivalent of the horrible summer ales NZ produces. Ein bier bitte can only take you so far I guess.

I went to a conference the other day, about 130 pavement engineers from all over Germany attended. Obviously it was all in German and occasionally I thought I knew what was going on. Sabine sat beside me for many of the sessions and whispered what going on, which generally revealed I had no idea. The strangest moment was when it all suddenly made sense; a second later I realized that was because he was quoting a paper written in English. On a tangent from pavement engineering (Straßenbau), 60% of the inner city stormwater and sewer reticulation is a mixed system, which explains why walking around the inner city produces the occasional olfactory sensation.

The roads all have cycle lanes, everywhere! Well, the main roads anyway. All the crossings have cycle lane painted on too (seems you can ride on footpath if you want, in fact it seems encouraged, but it’s a 50 euro fine if you ride the wrong way). There are more bike parks than car parks around the uni and they're all full. I’d thought that it was amazing what you can do with a society where cars are expensive and you make riding on the road safe. I’d been pondering how they achieved this and had the opportunity to speak with a traffic engineer the other day. He said the cycle lanes are a product of them deciding to protect the “fragile users”, namely walkers and cyclists. Furthermore, the cycle lane network that I'm so impressed with is, according to him, a poor example. I would be nice if we had such poor examples in NZ, I might ride on the roads more.

Where we went last weekend is the closest rock climbing area to Dresden. The rock is all sandstone. I had a quick boulder, and I’d have to say it’s more sand climbing. All the holds are sandy and cleaning the hold generates more sand! To top it off they have to use slings for protection because you can't bolt it! It wasn’t really my cup of tea; in preference I’d take Long Beach any day.

Work has been going well. Sabine generated our first model today after I managed to pull out the vertical load data from a CAPTIF test. In theory I should have been able to generate the longitudinal and transverse loadings today also but experiments and theory never match do they? So a lot more fudging to do before we can have a full tyre model but it’s well on the way. In a week or two we’re off to visit the HAMM factory to obtain information on their compaction equipment which should be interesting.