Studying …

Hi everyone.

First of all: sorry that I didn’t write anything for such a long while. But there is a reason: I’m superbusy since the beginning of my semester, and also for the following weeks and months.

So what did I do the last couple of weeks? In fact I don’t have many lectures this semester, maybe ten per week (90 minutes each). But in addition to seven exams I’ve got six big as presentations this semester, and lots of assignments to do. Last week I gave a presentation on the degree of innovation of the company 3M, in two weeks I will give two presentations, one about a fictional web tv platform, one about the movie “Citizen Kane”, the next week I will talk about the implementation of Search Engine Optimisation within the structures of German publisher Gruner + Jahr and the following week I’m going to present a PR stategy for German bank Commerzbank.

Besides of studying I didn’t have much time, but I used the small amount of time to e.g. present a show on our university radio BiTS.fm, talking, about the presidential elections in the United States, the Formula 1 championship, and my semester in New Zealand. And last week I went to the Westfalenstadion in Dortmund to watch the championship match Borussia Dortmund vs. Eintracht Frankfurt – Dortmund won 4-0

Between December 24th and January 1st I have some days to study for my exams which will take place in the second week of January. Directly afterwards I will move to Cologne where I will live two months before my final semester starts, and where I will work as an intern for the biggest private German television chain (RTL).

Until then I will have heaps of work so I won’t have much time to write about my life

Family far away

It’s not only me, my whole family is quite “international”. Though I don’t have any foreign ancestors of whom I know we are all travelling a lot, and this week is a perfect example. It was only two weeks that I came back from my New Zealand – Spain – France trip when my whole family went abroad. My parents visited my grand-aunt in Los Angeles, something they had planned for years already. Probably one reason why they did it now is the fact that my 16-year-old sister Mirjam went to Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the same time. We have a two-week school holiday in the part of Germany where I live, and my school offers the opportunity to go to the States for a school exchange over the holidays and the following three weeks. So Mirjam is visiting Hayley who stayed at our house last year. And last but not least my sister didn’t want to stay home alone and flew to Spain where she’s visiting one of her many Spanish friends.

Of course I was a little jealous when I heard that my family is going to the US, but my classes started on October 1, and I thought I would have no time anyway. This changed when I saw my timetable: I had five lectures on Thursday, Friday was a German public holiday (the 18th anniversary of Germany’s Reunion) and so I had a long weekend and stayed in my family’s house in Hamm.

I’ve got to tell you that my family NEVER switches the heater on before the end of the autumn holidays. To me this makes no sense, because in my mind it depends on temperature and not season, but it’s my parents home and I don’t have much influence in their decisions. So you can imagine that this house has an interior temperature of maybe 13 degrees. And although I’m wearing a scarf and a jacket the whole day, drinking many cups of tea, I got a cold the second day. A cold house is one thing, but because my parents thought this house to be empty they also switched of warm water. Every morning I tried to take a cold shower, but with maybe 10 degrees cold water I died everytime, and so I asked friends (btw) if I could take a shower at their house. So I’m really looking forward to going back to Iserlohn this evening – where I will take a hot bath.

Chaotic flat reunion

When I came to my old flat in Iserlohn last week I was shocked. Not because of my new flatmates, Alex and Toralf, who are really nice, but because of a EUR 776 power bill. The power in our flat hasn’t been paid since May and on October 1 the public utilities would come to cut off our electricity. Well, that was today. I told my former flatmate that the matter was extremely urgent, and yesterday he transferred the money to the public utilities’ bank account. So today in the morning I called them and asked if the money was already there – it wasn’t. Eventually I got a mail from the States (where my former flatmate is studying at the moment) with a screenshot of the transaction attached. But it was already 3pm when I got the mail, and the official wanted to come between 1pm and 3pm. Fortunately you can be sure that they’re not punctual. So I ran down the stairs to look for a copy shop (no one of us had a printer), and who did I meet at the door? Well, guess …. right. I explained him the story and he told me that if I hurried up he could still accept the payment – with a fee, of course. So I ran to the closest internet cafe and printed the document. The whole procedure took five minutes because the first computer didn’t wanna print and the second didn’t work at all. In the end I got the print-out and we kept our electricity.

This was a very shocking first day at university. My day began at 8am with this semester’s first lecture “Strategic Marketing”, today’s only lecture. Tomorrow I’m gonna hear two lectures of “Reputation Management and Public Relations” and afterwards I’m gonna decide if I will choose an emphasis on marketing or PR – at the moment I’d more likely choose PR. Afterwards I’ve got three further lectures, two called “Workshop of Ideas” and one in “Media Psychology”.

To my displeasure I have to go to uni almost every Saturday of this semester. I’m not that convinced yet that I’m gonna like this semester. We will see … anyway this semester’s first “party” is already planned: as last year our flat will celebrate Christmas on October 24

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, we’re leaving Main Street Station to Hamm Main Station

- with two days delay –

Today is the day of my departure. In fact I am sitting in the Thalys train somewhere behind Brussels right now, heading to Cologne where I will arrive at 4.45pm. Yesterday my roommate Filippo left to his hometown Modena in Italy. We had a little sit together (let’s not call it party) the previous day and he was content to go home so it wasn’t really a sad good-bye. Actually most people are jealous if you tell them you’re leaving, although it seems to me that most people like their jobs. But I’m feeling the same: I don’t like but love my job and the people I’m working with. But after some time you go crazy because the whole place where you’re working is so unreal, imaginary, loud and childish. And your spare time is to party. Fortunately my roommates have a television and I found a internet hotspot so that at least I could receive some information about what’s happening in the real world.

So after visiting the park and taking heaps of pictures on another surprisingly beautiful sunny September day I went to the Disney Sport’s Bar, with real people. Every Monday is karaoke day at Sport’s Bar, and Nadine, a friend of mine who’s working at ticketing, was so annoyed about the lack of German karaoke songs that she ordered a DVD on Amazon. So we went there, with our own music, and sang – or better: shouted – 99 Luftballons (99 air ballons) by Nena and Verdammt ich lieb dich (Damn, I love you) by Matthias Reim. The atmosphere was hilarious: there were almost only us Germans and a group of Italians, and we were cheering each other when singing. Eventually we even sang an Italian song with them whose lyrics no one of us knew – not to be talked about the correct pronunciation. Later that evening we went to the New York Hotel bar and I wondered why we didn’t do that more often before. In fact I haven’t really hung out during my time as a cast member. It was a great night but it made me miss the people even more.

Missing people is another thing. Two years ago I had to fight hard not to cry because I met the coolest people ever and I was leaving most of them forever. But in the last two years I had those situations so often: leaving high school, university semester breaks, holidays, leaving Berlin, New Zealand, and now Disney again. Still it hurts a little but you’re getting used to it, and more importantly you learn how to deal with it. I start reading a book, just don’t sleep or think!

So this morning I had my room inspection after a four hours night. My train left at 12.20 from Chessy Station (Disneyland) and I went into the park a last time. Maike was so nice to accompany me the whole time, and because there was not much waiting time (and we knew the cast members) we took a last ride at Big Thunder Mountain.

In one and a half hours I will arrive in Cologne and meet Aline who’s seeing Cologne for the first time. And in some five hours I will be home. Finally J

Au revoir Disneyland

When I didn’t keep you up to date this is not because nothing happened but mainly because I was so busy that I didn’t find anytime. The time here is passing superfast. Thanks to some luck with my working hours I already had my last day on Friday. The two evenings before I went out with some co-workers whome I won’t see again. My last day at work was also a special day because I participated, among about twenty other (mostly Steam Train) cast members, in an evacuation simulation. We were told to sit in the train and just try to act like Disneyland visitors. The train would then stop suddenly behind the Diorama tunnel between Main Street and Frontierland. The conducteur arriere’s task was it then to inform and calm down the passengers and to prevent them from leaving the train. Eventually the train had to be evacuated and we had to walk back to Main Street Station via the railroad. The whole exercise was very funny, because – of course – we totally exaggerated our roles, jumping off the train, simulating every illness someone could have. So it was quite a funny ending of my contract with Disneyland.

Well, in fact it wasn’t the end of my contract, since this will be on Monday. But the last three days are my ‘week-end’ so that I could visit the park. However, yesterday I went to Paris a last time where I wanted to see the last few places I hadn’t (really) seen before. Strangely, besides of La Defense this was also the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysees with the Arc de Triomphe, the most famous of Paris’ buildings. Again I met Aline in Paris to have a guide and emergency translator with me. But first we went to the quarter of Saint Michel where I wanted to look through some old book stores. I found two interesting stores in which I bought two books I had read as a child, but whose contents I can’t remember at all: Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. After seeing the Eiffel Tower and argueing about its contribution to the city’s beauty (I personally think that during the day when it’s not enlightened, the tower makes Paris even uglier) we stopped because a painter wanted to paint the two of us. I told him three times that we wouldn’t pay for it, but still he wanted to paint us and kept saying “How expensive, see later”. So we let him paint us and after ten minutes when we saw the painting which didn’t even look like us at all, he told us that instead of the usual 70 euros we could have it for only 20. I then reminded him that I told him earlier we wouldn’t buy his picture, and ‘bargained him down’ (in fact I only refused to buy it) to 5 euros (which was a reduction of 93 per cent). Eventually he realised that we really wouldn’t buy it, and called us communists, which didn’t make any sense at all. And so he kept his picture of us.

Not far away from the Eiffel Tower is the Pont de l’Alma, today better known as Pont Diana or Diana Bridge. On the picture you see a memorial for freedom on the bridge under which already eleven years ago Princess Diana died in a car accident. The memorial is covered with letters to and pictures of Lady Di and spreads a sad atmosphere.

On the Champs-Elysees we saw some twenty people dressed in Schuetzenfest-like uniforms. We had not idea who they were and what they were doing. At first we thought this could have something to do with the pope who was in Paris on Friday and Saturday, but they didn’t look religious at all and when we asked they told us they came from the French region Normandie to enlighten a flame under the Arc de Triomphe. This sounded weird to us and we lost interest in them.

There was one last thing I wanted to do in Paris. One day when I was driving to La Opera with the metro, I registered that there was a subway station called Quatre Septembre, September 4th, my birthday. That day I was to tired to go back there but today, since it was my last day in Paris, I had to visit the station. So we went there and took a picture of me and the station sign, and later the street sign because there also is a street called rue du Quatre Septembre. I had no idea why the street and station were given this name, but fortunately there is Wikipedia that can help us again: if we believe the insecure sources of Wikipedia (which I do), it “is named for the date of September 4, 1870, the date Napoleon III fell and the Third French Republic was proclaimed”.

Today and tomorrow I will visit Disneyland again to say good-bye to the colleagues and friends I made and to take some more pictures. On Tuesday I will take the train back to Hamm, stopping at Brussels and Cologne, where I will meet Aline again and therefore stay one or two hours.

I admit: Paris can be beautiful

As a child I visited Paris and I remember that I really loved the city. When I came back two years ago, I was so looking forward to go to Paris, but when I got there I couldn’t but hate it: it was 40 degrees warm, the RER’s (trains) were more than full of old, stinking people and it was impossible to walk in Paris without running into people.

This summer I’ve been to Paris four times so far and my mind has changed a lot since ‘06. Maybe it’s only me but I think Paris is not as busy as it was then, and for sure it’s not as hot. Because I changed my mind of Paris I’ve already seen a lot more of the city than the last time. My first visit of happened to be already a month ago and brought me to Versailles. I went there with Johanna and Julia, two Disney co-workers who’re also living in the Boiserie, the ‘appartment complex’ I’m living in. We had beautiful weather so that we really could enjoy the day. Versailles is quite a bit outside of Paris so it takes a travel of two hours to get there from Marne-la-Vallee (which is also far away from Paris, but exactly on the other side).

Versailles is the royal palace of the French kings and from 1682 until the French revolution in 1789 it was France’s centre of power. Today most tourists visit the castle because of the famous Hall of Mirrors and the beautiful Gardens of Versailles. The Hall of Mirrors is a very pompous and therefore world-famous hall with a total of 357 mirrors in seventenn mirror-clad arches that reflect the seventeen arcaded windows that overlook the gardens. To enter the Palace of Versailles you have to pay thirteen euros (or more if you want to skip the queue and have a guided tour). The gardens, however, are free, and in my view equally worth seeing and at the same time very relaxing. The gardens are huge – we walked about three hours and did by far not see all of it. To provide you with some Wikipedia facts, they’ve got the size of 800 ha. and contain 200,000 trees, 50 water fountains, and there’s 210,000 flowers planted every year. As the Hall of Mirrors (and the whole castle, in fact) the gardens, too, are very pompous and I doubt that any of the French kings has ever fully seen their own garden. Today, you can often see people – such as us – sunbathing in the gardens and ercovering from the busy life of Paris city, or Disneyland (although I think that would be a minor part of the six million annual visitors). Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of Versailles but I hope that either Johanna or Julia can mail me some so that you can visualise it.

The next time I went to Paris with Aline and Svenja who are/were both working with me at Steam Train. We did all that touristy stuff – Notre Dame, Paris Beach (which is only some chaises at the Seine waterside), the Louvre, l’Hotel de Ville, and – of course – 10, rue Daguerre. 10, rue Daguerre, I have to explain, is where Julien is living with his perrot, and all of his friends, too, according to Decouvertes, a French learning book that almost every German French student has read at school. Sounds a little like a soap opera, and I think the concept is the same. As you can see on the last picture, 10, rue Daguerre is in reality an alcohol store

Again the weather was nice, almost perfect because it was sunny and warm but not hot and thus, very comfortable.

The third time I went to see Paris I had no luck with the weather. In fact I only went there because two friends of mine, Sina and Meike, were arriving the evening, and I wanted to surprise them and pick them up at the train station. I didn’t plan with this weather. Fortunately, Aline took pity on me and showed me the sights I didn’t see yet – Sacre Coeur church and the Moulin Rouge. I didn’t care much about the rain but most people did and so it amused me a lot to see all those tourists fighting with their umbrellas and the rain. On Fridays people under the age of 26 can visit the Louvre for free from 6pm on. I planned to do that because Sina and Meike would arrive at 11.30 and somehow I had to spend my time. So I went to the Louvre at 7pm to see the famous Mona Lisa, the Venus of Milan and some other art. I don’t know much about art and after half an hour I figured out that the museum was of no value to me without a guided tour or someone who could explain the paintings and sculptures to me. I left the Louvre early and wanted to discover some of Paris’ nightlife places. Because I accidentally stayed in the metro one stop too long, I didn’e leave at the Hotel de Ville but at Le Marais, the gay quarter of Paris. As you can see on one of the pictures the people there are really, really, really strange. So I didn’t stay too long and took the RER to Gare du Nord where Sina and Meike would arrive some time later.

With Sina and Meike I visited Disneyland the following day, and originally we had planned to party in Paris until 1pm when they had to catch their train back to Germany. The weather and our – completely unexpected – tiredness made us change our plans. But our actual planning wasn’t less crazy: after partying till 2.30am in La Boiserie, we got up at 4.30am to take the first RER to Paris. We arrived in Paris at 6.45am and continued directly to see the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysees (where for the first time ever I saw the eight lain Arche de Triomphe roundabout with only two cars driving around it), Notre Dame and the Louvre. Very tired I brought them to the train station and went back to Notre Dame where I attended the 12.45 mess, the first mess of my life and more a celebration of the cathedral than anything else. Tired I went home and instantly fell asleep. Paris can be beautiful, but for sure it is tiring.

Disneyland with Sari and Ilaf

On Wednesday, for the first time someone visited me here in the suburb of Paris: Sari, a friend from my university BiTS Iserlohn, and her brother Ilaf came to visit Paris, the Disneyland and me for two days. On Thursday we went to the Disneyland Resort Paris in the morning and stayed there the whole day. We had luck with our time because we almost didn’t have to wait for all Discoveryland attractions. So we went to Buzz Lightyear, Space Mountain, Honey I Shrunk the Audience and Star Tours in less than two hours – usually you’re waiting twice the time only to get in.

We then went to Frontierland to visit Phantom Manor, take a ride on Big Thunder Mountain and go to the Tarzan show. Unfortunately the waiting time in Frontierland was much longer by then and so we came to late for Tarzan and we drew a fastpass for Big Thunder Moutain – a card with which you can come back later without having to queue seventy minutes as the ‘normal’ visitors. Sari wanted to visit the Sleeping Beauty Castle and, of course, the many Disney boutiques. So we spent quite a long time at Fantasyland.

Later we watched the beginning of Disney’s Once Upon A Dream Parade and the Lion King show, a highly recommendable musical in the Videopolis building. After twelve hours in the park we were then very tired and went home without watching the Fantillusions Parade and the firework.

Back in La Boiserie, a German invited us to his home where we went later that night together with Maike from Steam Train and her flatmate. The 1.5 litre bottle of Polnish vodka made us very talkative so that we discussed very sensitive topics such as discrimation of women and men in workplace relations until 6 in the morning. Unfortunately we – or rather Sari and Ilaf – had to get up at 8am to take the bus/RER to Paris because their train back to Cologne was going at 12. I was way to tired and just brought them to the bus stop, even though I originally planned to spend my day in Paris.

A weird day

Today started great. I had to work from 2.30pm until 10.30pm so that I could sleep long, until 10am. When I opened my mailbox I found a letter from my almost-flatmate Tracy from New Zealand in there. The weather was beautiful, 28 degrees and a bright blue sky – sounds like a perfect day.

My workday always starts with a briefing in which among other things they tell us the number of today’s visitors. Today there were 45,000 people in the park, which is the highest number since I’ve been here (on Sunday there were only 29,000 because of the bad weather). For the enterprise this is good news, but for us that means more stress and more fretful guests. And in fact the stations were full of people, the waiting time everywhere around forty-five minutes. Nevertheless today’s team was nice and the day passed very fast because we were laughing a lot together.

Our train station at Main Street has some very heavy doors which we only open to let handycapped people sit down on the benches behind them. Two hours before end of work I opened the door to let a man with tourette sit down – and I got my finger caught in the door. It hurt and was bleeding a lot so that I had to go to First Aid to let them treat the finger.

Before this incident a rubbish bin at the station of Fantasyland was buring. “Unfortunately” it burned only a little so that I could kill the fire with some water instead of using an extinguisher – what I always wanted to do.

When I had finished work an English girl of maybe eight years told me – through her father – that I reminded her of Troy from the movie High School Musical 2. I haven’t seen that movie, so I asked them if that was a compliment, and they agreed (“she loves Troy”). Generally the guests were very friendly today which is very unusual for a busy hot day. So eventualy, although everyone kept asking me how my finger was going, I had a very funny day.

That changed when I got into the bus to go home: I took the wrong bus and instead of being home after nine minutes, I was sitting half an hour in that bus and didn’t even get off at my stop but a twenty minute walk – on which I then got lost – away.

Tomorrow, I will visit the castle and the gardens of Versailles with Johanna from Sweden and Julia from Germany. It’s supposed to be 32 degrees tomorrow so I’m pretty optimistic that it’s gonna be a great day.

Disneyland Summer

After two hot summer weeks thunderstorms finally brought colder air on Friday and everyone here seems to be happy about it. Working for Disneyland you have to wear costumes which are not really made for hot temperatures. And even though your shirts are being washed every day it takes only a minute until you start sweating and feeling soaked again.

Although working for Steam Train I have definitely one of the easiest and most interesting jobs in the park it is sometimes hard, and the heat is not really making it better. There are basically four peaks during the day when it gets very busy for us: after each of the three Tarzan shows when at the same time four hundred visitors tun to the train station of Frontierland and the last ones would’ve to wait almost two hours to catch a train. The other occasion is the end of the Once Upon A Dream Parade at 7.45 when Main Street Station is the first destinations for all visitors. Then, visitors are getting angry, don’t listen to what you tell them and do everything to drive you up the wall.

Last week I had such a day: I was at every station at the wrong time and one of our trains had a technical problem. On those days it is nice to have the little moments which make you enjoy your work nonetheless. And at Disneyland you have them every day. At this particular day I was chef du gare at Discoveryland, i.e. I mainly had to inform the visitors about their waiting time – in French, Englich, German, and Spanish – and to be ready to answer any questions. Most of the time the guest’s questions are the same. “Where is the next toilet?”, “When does the next Tarzan/Lion King/Winnie the Pooh show begin?”, “How long do we have to wait to get on the train?”, “Are you from Spain? Johannes sounds so Spanish.” (???), “How do we go to ‘Pirates of the Carribean’?”. But sometimes they also surprise you with their questions. That day, three girls kept asking me questions on where I was from, why I was working here, where I was living in Germany, if I knew Enschede, and so on. I brought them as conducteur arriere to Main Street Station where I usually go into my break. But this was the second last train, meaning no break for me but closing the station and waiting for the next train. The chef du gare, Christian, called me because he had three passengers who wanted me to stay with them on the train. So I went to the girls and told them that unfortunately I could not but I agreed to take a picture with them and was really sorry that they left because on that day that was the only funny ten minutes I had.

Fortunately most days are different. You have German girls (nine year old girls, I mean) on the train who try to impress you with their French (which basically is “Bonjour”, “Bonsoir”, “Merci”, “Ca va”, “Au revoir”, all used alone or optionally with the ending “Monsieur”) and who’re getting upset when you tell them in your most fluent German that you wish them a nice day and a lot of fun in the park. And you have German adults who congratulate you to your accentless German. In any case you’re laughing eventually and – except of upset nine year old girls – the people around you, too. And that’s what makes me feel quite happy about standing at the Disneyland Railroad Station, tomorrow, 9am.

Do you know your language?

Do you know the name of the seal with which you open a beverage can? Well, think about it for a moment. I asked myself this question in Spain four weeks ago and because I couldn’t answer it I asked some friends who were as helpless as I was. So I decided to ask the Duden (German dictionary, after Konrad Duden) editorial and as an answer they advised me to call their hotline for only EUR 1.86 (US$ 2.90) per minute. My next thought was that rather than spending that much money for a name I should comb through the world wide web. It took me ten seconds to find the German name and a lot more to laugh about how typically German the name is: Ring-Pull-Verschluss (the English word for it is pull-tab). And I found out that the beverage can will be coming back to Germany. Well, then: Cheers!