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Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Grenoble and Le Tour de France!

July 22 - 24:
I just had the most amazing time in Grenoble, France!  My friend Dusty and I decided last minute to see the second to last leg of the Tour de France.  This leg:  the time trials in Grenoble. 
Part of the reason this trip was so last minute was due to the uncertainty of a place to stay in Grenoble for the weekend.  Hostels were outrageously expensive, and we had been only been in touch briefly with a couchsurfing host in the area.  Ultimately, we got a hold of the host and stayed with her the whole time.

But wait, I'm skipping ahead!  This whole trip was a jam packed adventure and deserves recapitulation from the very start.  First, the initial trainride.  It takes at least 12 hours by train to get from Munich to Grenoble, and without a book to occupy me, the only entertainment I had the whole time was my Eurorail booklet, DB magazine (it's like Skymall for trains), and my window seat.  Oh, also I was out til 3am the night before wishing a group of exchange students farewell in the Biergarten.  Yeah, I had my dreams for entertainment too...

packed and ready

First layover in Strasbourg.

Lyon, I'm finally walking around in France!

1.5 hours out of Grenoble and it starts raining. Noooooo!
But the weather pulls through.

Awesome reflection of the nearby mountains.  Taken as I wait for my host to find me.

Left from Munich on Friday morning at 07:12 and arrived in Grenoble at 19:45.  In between had 4 layovers, and two of them were long enough get off the train and run to nearby grocery stores for snacks.  Over the last month I have become the biggest fan of fresh cheese and bread as a perfectly satiable snack.  Now I'm obsessed with finding the perfect cheese - bread combo.

Caitlin              Auralia
Alright, so I finally arrive in Grenoble and am greeted by my Couchsurfing host and a fellow surfer.  Auralia (the host) introduces me to Caitlin (couchsurfer from Australia) and has barely shown me around her place when she informs us we must prepare our costumes for a party down the street.

thrown together party attire

Apparently all the couchsurfing hosts in the area throw parties every few weeks, and this weekend's party was themed 'crazy'.  Good thing I came prepared with my Russian hat and safety vest!  We changed and headed out just in time to rendezvous with Dusty as he arrived at the train station.

The party was way fun...



 

...right up until the point where Caitlin got seriously sick and we (Dusty, Auralia, and I) had to carry her all the way home.  This definitely was not how we pictured our trip turning out.  The next day Caitlin was as hung over as she was hammered the night before, and muuuuch less talkative.  But that was alright because Dusty and I were so preoccupied by the race!

The time trials started at 10am.  Dusty and I could not have been more stoked being amongst such enthusiastic bike fans and around such expensive, sexy bikes!
Crazy Ausie fans, their sign says, ''Crikey Cadel!''



We're at the Tour, life is good.

Check out the wing/hinge design of this fork!  So crazy expensive.  One of these bikes is easily 10,000 dollars!   


The racers were sent in order of ranking from slowest to fastest every minute until the last 20 or so riders, who were sent every 2 minutes.  It took 5 or 6 hours for the last 20 riders to be up, so we mostly just wandered around the course, snacking on baguettes, and accumulating swag.

Mark Cavendish

Thomas Voeckler's fanclub unfortunately just wasn't enough.
The man himself, my hero, Thomas Voeckler.
Cadel Evans (this year's champion)
Frank Schleck (third place)

Andy Schleck (Second place)


awards = mayhem
After the race we pushed and shoved our way through the crowd only to completely miss the awards ceremony.  That was fine though, the day had been a total success and we didn't need to see the ceremony to know who had one.  Tired of the masses, we peaced out and headed for Auralia's apartment.  

Along the way, we got sidetracked by the Bastille, a fortress circa 1470 overlooking the city just north of the finish line.  An hour later, we were at the top enjoying a breathtaking view of the city.  









We finally got back to the apartment around 20:00 totally drained to find Auralia cooking for us! Talk about best CouchSurfing host ever, she had a two course meal planned for us and proceeded to stuff us with the most amazing spaghetti I may have ever had.  The French can cook!



We were pretty kaput after that and made our way to bed like zombies.  The next day my train was scheduled to leave at 07:46, so I didn't feel so bad getting to bed by midnight instead of staying up with Auralia's friends.  We couldn't keep our eyes open any longer anyway.

Dusty, 'Couch Surfing'...
The following morning I barely made it to the station in time to catch my train.  After getting briefly lost running through the city, I boarded my train with one minute to spare.  Yikes!  On the way out of Grenoble, I slept for the first 2 hours before pulling out my Eurorail timetable booklet and trying to figure out how I could rearrange my travel schedule to spend some time in on the the cities I would have to stop over in.  Stuttgart lent itself nicely to a 3 hour layover if I wanted to arrive in Munich by midnight, so I switched trains in Strasbourg and headed for Stuttgart!

After I arrived, my first destination in Stuttgart was the city's central park next to the train station.  In this park, I stumbled on to a bocce ball tournament!  Hundreds of people gathered around two teams on the hard packed dirt watching in earnest as the players conspired against eachother.   One team would throw a ball, then a player from the opposing team would furrow his brow, walk over to his partner, point at the balls on the ground and grunt a lot, and finally after 3 or 4 minutes of 'strategizing' make his throw.  I've never seen such focus in such a simple game. I finally left when the measuring tapes came out and spent the next few hours wandering around the city.





My final destination in Stuttgart was the park I originated in.  Here, I spread out my sleeping pad, unpacked my cheese and baguette, and people watched for a bit.  Sometimes it's just as satisfying to let the world happen around you than run around trying to see as much of a new place as possible.  After about 10 minutes to myself a man wandered by singing Sinatra's 'Mack the Knife' and caught my attention.  After all, who knows Sinatra in Europe?  

Claus turned out to be a 60yo gypsy whose life goal is to get to the US to sing Sinatra covers.  He is afraid of flying, doesn't have a job, and cannot speak english, but the similarity between this guys voice and Sinatra's was remarkable!  We talked at length about classic jazz tunes, and modern music.  He told me he thinks the world is broken because people don't listen to Sinatra anymore, haha.  While I thought he was crazy for saying that at the time, I now realize that this comment is no more than an insight into how dedicated he is to one man's music.  His world revolves around Sinatra, not the sun. 


 In the end, Claus almost made me miss my train back to Munich!  I caught the last one with no less than 30 seconds to spare before the doors closed and it took off.  Three hours later I was back home from this truly epic weekend.  

Thanks for reading, it was a blast!
Myles

Meiner Arbeit (my work): A synopsis of my internship here in Munich

Alright, I think the brunt of my blogs have so far been all about what exciting things I have been doing on the weekends, but since July 11, five sevenths of my life has been devoted to my internship.  It's a pretty large portion of my life, so I think it's worth mentioning here.


My 'Praktikum', as the Germans call it, is in the Combustion Engines Labratory at my university.  In this labratory there are about 10 undergraduate/masters students working on a total of 6 different projects.  The projects all consist of motors mounted to steel frames and set up on their own 'test bench' - which is a vibration resistant block of cement (10' x 10' x 10'!) which keeps the engine from vibrating the surrounding building all day while the engine runs.  From each engine runs about 100 different cables hooked to measuring devices from each of the components on the motor (temperature sensors for heated parts, and pressure sensors for all fuel and oil regulation components) to the a series of computers in a monitoring station.  Facing each test bench is a row of blast-proof windows looking into the monitoring area.  Here, we can sit at the computer control boards, regulate stuff, and make sure that if anything blows up nobody will get hurt.

The projects are pretty cool.  One guy is working on maximizing the fuel efficiency of the newest HOREX motorcycle engine.  I had never heard of HOREX before I started work here, but they make sleek bikes!


Another guy, Peter, is working on a project for some truck company called Alantum.  Peter's job is to find the right running conditions of the engine to minimize the carbon/NOx emissions of a 16 cylinder truck engine.  His engine is easily the loudest, is right next to our test bench, and is always running.  Any given day he'll come to work saying something like, ''I was thinking about this project all night, and it hit me that all I have to do to reduce the emissions might be to reduce the length of the exhaust pipe!''  He'll then go on to give some wild theoretical explanation as to why this new realization is valid, and then spends the rest of his day testing the hunch.  Usually, he leaves disappointed, having maybe reduced carbon emissions, but reciprocally increased NOx emissions beyond the legal limit, or vis versa.  Sometimes he makes serious headway though, and we all celebrate with cookies and coffee.

It's like that everyday, someone makes minor headway while the rest leave having learned what not to do.

My team's project focuses on reducing the friction losses of a 2012 or 2013 BMW Mini Cooper engine (we don't know the year, and they won't tell us).  To do this, we hook the Mini engine to a powerful electric motor and run the electric motor.  By knowing how much energy it takes to power the electric motor, we can find out how much friction is lost to the Mini engine by observing how much energy is lost to torque based on how fast we run the motor.  This isn't accurate enough for BMW though.  In order to optimize the friction losses of our engine, we must first find what percentage of the total friction loss is due to each individual component, so we run, stop, remove a component (like the turbocharger, or the oil pump, etc.), run again, test for friction, and compare.  It's a nightmare of calculations, records, and electrical wiring to observe everything, but super exciting to be a part of.  I mean, I'm indirectly working for BMW on an engine that's not even in production yet!  Awesome.

Currently, most of my team is on vacation.  Since I'm never given big picture tasks (so it goes for interns), this means that my time lately has been my own.  When there's nothing to do at work, you can only check your emails so many times a day before you start to totally lose faith in the workforce.  Therefore, I started learning two different computer programs, Catia and Abaqus, to occupy my time.  I will spare you the nerdy details of these programs, but ultimately they're drafting programs that I can use to work on my own projects.

My latest project is a bit bad-natured.  It's a collapsible rainbow spraypainter.  I must admit, the idea wasn't originally mine, but I love it nonetheless and have a few idea on how to improve the original design.  Here's where I got the idea (left).  My idea is to do the same thing without the bike, without the electronics, and all with cables and a collapsible arm!


Here's my preliminary sketch and design in Catia and right now I am working on creating a stress analysis of the forces exerted on the sheet metal bracket. Uh oh, nerd alert...




So that's my job!  It's quite boring some days, and super cool others.  The most important thing I have learned from this job is that I will never go into the auto industry.  Hey, at least now I know.

Thanks for reading!

Myles