AMD 2

For AMD 2 my coworkers and I drank beer over lunch and attempted to speak in German while reminiscing about our travels to Germany. Our company does automotive manufacturing quality testing all around the world, and as Germany is a huge automotive supplier so we do quite a bit of business there. The people that I spoke with had spent most of their time in Frankfurt and Dusseldorf, while I spent most of my time in Hamburg and Berlin, so we got to learn a good bit about the respective places. Although none of us were very fluent in German, it was fun to attempt to converse over lunch. It was interesting to learn how densely populated the western part of Germany is, and how much manufacturing is done there.

My favorite story from the afternoon was from a younger employee who arrived in Dusseldorf at a time when all of the hotels were full and was put up in the hotel owner's girlfriend's parent's house. Lucky for him they were nice people and the older woman spoke a good deal of English. On his last day in the "hotel" they even cooked him dinner and gave him a quarter barrel of their home brewed beer, which he had shipped back to America.

I'm looking forward to improving my verbal skills so that I can have experiences like this when I get shipped out to help the Germans improve their automotive manufacturing processes.