How have you been?

Greetings to those of you who still follow my blog.  It's been over two months since I last posted, probably because life has been rather busy.

My kids returned to school.  One is in French Immersion, which has been a challenge in itself.  I spend more time helping her with her homework than I do working on my own.

Then my team got ready for our trip to Germany.  It felt like our project host dropped us like a hot potato.  I don't know if it was due to indiscretions by our project advisor (those golf course conversations get around, you know) or if things were rather crazy in the project host's world (we were supporting a real-life, live project that had highly sensitive content) and they were too busy reacting to internal demands and couldn't make time for us.  All the same, we felt a bit abandoned.

So, off we went to Germany.  Can I just say what a lovely country it is?  It is astoundingly beautiful there.  I am guessing that while rebuilding a country that was reduced to ruins, they made the strategic decision to plant a significant amount of trees in public places and along the autobahns.  Verdant was the word I used to describe it at one point, to which a team member said "You mean 'green'?".  Sigh.  The old walled town of Nuremberg (now a big city that has built up outside the walls), was rebuilt using the original stones.  It was just amazing.  As an anglophone with intermediate French skills, I found it incredibly easy to get around.  The CAGE distances aren't that great.  Sure, the language was different, but if you break things down phonetically, you can get the intent of most signs.  Body language was helpful in choosing pastries from the oh-so-many bakeries we strolled into.  (And everything was oh-so-good.)  Listening carefully was also a key learning.  Sitting on the subway in Frankfurt, I noticed that they had a digital display that followed the audio announcing the next station.  Well, "next station" is "nachte stationne" and sounds like "next station" with an accent.  I think an English-speaking person could very quickly adapt in the larger centres of Germany.  I didn't get the opportunity to get off the beaten path (although, at first, we thought our little diversion into Hameln was off the beaten path), so I didn't have to adapt to needing to know German in a more fluent manner, but managed quite nicely in the six cities we did visit.

The people we met were all wonderful.  Let's temper that with the fact that they were all essentially "bring business to Germany" sales people.  They were still lovely people.  (And I can't compare them to the people who never responded to our queries.)

Did I mention that I drove a fancy car on the autobahn?  The fancy car was too fancy for me.  I drive a minivan.  If you want to turn or brake... you do so very deliberately - almost with force.  Well, the fancy, German-engineered car I drove was some high-performance thing (I think I said it was a BMW on Facebook, but it turns out it was a high end Mercedes) that would veer off if you made only the slightest steering adjustment or would send passengers flying if you tapped the brakes.  I needed some time with it in an open parking lot before taking it out on the highway in the dark... but didn't really have the opportunity to do that.  I got up to 150km/h.  In my minivan, I gradually creep up to 140km/h+ before I wonder why I am passing everyone, so it wasn't really the idea of speed that unnerved me.  It was the fact that the car was too fancy.  It was an experience.  I don't need to do it again.

Well... we only have a month of classes left.  Sigh.  I am looking forward to the end because I am having trouble keeping my energy up.  On the other hand, I wonder what I am going to fill the void with.