tornado thoughts

Germany Day 7-11

It's more than 2 weeks since I last updated where I left off. Haha. A bit lost of the memory already there. Actually I had more fond memories during the first half of the trip. Oops.

On Day 7, we had a city tour at Schwelm. It's a small town (about the size of toa payoh I think) and it has an overhanging rail train. It is more than 100years old and is the one and only structure built in this manner in the world! As you can see from the pictures, it's a very small town and it took us 30min of the ride to 1 round of the circumference of the city. We also went to sit in a "sky chair" that took us up the hill to a "rebuilt castle". The castle was 70% destroyed during WWII and during the past 20-30years it was rebuilt to his former glory. We had some nice spitzel and cakes for lunch. At night, we went to some brewery to have dinner. Sian, it was only cold bread with cheese / ham plus beer. I had plain water and cold bread with cheese/ham for dinner. Yucks, lousy dinner. The koreans had the same sentiments but no choice, when we got back to hotel, there wasn't any eatery in sight to fill our disatisfaction.

Day 8, we went to a coal mining museum. The goverment decided to preserve this fairly new factory (about 30years of mining) because they feel that it's part of the heritage. By the time the tour ended, it was around 3pm and we were told that we have our own R&R. By the way, there are no shopping centres open at all on a sunday, thus we are left with looking around for nice restaurants to eat. The koreans and us decided to team up to visit a chinese restuarant. It was a good choice as it reminded us of home cooked food and to spur us on for another 2 days.

Day 9, we were "tricked" to go to a packaging exhibition as our supplier said that due to overwhelming requests, he decided to bring everyone of us there to take a look. We have to pay our own tickets (55 EURO PER TICKET!!!!) as our supplier do not have a booth and they are too "stingy" to pay for us. That's like S$120 per ticket. What was worse is that the whole exhibition was not our forte. We are mostly doing marine industry and not packaging. Paying S$120 to look at something only about 5% related is totally CMI. We had the time from 10am to 4pm. Gary and I walked around till 1pm to have our lunch. After that we found a cosy corner and slept till 330pm. Haha. At night, we went to another brewery. This time round, the building was refurbished from an indoor swimming pool. If you look at the pictures carefully, the central bar counter is actually where the pool was resided previously. The upper floors were the changing rooms. That was why the whole building is very "swimming pool" themed.

Day 10, we finally got a chance to visit our supplier's office & factory. Most of their items are outsourced from elsewhere and they do the assembly in house. Due to sensitive reasons, we are not allowed to take pictures of factories and machinery. We also had our technical training from morning 10am to 430pm where we also had our own country's sales report presentation. Man, this would be the first and last time I would want to do such presentation. Stress....

Day 11, we were still quite bitter over the 55Euro ticket and still have to find our way to take train from Schwelm to frankfurt airport. Another amazing race thingy. Thank God the supplier has a meeting a frankfurt that morning and offered to fetch us there early in the morning! Though we had to wait for 3hrs+, it was worth it! I would rather wait in the airport then to miss any transit while changing trains again.

That sums up my Germany experience 2008. Enjoy the pics! =)

posted by tornado @ 6:00 AM