Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Freaking

I ran across this poster when we were walking through Zürich's train station. I think the direct translation is 'so near.' It reminded me of an old guy I worked with at the 'Lac La Belle' golf course back home. His name was Ray and whenever you would leave him he would hold up his fingers like this and say, "So Long." If he still lives in the same place maybe I will go visit him when I get back. He lives just down the road from my home in Wisconsin.

Speaking of home, this is my home in Wisconsin - cue the country music :) It is a real log home. We live on 16 acres of land. An acre is a weird unit, no one knows what is it. Well, 16 acres is about 12 full American football fields, or 6.5 hectares for our SI friends (who probably don't know what a hectare is, because I sure didn't. A hectare is 100 meters squared.)

Sean and I are both finishing up some work on our Joint Propulsion Conference abstracts. They are due today, yikes :) No big deal. I've been crunching through a bunch of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics and algebra verifying Dr. Flandro's latest work.

A duck in Zürich. I like ducks - who doesn't?

We had a couple guys swing by and take a look at the apartment. They were younger and one of them kept saying that the stairs were 'freaking.' Um, ok? I think he meant awesome or freaking awesome or cool or something like that. Either way, it was entertaining.

We've had this little oddity occurring lately. Whenever we ask someone if they speak English (sprechen zie English?) they usually do, however, they respond with 'bißchen' which basically means 'a little.' It's funny because we obviously don't speak German at this point. Either way, we know what it means, so we just go on conversing in English.

The odd thing about it all is that it seemed to start suddenly a few weeks ago, and now everyone says it. It is like some memo went around German telling them to screw with English speakers. I don't blame them :) -Eric

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