Heidelberg and stuff

It’s Thursday afternoon back in Dresden, and my experiments are finally beginning to give results (although not particularly good ones yet!). The sun is shining and I rode into work today on my bike (the journey took three quarters of an hour and was annoyingly hot). I got back from the Rise meeting in Heidelberg on Sunday evening, having stopped off for lunch in Frankfurt.

Heidelberg was amazingly good fun. Unfortunately to get there in time for registration/free lunch we had to wake up at 5 AM, so we all arrived tired and confused at Dresden Hauptbahnhoff before 6, changed at Leipzig, changed again at Frankfurt, got on the world’s slowest train to Heidelberg, joined a gigantic group of fellow Rise students at the bus stop, squished into the bus and finally made it to the youth hostel in time. At least we got the free lunch though!

Barring a trip to New York when I was really young, I’ve never been to America, or really met Americans in large groups, so the whole thing was a bit of a culture shock! I would need to check the mailing list, but I think we had people from pretty much every state. I have weird flashback memories of a short Hawaiian with a pony-tail insisting that America technically hadn’t fought any wars since WW2 (Vietnam apparently a police action), a dude in a 3 piece suit with a skateboard telling me what types of drugs are supposed to be the most common in Berlin, Lisa the Long-Islander telling me that it was actually pronounced Long-guy-land, a Californian telling everyone he gets drunk with his friends and then tunes into the UK parliament channel on satellite because it’s so funny, and massive cheers from the Idaho contingent when in the opening lecture when the lady from the American embassy said that “in ten years you could be anywhere from a large company in London to a farm in Idaho”. With hindsight I should have cheered when she said London, but that would probably have been un-British.

On top of that there were the people from elsewhere; Diego from Peru who told me that they were trying to arm the students on the Campus at the Christian University of Texas, a load of Québécois teaching me to swear in French-Canadian, Dan from Gabon who actually spoke proper French (this started an arguement with the Québécois who insisted that they did, and French French had been corrupted somehow), and Carrie the Canadian-Californian who I managed to crack up at the inauguration speach in the rather beautiful Old Hall of Heidelberg University, when two consecutive speakers described the Rise exchange as a “Vin vin situvation”.

On Friday we all went off to visit German companies – I ended up in the group that went to Boehringer pharmaceuticals (the 2nd biggest Pharma company in Germany, with 41,000 employees, an annual turnover of around 10 billion Euros, with an über cool soft-rock backing track to their corporate video and a really good lunch). I stopped studying chemistry when I was 16 so most of the processes went completely over my head, but there were lots of shiny machines and networks of pipes carrying nitrogen and pressurised steam and stuff throughout the plant and a massive corporate entrance hall to the main building (it must have been about 7 storeys, with balconies everywhere), which my friend Arjun and I agreed would be the perfect setting for the final showdown in a James Bond film; henchmen in boiler-suits falling screaming off the balconies, loads of explosions, and James Bond swinging across the middle on a rope, shooting people as he goes.

Other than this we managed to get in lots of pub visiting (in the interests of further appreciation of the German culture), a lovely supper at the Rote Ochse organised by Rise, a tour of the town and the castle (again organised by Rise), where Heidelberg’s “frat boys” were pointed out to us – some of the students still live in 19th Century fraternities and wear cool hats. (Somehow I get the feeling that unlike their US counterparts they probably don’t drink beer out of red plastic cups and carry out amusing stunts involving inflatable women). We also paid a visit to the castle in the evening, eliciting a quote from Carrie which really wouldn’t look good if I wrote it down here, and on my last night I laccidentally lost all of my friends then got lost halfway up a mountain. I did manage to see the Heidelberg fireworks though, which were very impressive.

I got back to Dresden very much more tired than I’d set out (late nights, early mornings, people snoring), but much happier. My time in Heidelberg really was amazing and I look forward to visiting other German cities. Thanks very much Rise!