A Busy, Busy Day

Today was not my standard day in the office. I had the pleasure of accompanying my colleague Max and about 30 international students on an excursion to the Diamler-Benz engine factory, as well as the Mercedes-Benz museum, both of which are in Stuttgart.

We left around 8:45 a.m. and, despite having to drive through a bit of German traffic, made it to the factory on time.

Despite my little knowledge of cars, factory tours like this and the Audi factory tour are completely fascinating. To be able to actually see how, in this case, the engines for cars that are sent around the world are produced is much more interesting that just hearing about how it is done; it's much like the difference between watching a sports game on television versus being there in the stadium.

After seeing how these engines were made (no photographs allowed, unfortunately), we had a short break, and then were allowed to wander through the Mercedes-Benz museum nearby (where we could take pictures!). Each person got a listening guide and we could wander the museum at our own pace.

 Visit to the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart

One of many Mercedes-Benz vehicles that we found in the museum

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Once we had completed our visit to Stuttgart, we came back to Reutlingen just in time for me to tutor one of my tuttees. I made the 15 minute climb to her house and, once again, feel like she taught me more German than I taught her English. And my day did not end there.

Tomorrow is my first German presentation at Reutlingen. For my B1 German class, I have to give a presentation about American culture - the topic can be whatever I would like it to be, but that almost makes it more difficult than if I were assigned a topic. To choose one of the millions of things that make up American culture?! Yikes. In the end, I settled on the topic of Thanksgiving.

I began to put together an outline for my presentation, but was interrupted around 7:45, as I had my dance class. It was a welcome distraction!

We learned more of the routine that we will be performing in December. There were a bunch of new people and we did some review, which was nice.

Once that was done, I was back to it. I completed my presentation, ran through it a few times, finished up the homework that I had to do for my German class as well, and now I am heading to bed.

It was a long, slightly stressful, but very rewarding day.