Milan, Italy

So a couple of weeks back, Lydia and I decided to go to Milan, Italy. Not exactly because we had a burning desire to see the sights of that city in particular (in fact, we didn't really no exactly what Milan had to offer), but more so that we found some really cheap train tickets (around $100 CAD return) to get there, and hey, it was Milan, Italy, so why not!?!?! Were we ever glad that we decided to do this because we ended up having an absolutely AMAZING time there!

Both Lydia and I are on a very tight budget here, so even with a cheap ticket over to Italy, it wouldn't have been possible for us having to afford to pay for an expensive hotel, so instead we just decided to stay there for FREE! For more information about how we accomplished this....see my yet to be published entry about Couch Surfing (or just visit that link).

Anyhew.....one of the best ways to get a cheap ticket around Europe is to ride a night train. It is also two-fold on the cheapness scale, since not only are you traveling to around Europe for a cheap price, but you are also paying for your first night's lodging! The downside to night train travel is the fact that you're crammed in a tiny booth with a bunch of other people for like 12 hours. Luckily, on our way over, Lydia and I had our very own room (just by chance). Not only that, but we came prepared with snacks, and most importantly 'drinks'. What better way to depict this situation than two very unflattering photos!



Here I am with my tiny mouse shaped, ketchup flavored potato chip, feeling very tired in the middle of the night as the train passes through the Swiss Alps.




Here's Lydia getting ready for sleep.




The drinks knocked us out long enough to get us to Italy in a relatively short time....much shorter than the actual 12 hours! We woke up just as the sun was coming up, and the train was entering Milan.





The first thing we noticed about Milano (that's Italian for Milan :), was that there was a lot of interesting artwork everywhere. Above is a giant metal/paper mache woman walking her rock dog outside of the train station. Also outside of the train station was this guy:




An ode' to the hangover.



It took the Blair witch 6 months to make this basketball!




When we first arrived in Milan, we had a few hours to kill before meeting up with our couch surfing host, so we decided to walk around a bit. After taking in some of the more strange works of art, we realized that we were in the vicinity of one of the greatest works of art in history, Leonardo da Vinci's 'The Last Supper', which is stored inside a cathedral in Milan (see picture above). Wanting to see it, and remembering that it often has a very large waiting time, we decided to make it our first Milanese destination, and what a great decision that was. When we first arrived at the ticket office, we were greeted with a woman in the ticket booth shouting "There will be no tickets to view the Last Supper for 3 weeks.... It is sold out!" Needless to say, this did not sound promising for us, but we decided to wait to talk to the ticketing lady anyways. Once we got to her, she told us that tickets to view the fresco were sold out until mid to late December (this being the 3rd of November); however, (and this is the good part), a couple had just that moment decided to cancel their reservation, so there would be an opening in the next half an hour, and she wanted to know if this would be OK for us! In hindsight, we now know just how lucky we were, considering it is near impossible to see 'The Last Supper' without booking months in advance normally, but we just strolled in there and saw it in a matter of minutes! People often say that Lydia and I have a horseshoe stuck up (you know where), and I'm beginning to think that they are right!

So, without further adieu............... BEHOLD!!!!





'The Last Supper'.......well, actually, this isn't the actual 'The Last Supper', since they prohibited us from taking a picture of it, but this is a 'The Last Supper' that is inside 'The Last Supper' Cathedral's gift shop. I assure you that the actual fresco is much more fascinating. I was actually surprised by the sheer magnitude of the fresco. It took up an entire wall! An interesting tidbit of information that I learned while I was there, is that if you look at the painting, you'll see an out of place white arc in front of the table, blocking Jesus' feet. This is actually the door to the next room of the Cathedral, and originally, when da Vinci painted this fresco, the door was not in the way, but some years later, some guy got the bright idea to extend this door (which was already quite large - one could easily already get his king size bed through), by cutting into 'The Last Supper'! On the all time idiots list, this guy has to rank up there. One tip to go with booking well ahead, for anyone who plans to view 'The Last Supper' themselves, is not to get the audio recoding that you can rent whilst viewing the fresco. You only get about 10 minutes of viewing time in the room, and the audio recording goes on for like 12 minutes, meaning your still trying to pay attention to the recording when they kick you out, and you won't even get a chance to freely view the painting.

You have to hand it to Leonardo though, this is truly a masterpiece, and the mystery (ala Dan Brown) that surrounds it only adds to its appeal.




Another amazing site in Milan is the Duomo. Which is one of the 2nd largest Gothic Cathedral in the world (next to the Cathedral of Seville in Spain). A really magnificent building, which is partly spoiled by these billboards (due to construction), but apparently, a short time ago, the entire building was covered in these billboards, so I guess I can't complain.




A beautiful pigeon covered statue in the Duomo square.




The amount of detail that went into this building is absolutely amazing! The building started construction in the 14th century, and continued on well into the 19th century, and considering the billboards, blocking off the renovation zones, it is still being constructed today!




I have many pictures of the inside of the cathedral, but none of them gave it justice to how immensely grand it was inside, so I've decided to post an image of one of the many intricate stained glass works instead. To be honest, the inside of the cathedral was quite spooky, since it was so incredibly dark inside, they had thousands of statues that looked like they were straight out of Bram Stoker's Dracula, there was what seemed to be 'The Phantom' piping away horror music on the largest organ I had ever seen, and there was a dead guy in the middle of the church encased in glass! Not my idea of a happy place of warship, if you ask me, but very interesting to see none the less.





More of the Duomo.




Probably the main thing that Milan is known for is fashion. In fact, it is the fashion capitol of Italy. Throughout the city you will see building after building of designers, hawking clothes as expensive as cars and houses. I thought about getting a sock there, but then I decided I wanted to go back for the Jan school term, so I decided against it.




The Duomo at night! Look to the top to see the golden statue of Madunina (actually made of bronze).



While in Milan, we decided to take in a football match.... and why not, not only are the Italians the current world champions, but Italian fans are known to be some of the craziest fans in the world! Apparently, it's a common spectacle to see smoke bombs and other objects thrown on to the field during matches (i.e. one time a Vespa was thrown on the field)! The match we got to see was AC Milan vs Torino.



The stadium was absolutely massive, and the roar of the crowd was intense! Have a look at this video, which shows the stadium (unfortunately, there is no sound).




Unfortunately, the game we saw kind of sucked (at least game wise), and it ended up, in traditional soccer fashion, as a 0-0 tie. Probably the most exciting thing that happened during the game was the sprints that the medical staff had to make onto the field every time a player performed a swan dive and faked an injury (seen above). I'm still very glad that we went to the game though. The crowed was great (although no smoke bombs or riots), and it was still an AC Milan game (minus Renaldo, who was injured at the time)!




During our last day in Italy, Lydia and I took a recommendation from the Director of empirica, and did a day trip to Como Lago, an amazingly beautiful mountain encased, village on a lake, about 1 hour outside of Milan by train.



When we arrived there, we really didn't know too much about the place, other than the fact that it was supposed to be a beautiful town, so we just decided to explore. The first thing that we came to was this gondola up to the first peak of one of the mountains overlooking the lake. It looked like a larf, so we decided to hop on.



The view from this first peak was very pretty, but we noticed that at the furthest peak of the mountain, there was a tower, and from that tower (we thought) the view would be better.




So we started walking up....




and up.....




Until a while later we reached the tower. So then....



We went up some more.



We then got to one of the most amazingly beautiful vantage points I had ever seen! This tower gave us a 360 degree view of the absolutely stunning village on the lake. Even though these pictures don't give the view justice, have a look:















Tyrone, Tyrone, where art thou Tyrone?



Here is a depiction of our long journey to the top of the mountain. Make sure you look at this picture, I worked long and hard at this!




Here is one of the pretty churches along the way on the hike down.




Bella!



After our amazing hike, we decided to rest up with a nice boat ride on the Lake.



Along the way, we got the chance to take in some amazing Italian villas and other sights. Including this little charmer below. Does anyone recognize this villa from a certain heist movie....



This is George Clooney's villa, which was used in Ocean's 12 (if you remember, the French thief lived here)! Apparently, George gives out stays at his villa to famous couples as their wedding presents...... stick that in your fact bag!



Another beautiful villa on the Lake.



After the boat ride on the Lake, Lydia and I continued to float back home to Bonn on a cloud of our own joy. Our Milan experience was a great one, and we owe a lot of this experience to this guy:



Spike de Saint Victor. He was our host from couch surfing, and he was one of the coolest, most hospitable people I have ever met. So much so, that I'm going to create another blog entry just talking about how cool he was, and our experience with him in Milan....and, oh yes, couchsurfing.com



P.S. When I said that Lydia floated home on a cloud of our own joy, it was only a figure of speech. We actually took another 12 hour Deutsch Bahn night train home, accept this time, we were in a crowded room with 3 other people. If this wasn't bad enough, we had the spawn of Satan as our Coach attendant, who liked to yell at us in German for no apparent reason. It started when we first got on the train, and in the room that Lydia and I were staying in, there was a backpack on one of the beds, left by one of the other attendants in the room (who had left to go visit with one of his friends in a different room). The Coach attendant then walked over to me and started completely blowing up in my face, shouting away in German, pointing at the bag and shaking his head. I told him in German that it wasn't my bag, and that I don't speak German, but he decided to yell at me for another 5 minutes or so (in German). I then met a few other travelers who told me that they too had run ins with this Coach attendant, and he shouted at them for no reason as well. If this isn't bad enough, when the train was pulling into Bonn, the train stopped about 200 meters outside of the main train station. Lydia and myself, along with about 5 other people were waiting by the train exit with our bags, when all of a sudden this train attendant came barging into the coach crazily shouting away in German again. He stood there, shouting at everyone for about 1 minute, then stormed out to a different train car. Everyone then looked at each other with a stainge look, wondering, what the hell was the matter with him. Then all of a sudden, the train started going again.....and going....and going....and went right on through the Bonn train station and didn't stop again for another half an hour! It appears that shouting obscenities in German means, "Excuse me kind passengers, please follow me to the train exit." This sucked because it made me late for work, which I had to go straight to after the 12 hour train ride. I didn't manage to get a picture of the train attendant, but I found a picture with uncanny likeness to him, so here is a depiction of our coming home train experience:

Work update - November 9, 2007

Disclaimer: this post contains information that may only be interesting to people in the field of health informatics!

Wow, my first post talking about current events....it's almost like I'm caught up in my blog (but in reality, I still am behind at least 3 posts).

It's just before the weekend, and I'm kindof in the eye of the storm at work right now, so I thought that I'd give a little update for my Hinf cohort, and for Dave, who told me that I need more work information in here for me to use this as my co-op report.

Over the past few weeks, I have been mainly working on 4 different tasks here at empirica. My main task has been working on a report for the European Commission regarding the current and future status of e-Health standards and standard development organizations (SDOs). For the most part, as explained earlier, this has involved a lot of research, and a lot of getting up to speed on the myriad of different e-Health standards that are out there in the world. Probably the main challenge that I faced, whilst working on this task, was the fact that there is a real lack of critical information about the standards and their development organizations available. In fact, for the most part, the only information that you can find on a standard, is the information that its development organization puts out. This makes assessment incredibly challenging, considering the obvious bias that a SDO would have regarding the information that they release about their own standard.

To give us a more critical view of the standards and SDOs, empirica chose to conduct an online survey of e-Health experts around the world, to get their opinion on how the current and future e-Health standards game is actually played out - my second job. This was an interesting task to undertake in that the survey tool that I worked with, Limesurvey, has a lot of features, and with a lot of features comes a lot of understanding. Also, the fact that this survey was going to be released to top experts and industry leaders around the world (i.e. CIOs, ministries of health, etc) with empirica's name on it, the survey was going to have to be flawless. It was my responsibility to actually implement the survey with the Limesurvey tool, which was set up on a local empirica server. It took a while to get use to, especially compared with some of the more user friendly, plug and play type surveys like surveymonkey, but after a while, even I was impressed with the types of things Limesurvey was capable of. With the tool, you can use html and css programming to create templates for the aesthetic design of the survey, then with those templates, you can add in numerous different types of questions (i.e. drop boxes, tick boxes, text boxes.....pretty much any type of box the heart desires....;) Another cool feature is that you can use regular expressions to perform validity checks on the text boxes. It had been a while since I had written any regular expressions, so that was another thing that took me a while, but once I got the hang of it, it was quite cool! To run a survey, you can either open it up to the public, or create a user 'token' table, which assigns one token to every user that you want to use the survey, and those users can only use their token one time, creating a secure, closed access survey. Once a survey is up and running, you can monitor the progress on the survey, run queries for stats on the answers that are coming back, send automated invitations and reminders for people to fill out the survey, and much much more. The main flaw in Limesurvey, thus far, is the fact that a user needs to have cookies enabled in their web browser when they are filling out the survey, and since a lot of businesses regulate whether or not their employees can have cookies excepted on their work computers, a lot of people are left not being able to complete the survey due to these policy reasons. The survey is currently out and we are waiting for our responses to come back before we start running our analysis of the results.

The third, and probably the most interesting task that I am working on, is the conduction of expert telephone interviews, again to gain more critical insight on the standardization situation. Again, this is polling experts, but instead of using the online survey, we are going more in depth, by using a semi-structured interview to gather the information. I helped create the questions for the interviews, and I also get to be one of the participants during the interview, which is quite interesting hearing the opinions of the world leaders in my field. It's also quite interesting to get the European prospective on things during these interviews. During the first interview I was involved in, I was made aware of the idea that e-Health standardization (or lack thereof) may be more of a market issue, rather than a complexity issue, and to get even more into detail, it may be an issue of battling for market dominance between North America (i.e. HL7) and Europe (i.e. CEN). This is something that I never really thought of before, nor is it something that I really think is the actual case (entirely), but it's an interesting opinion to take, and could be debated at length, but I'll leave it at that.

The last task that I was working on isn't quite interesting enough to mention at length (like all jobs, not everything can be interesting), but it basically involves editing.

Since I only really have about a month left here, I guess I still have my work cut out for me. Next week, I'm going to be giving a presentation to the staff at empirica regarding the use of the Limesurvey tool, which I had been working with over the past month or so. With that, I will be creating a guide of use for whoever takes my place on this survey role. I have also been told that I will be given the opportunity to work on a couple of other different projects here. Probably what I am most excited about is that I will (hopefully) get the chance to sit in on a meeting where international policy decisions are going to be made (it was one of my co-op work term requests). I haven't been informed of when or where this meeting will be taking place yet, but I will surely keep you posted.

Last but not least, Dave wanted me to write a quick blurb about who empirica is, and what empirica does, so here it is:

empirica has been in operation for (as far as I know) around 25 years or so. It is a consulting firm for projects relating to concept development, the application and development of new information and communication technology, and the information society. The bulk of project work, and project funding is granted by the European Commission. There are currently 38 permanent employees listed on the empirica web site; however, there are also quite a few student interns at the company as well. empirica projects are far reaching, giving them partners in the following countries:

(taken from empirica.biz)



Working at empirica is very interesting and very rewarding. I'm gaining a lot of knowledge about my field that I would not have been able to get anywhere else.

That's it for the work posts for now.

To be continued.......

New posts to come....

Just a bit of a heads up on some posts that I will be trying to write soon.....

Lydia and I have done a lot of little side trips around the Bonn area that will need to be mentioned, including the beautiful area of Konigswinter.

I've had quite a few requests for a post about our current apartment, so I will get on that.

I need to give you guys an update on my working activities.

Most importantly though, this past weekend, Lydia and I decided to go to Milan Italy, on a whim, and we had an absolutely amazing time, so we have to tell you all about that.

I've been working all day though, and before that, I had a 12 hour train ride from Milan, so I'm a wee bit tired now, meaning, I'll leave those posts for some other days.

Berlin

Sorry about the delay of this post, as you can expect, life gets a little busy traveling through Europe whilst trying to keep up with work term activities.

A few weeks back, Lydia and I made a trip to Berlin, the new/old capitol of Germany (regaining the capitol status from Bonn in 1990). Berlin was an absolutely amazing city that we would have loved to spend weeks in; however, duty called at work, so we were only able to stay for the weekend.

Getting to Berlin seemed to be too good to be true on the Deutsch Bahn (the German rail system), because it was. We had direct tickets from Bonn to Berlin; however, our train ended up breaking down half way across Germany, so we didn’t arrive in Berlin until 10:00ish at night, which wasn’t really that good considering we still needed to find a place to stay that night.

We managed to find a rather cheap hostel (Backpackers Hostel Mitte), for the weekend, although I wouldn’t really recommend it, since it was quite dirty, but mostly because there’s a far better way to budget travel that I didn’t find until after Berlin, called “couch surfing” (but I think I’m going to write an entire blog post about that soon, so I won’t go too much into it). The hostel did provide us with two great opportunities though, the first was the cheap and plentiful breakfast, and the second was a free (yes, I said FREE) walking tour of Berlin. It wasn’t actually the hostel that offered the tour; however, they did provide us with the information for it, and the tour guide actually stopped at the hostel to pick anyone up who was interested, which was quite nice. The tour company actually does tours in a few different places, and it was really quite ‘infotaining’, so I would strongly suggest checking it out here: New Berlin tours, and if you don’t believe that we were actually there, you can find our pictures on their web site, although you have to play a fun game of ‘Where’s Tyrone and Lydia????’

The guided tour was a great start to Berlin, because it gave us a good overview (4 hours or so) of the sights, and a good layout of the city. Although the tour is free, they do suggest tips for the guides at the end of the tour, but it’s tip what you want, if you want, and after the great experience we had, it would be hard to see how anyone couldn’t tip these guides making no salary for their full time job (although there were certainly a few people who didn’t tip anyway).

(*Note - For this picture section I got Lydia to help me with the picture commentary, since I've been so busy at work, and I've been falling behind on my posts)

We forgot our camera in our hostel on our first day in Berlin, so we missed out on photos of the tour and decided to come back later that night. Luckily for us, Berlin looked even more enchanting at night. Here you see the Brandenburg Gate with Viktoria, the goddess of victory, perched atop it, driving the Quadriga. This statue was once stolen by the French after defeating Germany in a war in the early 1800's... Yet, a few years later, Germany won the next war and took the statue back to further prove their victory over the French... it has been said that the goddess now watches over the French embassy, which is around 50 metres to the right of this photo.

Here is Berlin's most famous hotel - the Avalon. It has very high priced and swanky hotel rooms... but the best part about it is that out of one of those window's, Michael Jackson made history by dangling one of his children, blanket clad, over a swarm of fans below.

Late on the Saturday night, we decided to take a free tour of the Reichstag - German's original parliament building that was once burned down (can you guess when... how about by whom?) and restored in the 1990's. It was open quite late - until 1:00 am. This dome is new - it was constructed so that the people of Germany could look down on the Bundestag, or German parliament.

The view down on the seats below.

The next day, we set out on adventures again. Only, we couldn't walk anywhere until the red traffic light stopped offering us hugs...

And the green "walking man" took off reading his newspaper. The walking man is very famous in Berlin - there are entire shops dedicated to him. He was designed back in the days of East and West Berlin for the East Berlinners in order to cheer them up... whatever works, I guess. After reunification, West Berlin fought to get rid of this happy little guy, but the East won that battle and kept their walking men in tact.

After crossing the street and walking some more, we made our way to Museum Island, which was named after this musem... the Old Museum. Behind it is the New Museum. They created a better naming system for other museums after they realised their little problem.

Littered across the front lawn of the museum were these ginormous, sorry "pleasantly plump", statues... an interesting installation piece that we admired and couldn't resist posing in front of.

That entire day, neither of us could get Mika's "Big Girls are Beautiful" song out of our heads! And just mentioning it, it's in there again...

Ty - On a side note, after these fat bottomed girls made our rokin worlds go round, Lydia and I took in a Cabaret show in downtown Berlin, which was really cool. The play itself was really cheesy, but some of the stunts and special effects in it were really cool to watch. The cabaret included a set of mexican twins who ran across this enormous revolving pair of death wheels, a high-tower-multi-hi-bar chinese flipping act, and an underwater-with-no-air-supply-making-out-naked-duo-dance.......now tell me you wouldn't want to see that!!!

Perpendicular to the Old Museum lies the Berliner Dom. Although this church looks extremely old, we were informed by our tour guide that it was built in the early 20th century.

This oddly plain photo is of Babel Plats - the place where the famous book burnings took place. Thousands upon thousands of books with "differing ideas" from those of the Nazis were burnt at this very place, right outside of the university... not only did the students take part in the horrifying act, but some professors participated in the mass destruction as well.

This is the Humboldt University, named after Alexander von Humboldt, which is situated across the street from the Babel Plats. Einst

The scholar, himself, perched outside the university.

Here is Lydia smiling away, pretending to be Checkpoint Charlie.

These stark masses of concrete make up the "Holocaust Memorial", also named the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe". The slabs vary in size and height, and grow larger and taller in the centre of the piece and shorter and sparser around the edges. The ground actually dips in the centre, so from the outside, each concrete rectangle looks relatively similar in height.

In the distance you can see the standard apartment buildings that were constructed around the time of WWII.

The masterpiece was designed by the famous architect, Peter Eisenman. It is meant not only to be looked at, but also experienced. One must walk through the maze of grey concrete in order to fully understand the artwork and the message that it gives out.

Here's a shot to show the sheer gigantism of the memorial.

After re-visiting the Holocaust Memorial, we headed across the road to Tiergarten Park. We thought this statue was rather nice, picturesquely surrounded by the quickly changing autumn foliage.

Some more foliage... this photo was obviously Lydia's doing.

Another random and beautiful monument hidden in the Tiergarten.

A shout-out to my pops!

This is one of our last photos of the day before we caught the train home... and before our camera stopped cooperating with us. This giant monument, the "Victory Column" is located in the centre of the Tiergarten Park. The gold statue on the top is again of Viktoria... Goddess of Victory. Apparently some Berliners have given this statue the nickname of "chick on a stick". Seems fitting!

Oktoberfest

Yes, I am in Germany, and yes, I am in Germany for Sept/Oct, so it's only natural that I went to the world's largest drinking festival! To be honest, I was damn excited about this festival even before I knew I was going to Germany (since my dad use to tell me stories about the time he went to it when he was my age). When I was trying to decide whether or not I should take the position at Empirica, I already had my friend in Toronto (Verity) waiting for my decision, because if I were to take it, she was going to hop on a plane and go to Oktoberfest with Lydia and I. As you all know, I ended up taking the Empirica job, and Verity lived up to her word, and quickly booked her plane ticket to Munich.......so the plan was set in action.

Unfortunately, things didn't quite go as smoothly as we had all hoped; in fact, everything kind of went to hell right before we were supposed to leave for Munich.

Lydia and I were having apartment troubles when we first arrived, and so until mid-september, we were still looking for a place to live. Finally, after MUCH searching, we were finally able to land the perfect place, thanks to a young couple who LOOOOOOVES Canadians and went out of their way to find us a place (both for Bonn, and for our time in Munich). Lydia and I moved into our new place the day that Verity and her new boyfriend Jason (who was a last minute, but very welcome add on to the trip) arrived in Bonn. Unfortunately, Lydia and I were still, at that time, running around like chickens with our heads cut off, because the house was a complete mess when we first moved into it (we were just temporarily taking the house from a couple of girls who were off traveling for a couple of months, and they definitely did not clean the house before they left) and because Lydia and I still hadn't had the chance to get to any of our laundry since our long European travels, meaning we were running out of socks and underwear! Minutes before Verity and Jason arrived, Lydia and I decided to test our new washing machine that was in the house. Let's just say that this is no ordinary washing machine, and that all of the controls are in german, and using it requires attaching one hose to the living room sink (yes, I said living room sink.....next to the living room shower) and another hose to drain god knows where (I'll get to describing our new apartment in a new chapter, with pictures of course). We decided to also place the drainage hose in the sink, and hold it in place with a towel. We fired up the machine to what we thought was the right option, and just then, our door bell rang, and Verity and Jason had arrived.

Lydia and I run down our entrance stairs to excitedly greet our new guests, and take them to their room to drop off their bags. We get to talking for a few minutes, and then I think...."Oh #*$@, the washing machine!" I run down the hall, into the living room, and see that the towel that was holding the drainage hose in place has fallen into the sink, blocking the drain, and the floor was under about a centimeter of water! One thing that our new apartment was lacking at the time was towels (I believe we only had two towels between the two of us), so getting rid of this water was going to be a bit of a challenge, and by challenge, I mean that it was impossible, and it took like 3 days for our floor to dry!

Things calm down for a bit, and we have a nice visit with Verity and Jason, who decide to go on a day trip to Cologne while Lydia and I are at work the next day. Unfortunately, that day, Lydia starts to feel a bit ill, and by the time night comes along, she is burning with fever (the night before we are supposed to head off to Munich to start some heavy drinking)! Lydia went to bed right away, hoping to get some rest so that she could feel better the next day, but that too did not go as planned.

The next morning came (Friday), and Lydia's health was still questionable (at best), but I had to got to work for a half-day, so I told her to give me a call with an update on her health at around noon, before we had to go to catch at the train. I (thought I) set the alarm for her, to wake up so that she could call me well before I had to leave work to catch the train (and hopefully meet her there), but I managed to not turn one of the dials correctly, so she didn't wake up until the last minute. No more than 5 minutes before I was to leave work to meet up with Lydia, Verity, and Jason at the train station, I got a call from a very sick Lydia, who was in no means well enough for a binge drinking weekend. This was not a good situation at all! I didn't want to leave my sick girlfriend alone, and at the same time, I have a couple of friends who traveled all the way from Canada, just to go to a festival with us! I had to do some quick thinking, and I managed to get Benjamin to help me out by having him check in with Lydia and give her a cell phone so that she wouldn't be left stranded, and I decided that I was just going to go for the day, as opposed to the weekend, so that I could get back to Lydia to feed her some soup.

I then sped to the train station to meet with Verity and Jason, and Oktoberfest had finally commenced (already down one person).
















Our departure was far from ideal (see the above story), but we were off to Munich for Oktoberfest. Jason (on my left) was the newest addition to the travel party. This was my first chance to meet him, and he quickly won my heart with the purchase of the first (of many) beer on the train.


















This is Verity (on my right of course). She's been one of my nearest and dearest friends since grade 10! Ver is always down for an adventure, so the opportunity to go to Oktoberfest was too hard to pass up. She even decided to take up beer drinking just for this event!

















I can't say too much about the city of Munich itself, seeing as how I was only there for one day, and I spent that entire day drinking myself silly, but from what I saw, it looked to be a very nice city. This statue, just outside of the festival grounds, blew me away. It was truly massive in size (just look at its scale compared with the people below it)! I had never even heard of this statue before, and yet, I doubt it's much smaller (if at all) than the Statue of Liberty! Very beautiful!!!

















The grounds of Oktoberfest were crazy! There were beer tents everywhere (and when I say tent, I don't mean one that sleeps 4, I mean hundreds, if not thousands of people cram into these tents, with their massive tables, and throw back literally millions of liters of beer), as well as carnival rides, and various food and merchandise shops. This guy above is the Löwenbräu spokesperson. He's a big animatronic Lion, who takes big gulps of beer, burps and growls every once in a while on top of the Löwenbräu beer tent.

















Before the festivities get going, there is a big parade that marches through the gardens, with various traditional German bands, and horse carriages carrying people who throw flowers out the sides. The parade ends at 12:00pm, when the Mayor of Munich taps the first Keg, and then everyone can start drinking. Until that time, no beer is served (although many people around town are seen in their traditional German dresses and lederhosen chugging back a beer bottle or two, getting an early start to the morning on the way to the fair grounds).
















The one man lederhosen parade!

















It's crazy that they're able to have this parade, because it's smack dab in the middle of the fair grounds, which is already packed with thousands of people (who are eager to start drinking). The police find a way however, with big horses and rope barriers. It is incredibly crowded though!



A video of the parade:)
















After the parade ended, it was time to start some serious drinking. Believe it or not, but it can actually be very difficult to get a beer at Oktoberfest (if you haven't come prepared). You aren't able to be served a beer unless you are sitting at a table in one of the beer tents or beer gardens. These tables get reserved in months (if not years) in advance, so people (such as us) who just show up, expecting to have a seat and a beer can often be sadly mistaken. Luckily, Jason had a friend of a friend at one of the beer gardens, who was able to squeeze a few spots at her table for Verity, Jason, and I. that meant..........






















BEER TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You might be thinking, "That is a damn big beer!" and you would be correct. The beer at Oktoberfest are served in the liter-a-beer fashion inside massive beer steins. This was my first experience with a beer of such stature, so my first attempt of taking one from the waitress ended up in me dropping the beer on the table and spilling beer all over our new friends who made room for us to sit down....ooops. Luckily, I was able to salvage most of that beer, and continue on without any more spillage incidences. The massive pretzels (seen below the massive beer) are also a nice addition to a day of drinking!


















From right to left, it's Verity, Jason, and Jenny (who was Jason's friend of a friend who got us the seats at her table). This picture was taken during the initial "Prost!" (which is the German cheers).




This is simply incredible... You've already heard my story of feebly dropping my first 'heavy' beer. This is a video of an Oktoberfest waitress. These women are amazing! They are nothing like the stick-thin, young waitresses we know of back at home. These are built, middle-age to senior women, who could easily take me down in a fist fight, who carry 10-20 of these mugs of beer at at time!!!!!!! These beer easily weigh 5-10 pounds each, and these women carry 10-20 of them at a time.....and on top of this, these women work like 10-14 hours a day during the festival, and have to plow through crowds upon crowds of drunken idiots, shouting and pushing their way through!!!!....freaking hell, I'm thinking they should earn a spot on the X-men team!!!! Apparently, according to my German drinking colleagues at the festival, that these women will make their years salary just in the month of the festival, which sounds crazy, but these women definitely earn it!





















Needless to say....the drinking went on....
















After a few hours of drinking, Verity and Jason disappeared into the crowd (by disappeared, I mean stumbled to a washroom, and lost me until the end of the night), so I ended up hanging around with Jenny and her work friends for a couple of hours. Then I disappeared (I stumbled to a washroom, never to see those people again), and found myself alone, in the middle of Oktoberfest. I stumbled around for a couple of hours, bought Lydia an enormous heart-shaped cookie that had German writing on it stating something to the effect of "I'm madly in love with you", which I wore around my neck as a necklace until the end of the night, and took in the festivities for another little while. I made some friends, had a couple of beer, then tried to find my way home for the night (which was at the house of the person who found Lydia and I an apartment in Bonn). Unfortunately, when I arrived at the house, to my surprise, Verity and Jason were nowhere to be found! Luckily, after a couple of hours, they did in fact, make it back to the house safe and sound, which was a relief to me, considering I was supposed to leave early the next morning, and I wasn't sure if they even knew how to get back to the house and get their stuff!

















The next morning came along, and it was time to say goodbye to Verity and Jason. The three of us had a great time at Oktoberfest, and I was glad that they came all the way from Toronto just to share in the experience. Verity and Jason traveled around Munich for a couple more days, then headed back to Canada. I hitched a ride with some people who were heading to Bonn from the house we were staying at, and managed to get my first Autobahn experience (220kmph in a Mercedes!!!!). I got back home relatively early the next day, and Lydia was still in bed (which she hadn't really left since I was gone). We then managed to get her back on her feet after a day or two, and it was back to work for the two of us.

Starting Work

After mine and Lydia's travels, it was finally time to start work. Unfortunately, when we got back from Amsterdam, I came down with a bit of a flu that didn't go away until well after I started work, so I was quite run down for my first few days. It was especially bad that I wasn't all too clear headed when I first started working, because it seems as if things here work a little differently than they do in Canada. In my previous work terms, I had about a week or so of company, people, and project orientation to easily transition into the work, this, however, was not the case at Empirica.

On my first day, I had about an hour or so to get my computer set up. This is normally quite easy for me, since I have spent most of my life working with computers; however, I quickly realized that in Germany, everything is German, including the computers, keyboards, operating systems and software. This meant that all of my messages and menus for: Windows, Firefox, MS Word, Excel, Power Point, Visio, etc were going to be given to me in German......yea!!!!!! (sarcasm). To remedy this, I quickly went on a downloading rampage, to see how many English programs I could fetch. I was able to get a new Internet browser and text pad, but everything else required a license (if I wanted to get it legally), and all of the licenses at Empirica were for the German version, so I was S.O.L with the rest of the applications. My last applicable English computer fix I could make was to change my keyboard into the English standard....even though it was physically still a German keyboard, with all of the the keys mixed around, but I printed out what a standard keyboard looks like, and I taped that to my desk as a reference.

After I anglofied my computer, it was time for my first project meeting. There, I was introduced to the first project that I'd be working on, which was an appraisal of the current situation in e-health standards. For anyone who knows something about this (and this will probably only be referring to my fellow hinfers), this is a very broad subject, that could be researched for years, with a budget of millions. The report that myself, Benjamin, and one other Employee from Empirica would be working on only consists of around 50 pages, and was to be completed in 1 month! For such a broad subject, this is a great task, considering there are similar reports, with a narrower focus that span hundreds (if not thousands) of pages, and the researchers had years to prepare the document, whereas we only had a couple of weeks!

From that day forward, I have been hitting the internet literature pretty hard. A typical day for me will have me come in at around 9:00am (although it isn't mandatory for me to come in or leave at any time.....as long as I get the work done). I'll fire up the computer and get set up for my day by around 9:30. Then, it's research, research, research. I have never read so many articles as I have read in this past month. It takes a lot of reading to be able to properly assess an entirely different health system, as well as the key players in it! Basically, for every page that I write, I'll probably have done about 5-10 hours of research (since the report has to be very condense to fit in the 50 page guidelines). I'll normally go off for a lunch with Lydia at around 12:30 or so (for around a half an hour to an hour) - hopefully to get some street meat (i.e. Brotworst mit Brot und heiße Senf - brotworst with bread and hot mustard...mmmmmm), then it's back to work. It's then research, research, research, writing, research, research, research, then I'll head off to home by around 5-7 depending on the day, and the urgency of tasks. Normally spending around 8-9 hours in the office a day (and for those of you who remember my salary.....that's about 5 Euros an hour (luckily, I didn't decide to come here for the salary). I find that I'm learning a hell of a lot while I'm here, and I'm gaining some great experience that will be more than useful for me in my later career.

As a side note, another useful tool that I have started using during my time here is the google personal web page, or igoogle. It allows you to create a personal home page that you can use wherever you have an internet connection, and on that homepage, you can add on really useful 'gadgets' which can be things like translators, calculators, local weather reports, etc. It's free to use, and really useful, so check it out at http://www.google.com/ig

As this report is coming close to the end, my work is getting a little more interesting. One of the tasks that I'm currently working on is designing a survey with the open source tool Limesurvey.
This survey (designed by me), is going to be sent out to around 100 of the top e-health standardization experts in Europe, which is pretty cool! I'm also expecting to be given a couple of different projects in the coming weeks to keep things interesting as well (I'll update you on those as they come in).