Fistfight in France (Pay Per View Only)

Tim Reppert

My mentor came back from America and started training me on Thursday on how to electrospin polymers. After a short work day on Friday, I left to go to Paris for the weekend to see friends and family.

I took an ICE train from Saarbrucken to Paris, and was placed in a snazzy 2nd class cabin on the train. 10/10 would recommend for traveling on train's that have reservation seating, it was a cool experience. After getting to Paris, I meandered my way around and found Gare Du Nord so I could take the rail system to my uncle's house. No more than five minutes into my Parisian experience there was an elderly women brawl on the train platform. It was my first multiracial foreign elderly women fight. I had no idea what was said because it was very quick and aggressive French, words that wouldn't be taught in a high school French class. The white old lady wound up on the ground and people were there to pick her up, but it was quite the experience.

On Friday night, I went out to eat with family. Saturday, I hiked from Roland Garos, where they play the French Open, to the Louvre through the Parisian forest. Interestingly enough, there is a strong prostitution ring in the Bois de Boulogne. I quickly evaded that area, stumbled upon a Music Festival then walked to the lakes in west Paris. Afterwards, I walked to the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs Elysees to the Louvre. I met up with my friend, ate some vegan french food and saw my other uncle later that night. On Sunday, my family made me be a tourist by taking me to Notre Dame and around the tourist dense areas of Paris.

Then back to work that Monday!

Bankfurt... I mean Frankfurt

     On Saturday we went to visit Frankfurt. It is truly an amazing city. Eric describe it to me as a major banking city, giving it the nickname "Bankfurt." I honestly could not even picture how big (literately) banking was there. For starters, when I think of banks I think of small, 1-2 story buildings that have a vault in them because I know most banking is done electronically. Frankfurt blows my image of bank buildings out of the water.

    See all those really tall buildings, basically all of them are banks. Not only that, they have small banking buildings all around town (and I mean literately all around town). Everywhere you go you see one bank or another. One of the most common was Commerz Bank. It was crazy to see how many buildings they had. If I had counted how many Commerz Banks I saw I know it would be in the double digits.

This picture shows the Commerz Banks headquarters. It's a little larger than I thought it would be.

   Frankfurt had more to offer than just banks. It also had lots of shopping centers. The malls had some of the coolest architecture I've ever seen. The picture below is a mall from the outside.

 I thought it was really cool how the glass sloped inward, but what I saw inside made this look like amature hour.

This picrure shows some of the ceiling that is warped to make a pipe that connects into the middle of the mall. It was breath-taking how beautiful it was. Also the mall had a lot of floors which you can see in this picture. It had about 5 stories and had one basement (subfloor) with even more shops. It was crazy. There was also a Crocs store which was ridiculously expensive for how bad those shoes look.

Overall Frankfurt was amazing and I had a great time visiting.

Food

Well, we came here. The first couple of days we enjoyed the delicious pizzas in the nearby restaurants Fig. 1. Ah those first beautiful days, where everything was bright and nice in terms of food, not weather. We have to assert that weather has not been in our side. According to some statistics, this is the coldest summer in 60 (Yes six and zero!!) years.  

Fig. 1. Some delicious Pizza. Special ingredient: Reindeer. If you manage to stop staring at the DELICIOUS reindeer pizza there is salad in the side.

However those beautiful days came to an end. The time to put our cooking skills to test soon approached us. We went to a nearby supermarket. Bought some food. Walked back to our rooms with our hand full of shopping bags and a unique and probably innovative way to hold umbrellas Fig. 2 (Rain in a summer day?! Not something strange here). Made it back to our room all fine and surprisingly not wet. Now the moment of truth was here! To cook or not to cook?! Our stomachs voted for the latter. 

Fig. 2. Isn't this one of the most innovative ways to hold umbrellas?!

We all have kitchens in our apartments but the common decision was to cook together for the first few times. After eating at "THE HANS" for 9 months, our previous, barely existing cooking skills had faded. We had to start from scratch, thus, we decided to start with something simple. I think that words would be a lot to describe how delicious and I have to specify HEALTHY this first "dish" was. Fig. 3. Fig. 4.

Fig 3. Vanilla ice Cream with strawberries, biscuits, banana (barely visible in the back), banana bread, and of course the HEALTHY ingredient, Carrot :).

Fig. 4. The abovementioned recipe without bananas and carrots. Best way deal with time zone difference and lack of sleep at 3 A.M. p.s: It was so bright outside, sun never sets here.

Our food adventure went on, with our skills improving and building upon themselves every other time we cooked. We went from simple ice cream recipes, to frying eggs and sausages three meals a day, to rice, pasta, biscuits Fig. 5 and finally our best meal so far Fig. 6. A Saturday family dinner  consisting of  Fettuccine with Alfredo Sauce and Salmon, the always present dish of fried eggs and sausages with a lot of random spices, some sauce we bought at the local market and to drink, tap water. We would like to specify that even though we can legally drink alcohol, as of now we have refrained ourselves from drinking and we will stay up to the expectations people back home have for us :P . Words aside the following pictures will tell the story of the rest of our food adventures.

Fig.5. Delicious biscuits. Crunchy from the outside but soft and tasty in the inside.

Fig. 6. Saturday family dinner. Best one till now. Fettuccine alla Alfredo Sauce and Salmon, toasted bread, and of course eggs and sausage.(This dish will always be part of our meals. Promise!) 

Fig. 7. Selfie at a fast food. How could we not go to a Finish Fast Food chain. How?! Is that even possible?! Btw the food was good but in terms of taste to price ratio (unit "deliciousness"/$) McDonalds leads.

Fig. 8. A rather rare sunny day at the beach. We hurried to get back to ice cream. Best Ice Cream ever.

To sum it up, besides all the great adventures we have had here the food adventure has aided in making our time better till now. Going from eating pizzas out, ice cream for dinner, to biscuits and fancy Italian pasta we have experimented and learned a lot. Some of the food was not the best we have ever eaten (a.k.a biscuits that were so bland we named them bread biscuits). Some of it was so delicious we thought that one of the used spices was some kind of illusionary stimulants (NONE WAS!) and of course to the fried eggs and sausages that will accompany us to the end of our time. We have started to see some of the bright sides of this experience as well. We are preparing ourselves for the upcoming academic year when most of us will be cooking for ourselves.

Finland and VLC

Well, its been a while that we've been over here, and oh boy have we been having some fun. Since moving into Finland we have begun research in a developing field known as VLC, or Visible Light Communication.

In short, this means programming and setting up an LED to send information through the medium of air and open space. This requires modulation of data coming from a data source (computer, video, etc.), such that the electrical signals are converted into wavelengths that can be emitted through an LED.  The non-visible to the human eye signals sent through the LED are then picked up and received through a photodetector. The light is then broken down by a receiver that, similar to the transmitter, breaks down the data into readable electronic signals and is then amplified for the display of the information. There’s a really interesting short explanation from the researchers at Disney research about this  right here. Our personal test bed can be seen below in the picture.

We have spent the past two and a half weeks reading about and testing VLCs and have learned a great deal in just a short amount of time. As part of the department over here, we had to take that knowledge and host a presentation about our findings and our intentions for the future of this project. This was just yesterday and we ended up having the entire department come in and give us feedback on our presentation. This was an awesome opportunity and allowed us to tweak our design and get the rest of the Tele and wireless communications department introduced to VLC.

Enough about all the work stuff, on to the fun stuff, we’re in Finland and we love it! We’ve spent the last weeks planning trips and taking some local adventures. We’ve gone all over the city of Oulu and explored some of the more interesting places it has to offer on the pre-owned bikes we purchased for the summer. This included spending a day at the beach, enjoying center city, exploring our local lake, and making friends in our housing apartments. Also something we noticed over here is that people really love their ice-cream. There has to be an ice-cream stand every other block in Oulu.

Some pictures from our adventures are in the Album below!


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Jeff, Burim, and Alex