Roughly twelve hours of work in a couple of days is more than anyone should
be subjected to, especially when you have to deal with the stresses of being
in a country where you don't even speak the language.
Once the Texans had been programmed, the deployment teams were out into the
field, and the three nights that the instruments would be recording began,
there wasn't anything for me to do in Jena, so I took a vacation.
If you've read any of my Philippine stories (here)
you might remember Mary Ann. I knew her when I lived in that part of the
world in another life. She married a German guy, Werner Beck. They moved to
Germany in 2002 and lived in Weinzierlein which was a small village of Zirndorf
which was a suburb of Nürnberg. Getting to Nürnberg from Jena by
train was easy, especially once I got on the right train. I managed to arrive
only several hours late. Now this was more like it.
Beck's parents owned a restaurant in Weinzierlein called the Zür Traube. The upper floor had apartments where several sons, daughters and their families lived.
I spent about four days concentrating on real important things like taking Beck and Mary Ann's two little boys to the nearby water park. The Playmobile FunPark in Zirndorf was a nice place to spend a hot afternoon. The rest of the time was spent taking the kids to a playground near the restaurant, and catching up on all of the tsismis (gossip) from back in the Philippines.
Weinzierlein was a sleepy little village.
The restaurant was right on the edge of the developed part of the village. From there on there were only wheat fields, corn fields, and little tufts of forest as far as you could see.
2018-03-06