May 16, 2012

May 16, 2012

Today we woke up a little early to head to the market and buy flowers for Dr. Copeland, who tried to hide the fact that her birthday was yesterday. We found some nice flowers at the market across the street from us and made it back to the hotel a little early for our trip to the nuclear power plant. Dr. Copeland seemed to enjoy her flowers, but sadly couldn’t accompany us on our tour of the nuclear plant. After everyone had their passports and notebooks we head off to meet with the instructor that will be taking us to the nuclear plant.

The instructor talked about renewable energy and what nuclear power is doing to the environment and why Germany has decided to get away from it. He offered a different perspective of nuclear power than our first professor in Regensburg had. While our first professor was for nuclear power this professor was definitely against it, so I could tell that this would be an interesting trip to the power plant with someone who supported the closing of it. After the brief lecture we head into the car and make the hour and a half trip to the power plant Isar #2. Due to my intense motion sickness, I opt to sleep the majority of the trip to avoid getting sick.

We arrive at the nuclear power plant and our welcomed by our tour guide. She is a very nice lady who is obviously pretty smart because keeping up with her throughout the tour is quite a challenge. We go through security at the plant and our put into these white jumpsuits with yellow ducky shoe covers. No kidding it looks like we are about to take flight to space. Finally arriving to the plant we are able to see where the reactor is housed and the water that cools the used rods and how they are stored. It is a very interesting process and being able to tour the plant was quite an experience, especially when we are informed that this tour is probably the last tour that will be done, as the plant is going through its closing down process.  Keeping up with the process of nuclear power is exteremly hard as there are so many little things that affect the power output and I can’t really keep up with it all. The tour lasts about three hours and then we are served some dinner and have a discussion time with the tour guide. At one point during this discussion I thought her and our professor were about to get into a fight. They have very differing opinions on the closing of the plant and the discontinued use of nuclear power in Germany altogether.

Eventually we have to leave the power plant since it was getting pretty late. I still had some more questions, but we were already late leaving so I decided to withhold them until a later time. On the journey back I’m actually able to stay awake for the majority of the trip and get another good look at the German countryside.  Arriving back we have only a short time to get ready before we meet up with someone who used to go to my high school. Luckily he was running a little late to so we had enough time to get four girls ready for a night out.

We end up going to this pasta place for dinner and poor Mo has to translate for all of us since they have no English on the menu. I end up ordering a delicious pesto pasta with some spinach and a white beer that I hadn’t tried before. Ordering was quite an experience, but the guy who made our food was exteremly helpful and, along with the help of Mo, we were all able to get what we wanted, even with some complications. After dinner we head out for some drinks at a local cocktail bar, which is very crowded. One nice thing about this bar is all the drink names are in English, so we can actually order drinks without having to guess, for the most part, what is in it. I order what I think will be a good drink, and it ends up tasting like pure alcohol. I guess Germans make their cocktails extra strong, cause there is no way I would’ve gotten that much alcohol in a drink in the U.S.. Luckily we are there for a little while so I have plenty of time to finish the drink and not rush it, even though one of the girls keeps challenging me to a chugging contest. Which is kind of the only way I can drink my drink since it is really strong and not exactly something that you can easily sip, it doesn’t really taste that good.

After leaving the cocktail bar we head to a dance club for a couple hours. The club was really fun, but it was extremely crowded! Most of the time you could barely move, but it was actually more enjoyable than the clubs in the U.S.. I think this is because there aren’t really those creepy guys that try to come up and dance with you. It was a blast to actually go out and with the crowded club it wasn’t that hard to hide my awful dancing skills. The next thing I know it’s four in the morning and I have to rush back to the hotel and shower really quick in order to catch my train that leaves at six. I guess there’s no sleep for me tonight, but it was a fun night so I can’t complain too much.  Guess we will see how this train ride goes after being up for 24 hours and not being able to understand any German. Wish me luck! J