Week 3

Returning after 3 nights without sleep last Weekend, I woke up late as expected on Monday and soon became a trend for the week.I had excuses ready 'The tram changed its route', 'went to an ATM and was figuring out the German keys for an hour' or 'I found a lost kid, took him to the polizei and then his mom came and it turned out she was the mayor's daughter and ...'; however its so cool out here that I didn't even have to mutter half an excuse.Despite enjoying every moment, work happens in an awesome manner with deadlines being met on time and interactions swinging between politics to soccer to project to .... I love this work environment!

Highlights of the week range from my cooking experiments which have subdued now that I have reached standards beyond the expectations of the finest chefs and cuisines, being caught by the police for cycling on the pedestrian track, withdrawing Money from German ATM's using the 'love me, love me not' protocol to last night's Mexican party.I realized that Mexico is another of the Wonderful places to go to despite being the epicenter of the Swine Flu.Also my first acquaintance here being from Mexico I had a soft corner for that :) and it was well worth it, especially the shredded chicken in (... that was the only identifiable thing in the otherwise delicious dinner).I met this guy called Kevin from France with an India connection living in Brittany and we had a great time discussing business Informatics and life in France,India,Spain and Germany.He told me about a better VoIP service with which you can almost call worldwide for free than SKYPE and I think its way better than anything else available so all students planning to travel over the world should buy some credit,it helps keep CONTACTS :).I also met this German Girl who just came from her exam and every weekend travelled to her home in Munich(Same-Same to BITS and Margao :|)Later into the night this friend of his from Palestine went for a night drive and dropped me home.I'm globe trotting every week!

..yeah and not to forget today just had its share of Ice Cream and Microsoft Surfaces(Must watch for someone who doesn't know about it), the best part of working in such a high-tech environment is you get to experience everything that would normally would have been restricted to people's gtalk status and news.

Clockwise from top left -Me :), Intentionally embosed pic of the party, BITS Pilani Goa Campus,Collage of Prachi and Me at Bastei in Saxony-Switzerland

Lastly I would like to thank all the 4 (+1 whoz sleeping currently, its late night!) in the pic above for everything this week(And of course plenty in the past and future too) :).The weekends still left, sometime someone nice asks me Y should i have all the fun?

Keep smiling and you'll find out...else add me on gtalk- Pratik Mandrekar, I like reading your smart status messages :)

P.S-All the text in a funny color or underlined as per your browser above can be clicked to access the corresponding entertaining content!

Alles gut!

I had to write this.As I said every day just gets better.

Today we managed to get an interesting breakthrough on the problem we were looking at and I have to give a presentation to the team tomorrow.I know that there would be flaws and there's one assumption that prevents it from complete generalization, but when the team of people brainstorm together, it simply gets Awesome!

I was shown the safety analysis project today and how the Deutsche bahn railway crossing system was used as a model for safety analysis.After that I played with the Kuka industrial robot , the main ones I'll see later next week, but the one used for experiment and demo.Some students had integrated the Nintendo Wii which is a joystick which makes the console or object it conrols move in the same way we move it in our hand, for eg if we are playing a tennis video game just smash the wii joystick like a tennis racket and voila!, so I manged to complete that game pretty quickly and then saw a few more things including an intersting set of mobile platforms..all this technology is so awesome...

I stayed overtime today 'coz I wanted to attend the presentation by the Russian students at the ESG.I was invited by the International office to this party hall, and it was amazing..I made my first set of contacts outside the group, Sarah(From Sout-West Germany) and Gabriel(From Mexico) whose brother had just flown him to join at the school.Both do law at the the university and as part of Mentorenprogramm of the Studentenwerks Augsburg.Well I later was to go with them through the city while they went for 'Terminator 4'.They were nice!

Then the Russian students started with a very pretty dance and an exciting presentation which I managed to understand in bits and pieces.The food was incomprehensible as usual, but I kind of liked that soup :P, on my way to the tram station, I heard someone call me from somewhere in the sky...it was omit and he spoke a lil bit in Hindi, seems he'z from Afghanistan(but again all german) and his grandparents are from Delhi,and then I met this girl who was waiting down for him from Turkey and there was a lil bit of discussion on 'Maine Pyaar Kiya' and some jokes that made me stand the summer chill.It was late night but I loved all the people and ofcourse the Skype group chat with raka and Prachi with Haha in the background has made me sleepy...an awesome day n night!

Chao..i better start learning more german..

Guten Tag.