Hello, world. About 5 months ago I told myself I would write a blog to document my adventures around Europe, so, finally, here it is!

For the last fourish months I’ve been doing an internship at a pharmaceutical/chemical company, Merck, in Darmstadt, Germany. Darmstadt is a nice city with a population around 150,000 and a big technical university. It’s in western Germany, 15-20 minutes by train from Frankfurt. I’m working in a pilot plant for industrial waste water treatment, where there are currently several experiments going on about how to remove toxic chemicals from contaminated water. I’m in charge of a 1,000 L membrane bioreactor (MBR, type of waste water treatment plant), so every day I have to run analytics on the quality of the effluent and reprogram the computer which runs the MBR to optimize the process. And I also have to figure out how to fix any problems that occur, which happens quite often. Soon we will be getting a UV-reactor and will start experimenting with using UV light as a pretreatment for the conventional MBR process to break down chemical byproducts of liquid crystal production for TV and computer screens. It’s cool to have real responsibilities and legit work, but it also really sucks to have to be there at 7:30 every morning, I liked my college schedule better.

Apart from the early mornings, Germany has pretty sensible working regulations, so I get 15 vacation days for my 6-month internship and I have a limit of 37.5 hours per week. If I work more than 37.5 hours then the overtime counts towards extra vacation days. This has given me some really awesome opportunities to take a ton of long weekends and travel all over Europe. To catch up, I’ll briefly summarize the 9 countries  I’ve been so far, and from now on I’ll try to write a new post after every trip.



#1: West Coast, USA – Vegas, San Diego, Sonoma, Seattle area
The adventures began long before even getting to Germany. A couple weeks before graduation, as the semester’s work was wrapping up, I kicked off the adventure season with a trip to Vegas with a few friends to see some of our favorite DJs. After Vegas we were back in Claremont for the last week of classes, and as soon as classes were done we immediately headed down to San Diego, where we rented a house on Mission Beach to participate in the Claremont Colleges’ annual senior week festivities. Needless to say, it was a ridiculously good time. Scuba diving, snorkeling with sea lions, boogie boarding, surfing, skating up and down the boardwalk, and too many kegs to count. After San Diego we were back in Claremont for a few days to graduate, and then drove up the coast to Sonoma, where a good friend has a vineyard. Several of us chilled at the vineyard for a few days and kayaked down the river, treasuring our last few days together as a group before everyone jetted off to opposite corners of the world. After that I flew to Seattle with my girlfriend, Evelyn, and we met several other friends at Sasquatch music festival. Sasquatch was amazing, and then I spent some time at Evelyn’s house on Bainbridge Island, went hiking in the Olympics, and scuba diving in the Hood Canal. After a week on Bainbridge, I flew home to Iowa for a few days, then a quick stop in Washington, D.C. to see my grandma, and from there was off to Germany!

I done did good in kollege

#2: Iceland – Thorsmork and Reykjavik
Before I made it to Germany I had a quick 3.5 day layover in Reykjavik, Iceland. The airline Iceland Air has a really cool deal where you can stay up to a week in Iceland on a flight across the Atlantic without paying any extra. As soon as I landed, I got right on a bus to the mountains. I went on 3 beautiful all-day hikes and stayed in a little mountain hut all alone. On one of the hikes, I hiked up to a glacier on Eyjafjallajokull, a huge volcano that erupted in 2010. It was a really crazy wonderland of white snow all the way to the horizon and giant spires of red and black volcanic rock rising up out of the snow. The snow, ice, and rock is so insulating that there is still heat from the volcanic eruption just a few meters inside the lava piles, and while climbing on one rock pile, I found a hole with hot air coming out. I dried my boots and cooked a grilled cheese sandwich over hot lava while surrounded by a glacier, it was amazing. Since Iceland is so close to the arctic circle and I was there a week before summer solstice, it never got totally dark out, so every night between midnight and 3, I was treated to the most amazing 3 hour sunset/sunrise combination. I’ll definitely be back to Iceland again sometime.

Lush valleys, glacier-capped volcanoes

#3: Germany/Austria – Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Munich, Neuschwanstein, Cologne, Berlin (x2),  Mannheim, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Mount Pretzelhorn (Tirol)

I’ve been a bunch of places around Germany, thanks to the amazing public transportation systems which make the US seem primitive and undeveloped by comparison. My dad came to visit early in the summer and we went to Frankfurt and Heidelberg, where we explored a castle and walked around the cities. Then I spent a weekend in Munich with Evelyn and we went to Neuschwanstein castle for a day–a fairy tale-like castle in the Bavarian Alps–which was really cool. We hiked up a mountain above the castle and had some really amazing views of the castle and the surrounding mountains. Then I spent a weekend in Cologne for a conference for my internship program, which turned out to be a giant party. I spent two weekends in Berlin, one during the summer with Evelyn and one just a few weeks ago when my sister came to visit from Israel. Berlin is a really cool city, lots of hipsters but still a super chill vibe. I’ve also spent a few weekends at home in Darmstadt, where there is a really amazing group of international Merck interns who always organize events and day trips. But the best weekend in Germany so far was definitely Oktoberfest. I took a day off work to meet some friends in Munich and it was the first time Ryan, Matt, and I had seen each other since graduation. We all got there a day before Oktoberfest started so that we would have a day for an adventure in the alps. We went on the most amazing hike, from Eibsee in Germany to Mount Pretzelhorn in Austria, laughing, philosophizing, and communing with nature the whole way. At one point we went off the trail and found a tree house hidden in the woods, and we ended our hike muddy and sweaty at a fancy bar in a 5 star hotel. And the next day was Oktoberfest. We got up at 8am to get into a beer tent and drank liters on liters for the rest of the day.

buffooning around the Alps on the border of Germany and Austria
Caitlin and I in Berlin

#4: Gent, Belgium
I went to Gent for a weekend to visit Evelyn’s roommate from Pitzer College. There was a big annual 10-day festival when we were there, which meant bands playing in the streets and 8-10% abv beer being sold everywhere.

The best idea ever: urinals on the street during the festival in Gent

#5: Thun, Switzerland 


Switzerland is the most ridiculously beautiful place in the world. I went with Evelyn and we stayed at a friend’s house, who was staying there for the summer. The first night we ate homemade cheese fondue which is the best food ever, and the next day went on a long hike from Griesalp to Murren via the Gspaltenhornhutte (pretty close to the city of Interlaken). The hike took about 8 hours and was incredibly steep (~4200 feet elevation gain, mostly concentrated in one steep section) but gorgeous. If you’re ever in Switzerland on a sunny day, you should definitely do this hike. We walked along a glacial moraine and up to a ridge with at least 7 glaciers and the epic jagged peaks of Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau within the 360 degree view. We also ate fondue again that night, but this time a meat fondue which was just as amazing as the cheese fondue the night before. The next day we went on a hike to a really beautiful lake, Oeschinensee.

a nice mountain
The most beautiful piss of my life

#6: Sicily, Italy – Catania and Taormina

Ev and I bought a blind booking flight one weekend and ended up in Sicily. Blind booking is a program offered by Germanwings Airlines where you can choose which category of city to go to (beach cities, party cities, historical cities, etc.) and you don’t find out which flight you will be in until after you pay for the ticket. So we booked a flight to a beach city and ended up in southern Italy. The water was as warm as a bathtub and perfectly crystal clear. We took advantage of the conditions and went scuba diving one day, and although the Mediterranean sea life isn’t that exciting, the visibility was incredible and there were cool rock formations and a few interesting creatures. That night after diving we were able to see Mount Etna erupting, which is a big volcano in Sicily. It was the only time I’ve ever seen lava spew out of a mountain. Pretty awesome.

The beach in Taormina, where we went diving
underwater in Taormina
Couldn’t get a good photo in the dark, but the red is lava flowing down Mount Etna

#7: United Kingdom – London, Creamfields, Edinburgh

For Ev’s last week before she headed to Spain to start Fulbright, I took a week off of work and we went to the UK. We spent a day in London with a friend from Pomona, Amade, and then took a bus to near Liverpool where we would spend the weekend playing in the mud at Creamfields music festival. I’ve never seen a place covered in such a thick layer of mud before, and apparently we didn’t get the memo that mud boots are essential at British music festivals. Though dirty, the festival was incredible and the lineup was about as good as it could possibly get. Then we went to Edinburgh for a few days and explored the city and took a boat to the nearby Isle of May, a sea bird reserve just off the coast from Edinburgh. We also ate a lot of haggis which is surprisingly delicious for something that contains at least 4 internal organs. After Edinburgh we were back in London for a weekend, where I was able to catch up with some friends from when I lived in London 8 years ago.

Isle of May, Scotland

 

Tower Bridge, London

#8: Amsterdam, Netherlands


At the end of September/beginning of October, there was a German holiday which gave me a 3-day weekend, so I took the other 4 days off that week and did a trip to Amsterdam and Madrid. In Amsterdam I met two friends, one from Pomona and one other intern from Merck. We had a great time wandering around the city, frolicking in the magical Vondelpark, and spent some quality time in many of Amsterdam’s unique coffee shops.

Somehow I ended up with only one photo from this trip, the I amsterdam sign at night



#9: Madrid, Spain


I flew from Amsterdam to Madrid to visit Evelyn, who is now living in Madrid. We explored the city, ate a ton of tapas, and went hiking in a really cool area outside of Madrid called La Pedriza. It had similar rocks to Joshua Tree, but was a bit more lush and way more crowded. On my first day in Madrid I also saw Matt, a friend from Pomona, who was passing through on his way to start an English teaching job in Caceres, Spain.

A castle, somewhere in Spain

That wraps up the year so far, but I’ll continue to post when I go on more adventures (I’ll try to post more than once every couple months from now on). Hopefully this blog will inspire you to travel more as well, because if I can travel this much on an intern salary of 900 Euros per month, then you can too. Being too tired or too poor is no excuse, you just need to live a minimal lifestyle and forget that ridiculous paranoia of strangers that growing up in the USA instills in us. You gotta be willing to occasionally jump in a car with someone you just met and give up that 5-star hotel room service to crash on a random person’s living room floor. And don’t forget, YOLO.