I woke up at 7:27am this morning, which was terrible, considering we were meeting in the lobby at 7:45. I quickly showered, threw everything in my bag and ran downstairs. I then quickly discovered we were supposed to wear business casual. I ran upstairs, switched clothes and was ready at 7:46…fortunately the bus was running a half hour late. Still, I was rushed, and was unable to sleep on the bus ride to Köln. It took some time to get there considering the rain and terrible traffic, but the 90 minute ride was worth it. We visited the Ford plant which produces 3 door Fiestas, 5 door Fiestas and 5 door Fusions. The plant makes both right side and left side steering in order to fill orders for customers in England and Africa. They crammed us into a tram which drove us around the production line in order to watch the impressive process.
The robots do the most amazing things with delicate precision and incredible speed. The plant also employs several hundred workers who each have 76 seconds to perform their job (they are given a different task each day). This gives them enough time to complete their task without rushing them, but also allows the plant to produce 1,900 cars everyday. Employees are not allowed to work solo, and they always work in teams to catch errors and provide positive spirit among coworkers. The plant is one of the most efficient in the world.
Following the tour of the plant, we headed to the city of Köln. It was raining pretty hard again, but we took shelter in the largest cathedral in the world. Compared to the National Cathedral in DC, this thing was massive.
Unfortunately, we could not figure how to get to the top, and consequently, we headed out into the city. The place had countless H&M/Express/Pac Sun stores, all with reasonable prices.A few times we found really good deals, but none of the shirts were in our sizes or the right color.We returned to the bus and sampled the local pretzel place, which was pretty good, but tasted just like a ballpark soft pretzel. We drove home and worked on our presentations about Italy andHungary until 9 o’clock. A note about our project: each of our 4 person groups was responsible for researching two European countries’ Business and Political structure and stability. We went to dinner at the place we visited on Sunday, and ate in the cool Wine Cellar. I had a pizza coveredin onions, needless to say, it was not my favorite dinner in Germany. We ran back to the hotel to meet up with everyone before heading to the local student night club we were told to try. True to Wolverine form, most people took longer than expected to leave, so most of us took off before everyone and arrived around 23:15. We promised ourselves before leaving that given our project presentations the next day, we would not stay for longer than 30 mins, but of course, we got there before the party really began, so we ended up staying for two hours. To keep us entertained, the club kept feeding us free champagne while it was less than packed (presumably as a thank you for making the place look fuller). Since we had a bed time to keep and the locals were being cool and staying off the dance floor, we decided around midnight that if no one started dancing in the next fifteen minutes, we would kickoff the revolution. Naturally, this promise we made to ourselves forced me to begin ballroom dancing in a less-than-appropriate setting. No worries though, while we were the only ones dancing for five minutes, with ten the place was packed, and we felt proud of ourselves for making it happen. We bumped into the rest of the group as we were leaving, and returned to our hotel where we climbed the stairs as quietly as possible.
Due to Mac vs. PC incompatibility, I stayed up quite late amending slides in our Power Point. I also had to pack all my things to checkout in the morning. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I got to watch (meaning refresh the box score page) the Red Wings game where Franzen scored goals with reckless abandon. He got four in the first 11 minutes. Go Wings!
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