I am sitting here in a computer lab, typing so fast it sounds like my fingers are doing the Riverdance on this here keyboard. I think some of the Germans keep turning their heads to look at me being so noisy, but I don't mind, because I am recalling my mecca-weekend and sucking on a decadent square of authentic German chocolate, called Schogetten. I am definitely, definitely going to miss all the chocolates and open-air bakeries this country has. Germans have one helluva sweet tooth, as do I. :)
Anyway, this weekend was BLISS!!! I have officially gotten EVERY LITTLE THING DONE on my "List of Things to do on my Germany Trip" that I wrote up with my New Year's Resolutions on December 16th. It included:
1) Visit Wolfsburg, Volkswagen's global headquarters
2) Visit Munich, to tour Dachau
3) Visit Stuttgart, to tour the Porsche and Mercedes Benz museums
4) Tour Volkswagen-Kassel, the second-largest VW manufacturing factory on the planet.
Ding ding ding ding!! I have done them all! Those four things are what it took to make this trip truly the "trip of a lifetime" for me, and to say that I've beat feet in the past two weeks is amazing. And I'm not even tired. In fact, I've never found it so easy to get to bed early, only to rise early, and run-run-Rudolph until I get back home to eat supper at 9 PM, and collapse into bed right after that.
Normally, I'd save the best story for last, but because of this blog layout and putting my most recent posts first, I want to make sure I make my favorite trip the most non-recent, if that makes sense (so y'all read it last.)
:) :) :)
Sooooo, here she begins. (WARNING: this is lengthy. Only read if your boss is MIA or if you are in between college classes with no homework or textbook reading to tend to.)
Friday, January 12th, was my day of love. Professor Balmer arranged a private tour for us to go to Wolfsburg, a city about 1.5 hours northeast of Kassel. (Yes, even though I am in Europe, I still measure distant as a Wisconsinite: in units of time.)
We left at 7:21 AM from the Kassel-Wilhemshöhe train station. The night before, there was some big campus party, and everyone went to it and got totally skunked. There were supposed to be five kids going, plus the professor...but three of the kids were hungover (or still drunk), and completely missed being at the train station on time. I had to call them to find them, only to realize that I had indeed woken them up from their slumbers. In their beds. At their host homes. No where near the train stations.
Alas, it was only Balmer, myself, and my travel-buddy Sara that made it. We had our own luxurious cabin in the ICE train, about the size of a walk-in-closet, with glass sliding doors to enter, remote-control audio with headphone jacks built into our armrests, and climate control for the room. It was already magical.
Fastforward the anxious 1.5 hours, and BOOM, we arrive in Wolfsburg. As soon as you pull up to the train station platform and look out to (what was my) right, you see it!! IT!!! *Squeals* The HUGE Volkswagen plant!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It had four smokestacks, it was so large and big and beautiful. It had a HUGE lit-up VW badge hanging on its all-masonry exterior, on the wall facing the train station.
The whole factory was just on the other side of the tracks, and down a ditch and across a field.
We got off the train, and to the train station. There, a man named Henry met us, and catered to us for the REST of the DAY.
Mind you, Henry is a personal friend of Professor Balmer's. Balmer's been around the block a few times, and he actually was a teacher of Henry's, several years back, at UWM. Now, Henry is a globe-trotter pulling in a six-figure salary (easily), and gave us a private tour of Volkswagen that I would NEVER have been able to pull off, had I stubbornly arranged my own trip to this city on a weekend date. (As dense as Balmer is, he didn't put two and two together that he had already planned a trip that I was brazenly trying to plan as well. Needless to say, I was overjoyed when he told me he had taken care of it all for me!!)
Oh, did I mention that Henry is also the fricken Vice President of Research and Developemnt, or something outrageously superior like that??????
HOA YEAH, dear readers....he got us into such secretive stuff, that I pretty much had to pee from all the excitement before we even hit the sidewalk to enter the atrium to the main building.
Totally, totally could not have gotten into the inside linings of my mother company without this gentelman. He really put us up!!
Once Henry met up with us at the train station, he walked us to the Autostadt, or Auto Museum.
It turns out, that the Autostadt is actually a city.
Yes. Volkswagen has a Volkswagen City inside of a Volkswagen City. EEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!
You enter into this huge atrium, with a big, stainless steel globe hanging from the ceiling. It is not a solid globe, just one made of vertical bars that gather at the earth's North and South poles. There were also a few horizontal bars that ran around the globe, as latitudinal markers.
The globe is supposed to represent the earth, and it had this red LED-light streamers on them, just like stock market tickers, that ran around the 'equator' of this scaled-down earth.
There was a rectangular stock market ticker with blue LED lights just south of the equator, that oscillated between showing the current time and temperature in Wolfsburg.
Apparently, the ticker is supposed to represent the exact longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates of the city of Wolfsburg on the earth.
However, it was south of the equator on this big, hanging globe. Wolfsburg is not in Africa; it is clearly north of the equator.
This is where our private, English-speaking tour guide (whom Volkswagen paid 150 Euros to take us around for 2 hours) explained to us that you are supposed to look into the blue glass floor of the atrium, where the globe is reflected.
With this reflection, the blue stock ticker appropriately shows up north of the equator, at the exact spot where Wolfsburg is on the real earth. So, to view this work of art properly, you can't stare at it directly. You have to look down at the floor:
(Just to hold you over until I get home and can upload my own photos) :)
In the blue glass floor, once you looked down into it and past the reflection, where a bunch of baby globes, all like beach balls. They were solid, and each one had a different pattern on them. A journalist/artist dude writes stories, but stores all of his data in these globes, and then gives them to Volkswagen.
For example, he had one globe with all of the land colored in either green or red. The red color represented the already-destroyed rainforests, and the green represented the remaining hectares (silly European units).
Another one was all black, but had this silly-string looking stuff strung all around it. It was called "Traffic Jam," and showed that if you were to take every single personal vehicle from every single person in this world, and lined them up bumper to bumper, the line would go around the circumference of the earth 76 times.
It was huge. This whole place was huge!!!! The tour guide took us all around this mini-city, which resembled the Olympic grounds in Munich. It had cobblestone walkways, steel poles with lit torches atop them, throughout the grounds, and "winter markets" that were outdoors, but really sauna-stands!! Shyeah! So you don't get chilled while shopping outdoors, you can step inside the wood-paneled huts, to shop there. They look just like saunas.
Volkswagen has its own university. It's own soccer team. It's own Ritz-Carlton hotel. (There are only 5 in all of Europe, and one of them is there for Volkswagen!!!!)
The hotel is so five-star, that if under half of it is booked on any given day, Volkswagen pays the room fees of the remaining half of the hotel, as a thank you to its employees, and to keep the service up-to-par.
The Wolfsburg Ritz-Carlton.
Did you also know that Volkswagen owns Lamborghini? Bentley? Audi? Bugatti??? Seat?? Skoda???? Bugatti makes the fastest car on the planet...this means VOLKSWAGEN does.
The only twisted thing about this is that Ferdinad Porsche started both Porsche and Volkswagen, way back at the beginning of the 20th century. The companies have been passed down through the families, and today's Porsche CEO single-handedly owns 29% of Volkswagen's shares.
Soooo, Porsche owns Volkswagen, who owns Lamborghini, Bentley, Audi, Bugatti, Seat, and Skoda.
Freaking. Huge. !!!!!
And oh, so, so luxurious.
The Autostadt also had its own ice rink (which Sara liked, since she has been professionally figure-skating since she was a little girl), and special buildings/pavilions for each of the car brands it owns.
See, I was not kidding when I said it was huge!!!!
We first set foot inside the Bentley Pavilion, and it was lavish. I expected nothing less. :) They had a bunch of race cars on display, along with a live (but parked and roped off) Continental GT. Eeeeeek! What a beautiful, $225,000 car!!
They had these little moon-shaped rooms you could step into, with all authentic curtains of leather you could touch, feel, hell...SLEEP IN, in all colors and patterns, to custom-build your Bentley.
The moon-room next to it was covered in gorgeous, soft, smooth, and sophisticated panels of real wood, that you could choose for the interior trim.
I felt like a million bucks, grazing those floor-to-ceiling panels!!!
They had a glass display of all the chrome, steering wheels, and special door handles you could arrange to have on your vehicle as well. Wah.
We moved on next to the Lamborghini Pavilion. Honestly, we didn't have time to go into it, because we were running late for our 1 PM lunch date with the Henry guy. However, we stood outside of it and listened to the tour guide tell the story of the Lamborghini Pavilion:
The whole thing is black. Just this big, boxy, pitch-black, matte-finish building. Scant on windows, and only all black doors. The "artist" who designed this building claims that it was something that just fell from the sky, like a meteor, and just plunked down into the earth as it currently sits today (which is completely level):
However, on one side of the building was this large circle, carved into the wall. Yes, it was also black. The tour guide told us that on the inside of the pavilion, on that circle, was a yellow Lamborghini Murciélago hanging on it. The pavilion was a big theater, showing a movie about the car being named after the great brave bull that was spared his life in a rodeo somewhere. So, the whole show compares the spirit of this raging sports car to that of a bull. About halfway through the show, the car "becomes enraged" and spins around to the outside of the building. Yes, just like a revolving bookcase, the big black circle spins 180 degrees, so the car hangs outside. They have fog effects and thunder noises and everything, I caught some of the coolest pictures when I witnessed it spinning to the outside of the building:
There was so much more to see!!! We had to breeze past the Audi, Seat, and Skoda pavilions, only to move on to what I thought was the coolest part of the whole Autostadt: the Twin Cylinders.
In Europe, there are only two ways you can take delivery on your brand spanking-new Volkswagen. You can either take it from a dealership, of which you are then required to buy extra packages for it to powder the dealer's ass....or, you can visit the Autostadt and watch your precious new vehicle roll right up to your feet.
You see, when you arrive, you walk into the big atrium with the aforementioned globe hanging from it. You head up some escalators, and explain that you are here to pick up your vehicle. You tell them your name and account information, and are then given a voucher with a UPC label on it. That UPC label gets scanned into the computer, and sends a signal to two HUGE twin cylindrical towers standing on the outskirts of the Autostadt:
Look closely. Do you see the cars in there?!?!?!? Eeeeek, it is so cool!!
Each car is parked like a slice of cake. They are parked on a conveyor belt. When that UPC label gets scanned and sends the signal up to the tower, it activates the corresponding conveyor belt, and backs your vehicle out of its cake-slice, and onto the elevtor/lift in the core of the cylindrical tower. It then lowers the elevator to the ground level, and then pulls the car + conveyor belt out of the tower, and into this glass dome-tube-tunnel thing that winds throughout the Stadt. It is even a catwalk over the highway you have to take to get in to the factory! This conveyor belt winds down and around, until finally, the car enters the greeting room where you have been waiting at. The belt stops right at your feet, and the very first human hands and human oils to lay a hand on your vehicle, is yours. It has never once been parked out in the human elements, and never once faced the risk of being carjacked up in that tower.
HOW SLICK IS THAT?!?!?!??!?!?!
:D :D :D
Ahhhh, but the BEST is still coming!!!
We scrambled to meet Henry for a 1 PM lunch. Check this out: Volkswagen PAID for our lunches!!!! Hoa yeah!!!
I probably shouldn't be typing about this while I am starving for supper, but we were each given a freaking CREDIT CARD to use, to go through their 5-star gourmet restaurant!!!
We walked up to the doors (P.S., at every door in every building of the Autostadt, there are two VW employees standing there, with their hands crossed behind their backs, waiting to serve you), and one of the employees handed us our credit cards and waved with his white-gloved hand to "eat anything you see before you."
I will always remember my jaw dropping at the FANTASTIC, pretty, pretty food all lined up and colorful and coordinated in this huge room. The lighting, the mahogany tables, the tall straight-backed chairs...oh, I felt like a queen!!!
I didn't want to be a rude guest, so I ate modestly: a penni-spinach käse dish with a fresh half-loaf of bread and some cooked vegetables. Others had more, you could get heaping, heaping dishes of food. All with the simple swoosh of this card that I didn't have to pay for.
And check this out, fellow chocolate lovers::: they had a whole wing of the restaurant devoted to DESSERT. My mouth is watering all over again; this food was all arranged and smelled soooooo good and sparkled so innocently, it looked like it was a diamond store!!!
I AM NOT JOKING!!
Somebody, PINCH ME! It was the coolest ever!!!!
I had a chocolate cake, chocolate-frosted, apple strudel slice of something heavenly for dessert. I could have wolfed that whole cake down, but again, I had to save the sucker for the real employees. :)
The lunch with Henry was fascinating. I loved listening to the guy; he has done it all, but still remained grounded the whole time!! The only creepy/hopeful thing about it all, is that he told us about his career path. So far, my path matches his STEP for STEP. Which is hard to say, seeing as how I have a career about as long as your average caterpillar hangin' out in the grass.
But yeah, he went to UW-Milwaukee, and then when he graduated, he worked for Kohler Company out of Sheboygan. (Hmmmmmm, if I remember correctly, I had a job offer to start working for them the DAY I get BACK from GERMANY!!!)
After a few years at Kohler, he got a job for a French car company...I can't remember the name of it. But, he quickly became a Big Wheel at this company, and would frequently have summit-meetings with the Big Wheels from other European car companies...one being Volkswagen. He befriended a few guys from VW, and they persuaded him into working for VW. So, he left France (after studying there to receive his Ph.D.), and moved to Wolfsburg. 15 years later, he is now a Big Big Wheel at Volkswagen, at the mere age of 41, and has three children with his college sweetheart from UWM. One of his children is my age; she is going to college at a university in Paris. (Ooooh, could you imagine???? They are completely living the globe-trotter life right now!!)
After lunch was finished, modest and proper Henry took us in his company car (yes, a Volkswagen...but a van, one that is not manufactured in the U.S.: the Sharan).
It was time for our super-secretive, über-Jack Bauer, inside tour of Volkswagen's Homeland Research and Development Department. *Enter triumphant music here*
You guys, I got into such high-tech stuff that I could be considered a lethal weapon to my endeared company. We had to get out of the van at the security gates and go into this building to hand over our cameras and sign a whole contract swearing ourselves to secrecy that we will tell no one what we saw of Volkswagen's inner lining, by the chance that we'd spread it to their competing companies. (Which I can completely understand.)
We signed away our forms, were given a bright-orange return slip to redeem our camers upon exiting Mecca, and then hopped back into the van to tour R&D.
Henry drove quickly and smoothly; that lil van purred just like any other Volkswagen I've heard!! We parked at the R&D, and as soon as we passed through the Jetson's sliding doors for the entry-way, the secrets already spilled out! There was a particular undercover model of the Golf GTI sitting there, and I got to hear all about it.
Naaaannna nanna boo boo, that's all I will tell you! Besides the fact that it was freaking brilliant, and I am waaaay impressed by what Volkswagen might debut in the coming years at auto shows. :)
We walked through some heavy wooden doors, into a conference room, listened to a Power Point presentation, and then continued on to the portals of my existence:
The R&D workshop floor!!!!!!!
I saw tons and tons and tons of cool testing stations, with Volkswagens of various models (all my faves, hint hint) modified and hooked up to all these wires, and covered in special tape and paint jobs. There were computers and robot arms and automated this-and-that, it was completely mesmerizing!!! Totally beat the pants off of Disney World!!!!!!!!
The COOLEST part of the ENTIRE day was what was just sitting there, unlocked on the workshop floor: the VW EcoRacer.
It was gorgeous. Stunning. Breathtaking. Empowering. Silently-strong. You name it, I was smitten! And *POP!* Henry opened its door and casually said, "You wanna sit in it????"
THE HELL I DID!!!!!
It is a shame that I couldn't have my camera to take a photo as proof, but I sat in it, I really did!!!!! It was so comfortable, it hugged my body perfectly, and the dashboard was so inviting. It sat low to the ground, and you had to lift your leg up and over the hurdle-sill to get out of it. Wah, I was speechless for a good 3 minutes after I got out of it and Sara got in. The boys around us were all just grinning at our reactions. Pure magic was in the air, I swear I could hear the Fountains of Arabia playing in my head somewhere.
Totally, totally would NOT have been able to pull ANY of this off if I had tried to do this tour on my own, on some random backpacking-through-Europe trip!!!!!
Sitting next to the EcoRacer was another Volkswagen concept car; one of two ever built. (Later, I would find out that the other one was sitting on the floor just 10 yards away!) It was a little torpedo-looking thing, the infamous VW car with three wheels. Known for it's superior gas mileage and making a splash in car enthusiast's articles, this little bad boy drove 100 km on 0.9 L of gas.
Holy. Mac. Ar. Oni!!!
(Mind you, it has a 1-L tank anyway.)
It was time to move on to the next phase of our private day: we had to meet a German engineer at the Autostadt to hear about his work in AI, artificial intelligence. We buzzed out of the R&D building, back into the van, and towards a new set of exit gates, only for Sara and I to remind Henry that we still needed to get our cameras from the other gates. We were running late as it was (and Germans have 0-tolerance for poor punctuality, they are to-the-minute), so he spun the van around and power-housed it through a whole NEW street inside of the plant, to the other gate, and to the security building, for Sara and I to sprint in there and effortlessly retrieve our cameras.
From there, we rode on the Autobahn (yaaaaaaaaay!!! My dream come true: riding on the Autobahn in a VOLKSWAGEN!! Hee hee hee!!) back to the Autostadt, parked, and raced inside to meet the grumpy German guy, with his arms crossed, and foot briskly tapping on the ground.
We apologized for running late, in our states of admire, and followed him into the museum and up to this interactive stand where there are pieces of a generic Barbie-sized car (although you can tell they were modeled after the VW Passat) sitting on a bookshelf.
In front of the bookshelf was a table, with little squares countersunk into the table, all in a row. To the left of all of this, was a big projection screen with a computer-generated man and woman standing on the screen, speaking to each other.
It turns out, that on the undersides of the pieces of the car (the hood, the body of the car including the front seats, the body of the car including the passenger seats, the body of the car including a possible third row of seats, a body for a convertible edition, a body for a van edition, a body for a sedan edition, etc.), were matching-sized square black boxes. Underneath the black box was a computer chip, that matched up to the sensor in the countersunk holes of the table.
When you would match up the piece of the car with the countersink, it would trigger a response for the two computer-generated people to speak to you about. They were artificially intelligent: previously programmed to give recorded explanations about the car you just built. They told you what was good about it if you built it correctly, and what made the frame of the car a strong one. On the otherhand, if you purposely tried to make a mutant vehicle, they'd tell you what was incorrect or if you "should just take that whole thing off the table." Ha ha!
If you took all of the pieces off, and placed them back on the bookshelf, the two people were programmed to think that you had left. To keep the atmosphere of the museum going, they were wired into real newscasts, to talk to each other about the news. For example, they were wired into the EU weather service over here, to talk to each other about the weather. It was really neat, and very intriguing.
There were over 10,000 different combinations of a vehicle you could make with the given pieces on the bookshelf; however, only 64 were practical. So, VW programmed 3 separate responses for each of the 64 possibilites. Pretty thorough, eh?
I was told the future of engineering is in AI, and after seeing that remarkable skit, I do believe it.
Sadly enough, 8 hours had whizzed by at this point, and Balmer/Sara/I had a scheduled train to catch at the train station. Henry walked us to the station, gave us his business cards, promised to get something set up with co-oping for UWM students for VW in Wolfsburg, and hugged me good-bye. :) He was very sweet, I told him I did not want to leave, and thanked him to heaven and above for providing me with such an honorable day.
The whole experience really showed me how it pays off to be passionate. What I did, only a handful of people on this earth will ever be able to get to do! Me, a little girl from a small town on the other side of the world, was rewarded by getting to see the most intimate facets of her role model. It does pay off. It pays to keep at it. It pays to care, to be loyal. And it pays to know that things always work themselves out to be how they were meant to be!!!
:) :) :)
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