Time for the design project!

I have a meeting tonight at 8 PM with Professor Balmer and the other four UWM kids that went to Germany with me.

It's time to start our design project, the one that will count for the grade in this course, to get credit towards my degree! We have to do this for the next five weeks.

I'm actually kind of relieved to see them tonight. I could use some chuckles over re-telling the stories of all the stuff we saw and got ourselves into. :) I keep day dreaming about Germany while I am in this slow first week of classes, where we just sit and listen to rules that never change, from semester to semester. So, this hang-out will be a remedy to me missing Deutschland!


Well, we had an assignment for our meeting tonight. We had to write a brief article on our experience in Germany.

Geez, where do I begin??? I loved that trip so much, it went perfectly and I got to do ALL of the things I had wished to do, all these years!

I will always remember this trip, it means so much to me and I take it very seriously.

So, I concocted a two-page banger on my experiences. I still feel it does no proper job on capturing all the little ways this trip satiated me. It's as if I can't get the words to come out right, to represent how major this was to me!!

Anyway, here is my paper, copy/pasted for you. I apologize if the beginning of it sounds like some Hippie-Tree Hugger; I had to play to my audiences, here! It's a construction and foreman team looking at how harsh Oil-Loving America is, and blah blah blah.

I just like how the second part of it came out, hence why I am sharing it with you all:


Ashley Ullmer
Kassel UNI program
Led by Professor Bob Balmer
January 24, 2007

Somewhere Only We Know


I was one of five students fortunate enough to travel abroad to Kassel, Germany, to study renewable energy methods that have been developed in Europe. Our mission: to help implement those same methods here in the blessed United States of America.

There were two main memories that I flew back home to America with. Two memories that left me dumbstruck, that left me realizing that what the five of us had done was truly remarkable and monumental.

The first memory that branded itself into my mind came halfway through the three week excursion in Germany. We were introduced to a presentation prepared by ISET, a company that manufactures windmills and specializes in wind energy. The presentation opened with a song by the artist Keane. Sure, I had heard the song back in America on FM radio, but hearing it at that moment paired up with a somber film about the increasing losses in the earth’s natural resources, caused me to stop dead in my tracks and really listen to what society is doing to itself nowadays, and how we must save ourselves.

“I walked across an empty land,
I knew the pathway like the back of my hand.
I felt the earth beneath my feet,
Sat by the river and it made me complete.
Oh, simple thing, where have you gone?
I'm getting old and I need something to rely on.
So tell me when you're gonna let me in,
I'm getting tired and I need somewhere to begin.”

The song’s lyrics struck me in the ears like a steel pipe; they were so true. Society is cutting away at its lands and fuels, such as trees, water, fossil fuels, and oil reserves. We know our planet ‘like the back of our hands’ because we have taken it for granted for so many centuries and generations, and know how to manipulate it in rather clever ways.

However, the public and media have gotten a hold of the stark reality that the earth may not last forever, but we as its inhabitants remain nonchalant to that reality. We’ll continue to use it and abuse it, until it is too late for repair, causing us to stop dead in our tracks and blankly ask, “Where have you gone?”
The earth is getting old and needs something to rely on: humans that will treat it with respect, instead of with waste. Likewise, our current methods of energy consumption are getting old, and we need something new to rely on.

Enter the content we absorbed while studying in Europe.



The second memory that I hold in the frontal lobe of my mind stems from a private trip to Wolfsburg, where I was privileged to tour Volkswagen AG’s global headquarters and its ever-so-secret-and-precious Research and Development Center.
I have long been a raving fan of Volkswagen and its corporations. I’ve studied its products for years, and I foster a deep passion for anything carrying the VW brand. I was honored to have a full day being chauffeured around the Autostadt, the 5-star restaurant, the R&D building, and getting myself into top-secret multi-million dollar projects that Volkswagen protects so strictly.

I was able to view a prototype Golf GTI model, sit in the only EcoRacer made in the entire world, have a private tour given to me in English, and sample any one of the delicatessen foods in the buffet for lunch. I was driven around the entire park, the heart and soul of Volkswagen. I was given a private lesson on artificial intelligence, which is the expected new wave of engineering. I had so many intimate facts of Volkswagen revealed to me, that I had to sign a contract to keep my secrecy. I feel proud to be tucked into the inside track of my parent company.

I was even able to peer up into the Twin Cylinders, the towers that store 800 new Volkswagens, waiting to be picked up by their owners, whom were my fellow Volkswagen fans.

However, those 800 drivers will most likely never have the opportunity to see what I saw with all of those private tours. They will never get themselves into what I was able to. They will never touch what I touched. Anything that they will learn from Volkswagen, I will have known already for a whole year and a half. My family back at home, my Volkswagen New Beetle club from Wisconsin, or any Volkswagen of America employee, will most likely never have the chance to even set foot in the Volkswagen city that I did! I am very humbled.

I will never ever forget my day at Wolfsburg. It is easily one of my favorite days of my entire life. It always will be.

I floated out of that city, full of glee and wonder, as to how I got to be the lucky girl to be treated like a princess. I felt indebted to my professor, and his personal friend who piloted us around Volkswagen. What did I do, to be given such a monumental gift?? It was then that I realized that it pays to be passionate. It pays to be loyal, to stick to your guns and keep working hard. Don’t falter from your dreams, don’t let anyone lead you to think less of your motives. I’m just a small-town girl from the sticks of Wisconsin, on the other side of the world from my dubbed ‘Mothership’ Volkswagen. Yet, I was hand-picked to make it over to Germany and see the very heart and pulse of the company that inspired me.

That meant the world itself to me, and I will never ever forget the kindness focused on me in Germany. I really do thank you so much, whoever ‘you’ specifically may be. My professor. Henry, my professor’s personal friend who showed us around Volkswagen. My luck. Some divine being. Fate. Whatever it is that reassured me to keep being an honest, good girl, working hard for what is right, no matter what my colleagues may say.

Thank you.




Germany can still be pointed out on a globe; but the city, sights, sounds, scents, and experiences the five of us shared, exist somewhere only we know.