The Czech is definitely prettier than Lodz, Poland.
The last couple of days have been a flurry of factory tours and deciphering english accents: on Monday we visited a high school in Jablonec, Czech to take SEM (scanning electron microscopy) pictures of the samples we made in Liberec. Although our samples turned out horrible (I believe one lady working the machine even called them "idiotic").. the fact remains that we actually did get to make samples (yay!), and we made friends of the two ladies who worked there.
The microscope in the high school.
Entertainment through cheesy photography?
One was 20, in school for biomedical engineering, and had the wonderful job of escorting our small bladders to the restroom any number of times during the day, and trying to find means of entertaining us on our five hour "sit against the wall and watch someone take pictures of your samples with a 4 million dollar machine that you aren't allowed to touch" extravaganza. She resorted to 360 degree photographs of Prague taken from 100 towers in that far-too-steeple-y city, and pictures of her dog AND her dog's Dad. The other lady was getting married in 11 days, and after many exclaimations from the four of us, we convinced her to show us pictures of her fiancee, dress, and the church where she'll be getting married. We even got pictures of the mother-in-law, brother-in-law, and father-in-law in a silly wig.
I even found the time to use Courtney's arm as a canvas, creating a brilliant tattoo (!) of our experiences together in Europe. The two ladies handed over some colored pencils and computer paper and I ended up making a "Thank You!" sign that all of us added a small message and a signature too.
Checking out a gold plasma inside a coating device. In a sick turn of events, someone had coated a cockroach in gold. I freaked out a little bit when I saw it.
My awesome tattoo. It had nutella, a witch's broom, the pyramids, us running in front of the pyramids, a butterfly, a heart, "Audrey loves you!", us jumping in puddles in the rain, a "Big and Little" pillow, a rainbow, a purple pony, a cannon firing a cannon ball (because I couldn't draw the Sphinx without his nose because I'm simply not that talented.), and... a fried egg.
They were sweet though, and I'm glad to have met them.
From left to right: Courtney, Vladena, Kristin, me, Clara, and Sonda.
Wednesday found us traveling in a car through Czech, Poland, and Germany in a five minute time span. There are open borders because of the European Union (and they've even started calling the countries "states")... so we easily went between countries, ending up in a small town in Germany with a name that escapes me. Dr. Louda (our new professor here) had to mail some stuff via DHL, and the office wasn't open yet, so.. being the teenage girl that I am... wanted to go shopping. We found ourselves in a quaint little market in the center of town, and wasted 15 minutes looking at huge granny panties with lots of lace and silly suspenders. They have fake purses in large quantities and more socks than I'd know what to do with.
The market in Germany, and Courtney's enormous cranium.
Sneaker Socken. I have nothing to add!
I even brought my Euro, but no matter how many tiny shops I asked, nobody sold Coca-Light. It seems the Germans do not drink Diet Coke. =)
Our primary destination was a titanium/aluminum alloy coating factory named Techno-Coat that Courtney and Kristin quickly renamed "Technicolor Dream Coat," that specialized in coating medical tools and Kohler sinks. It's kind of funny, actually, because we recently renovated most of the bathrooms in my Florida house and all of our sinks are Kohler. It makes me wonder if any of our hardware parts came through this tiny factory in an obscure town in Germany.
The man who ran the factory, Burkhard Scholz, was completely sweet. He explained everything to us about his machines and the techniques, and answered all of the questions we fired back at him. He gave us business cards, brochures in english, and most excitingly.. let us play with medical instruments after they had been coated.
Skin retractors.
Mr. Scholz explaining a 1.2 million Euro machine to Kristin and Sonda.
A new part of the factory... it will soon be filled with equipment.
The nice man who showed us how professionals do layer thickness tests. He put in the sample, had a spinning ball rubbing against it, and added some synthetic diamond liquid in a line. Then he let it come into contact with the layer for about a minute and measured the diameter of the scratch on the sample with a computer program and an optical microscope. I was actually completely impressed with the technique.
I picked Tuesday to die, though. We were standing in a small group, listening to Mr. Scholz speak, and I suddenly felt light headed and couldn't hold myself up. Try as I might, I was sure I was going to fall on the floor, or faint, and I the feeling of all of the blood draining from my upper extremities was in full swing when Courtney suddenly rushed over, with Dr. Louda on her heels, and asked if I was okay. I guess that there wasn't even oxygen in the factory, or that I just didn't have enough sugar in my blood that morning, but two more seconds and I would have been sprawled out all over the factory floor.
Again, Mr. Scholz was really sweet... pushing me to get outside and breath some fresh air, grabbing me a chair, and even running to get a cold bottle of water right away. It had gas, which I hate bless his heart, but he was definitely trying really hard. And Courtney and Dr. Louda didn't so bad either. =) I hate being the sick kid. I think I apologized about nine times.
Pre-Audrey episode. The four of us in Germany with medical tools in the background, and a giant PVD device.
Wednesday (today) we woke up early and drove to another town, Turnov, to visit a ceramics factory. It was pretty cool to see all of the assembly lines in production. (Who am I kidding, I sat there in awe and was mesmerized by the constant perfect motion).
From what I understood, the factory took very fine aluminum composite powders (tiny nanospheres with diameters in the range of 12 nanometers) and compressed them into different molds, then sintered them to melt everything together and shrink the product, then coated them if necessary. They made these tiny rings that were used in oil field machines that were ever-lasting. They were super light weight - it was insane - and it was a world wide effort to make them, including different stages of production in Germany, the United States, the Czech Republic, and Austria I do believe. And they literally never had to be replaced. It was over 800 Euro per tiny ring, which seems like a crazy amount considering it weighed about 2 ounces, but Dr. Louda explained to us that if a worker had to stop the oil machine to change the ring it could cost 1000 barrels of oil instead of just the 800 Euro to buy the piece that won't ever break. Good point.
Our guide at the factory was very nice too, although he really only spoke German. It still pretty cool to see the entire ordeal, and he let us each have a sink gasket (thing) and tiny random pieces that they made at the factory. I shall tape them in my journal and keep them forever. They can't be broken! Not even with a hammer and all the force I possess...
The Saint-Gobain Ceramics factory.
Court and the factory. It was pretty cool.
Assembly lines amaze me.
One of the various products that they let us keep. These are in almost every person's sink. They control the amount of water that comes out of the faucet. And they cost 10 cents a piece to make, although the mark-up is a couple hundred percent for the consumer.
And just for fun, because it's cute and she's cute...
