Adventures in the First Work Week.

Hello! Here is another update of my adventures in Germany!

So I have officially completed my first week of work at my research internship in Germany. Some parts of the week were great, and I enjoyed them very much. Others were not as much as fun (will describe later). So let me give you a run down on the week!

Monday started at the beautiful time of 9:00am. Yes, I said 9:00am. That is when I had to report for work, which couldn't have been a better time in my opinion. I get to sleep in until 8, and by that time, I am already awake to an extent. Thanks to the sun rising at 4:30 in the morning. Monday was a pretty slow day. I first started out helping others load the van for a group of interns that were going out for a few days to get methane and CO2 measurements. After that, I started to learn how to protocolize data. This involves matching the observed data that the interns wrote with the data from the loggers. When this is done, it helps Michael and the others model the trace gases as a function of soil temperature. It's quite interesting, and I cannot wait to see the results from our data later in the summer. After I was taught the ropes of protocolizing data, I attempted it on my own. I barely got half of it done by the end of the day. The reason being is that it was hard to get a pattern down to typing in the soil temperature measurements into the Excel worksheet. Excel doesn't have many keyboard shortcuts to aid in our work. So lots of it is manual clicking and dragging, and typing data in. Lunch on Monday was good as usual. They always seem to have a lot of good stuff for cheap, lunch is only around 3 euros for me everyday. After lunch, we were called to sort roots in the ZALF greenhouse (I'll get some pictures up another time). Sorting roots in my opinion is the worst part about this internship, it's very mind numbing, and I have absolutely no clue what the purpose of the experiment is. It's actually not part of Michael's work, it's an other professor's work. The aggravating thing is that some of the interns have mentioned that there is a lot easier way of measuring the biomass of the corn plants. Sorting roots seems very inaccurate, considering how many small roots there are. It seems to me that if many of these small roots are missed when we collect them, they could add up to a statistically significant difference in the biomass value. This could just be me though, I still have to take a statistics course. Overall though, they probably don't matter much, and this is just me complaining about sorting roots haha.

Tuesday was about the same as Monday. I spent all of the morning attempting to finish my first protocol. By the time lunch rolled around, I was about 75% finished. A typical lunch plan for me involves meeting up with everyone outside House 19. Most of us just call it the warehouse because it pretty much looks like one (hopefully will take pictures of sometime in the future). When we all met up together outside the warehouse, we walked to the kantine as they call it here. While on the way there, Michael told me and Kofi that we would be heading to the field on Thursday to measure methane concentrations in the dark chambers. After lunch we met with Michael, Nathan, and Andrej. (Nathan and Andrej are two interns from Canada). Along with Michael, Nathan and Andrej showed Kofi, Nogul (intern from Kazakhstan), another person who I can't remember, and myself how to operate the clear chambers. The clear chambers measure CO2 concentrations. It's a fairly simple procedure that I'll describe more in depth when I come back from a field trip where we measure CO2, and not just methane. Later on Tuesday I finished up the protocol after Michael released us.

Wednesday, besides the root sorting, was a fun day. It started out with a delicious cup of coffee courtesy of the interns. Despite how boring protocolizing data might seem, it's actually not, and I enjoy it. I don't know if it's because I like entering the data, or if I like to use it as an excuse to listen to some new music! The morning was spent starting a new protocol of data from a site called Dedelow (I think I spelled that correctly). It was nothing special. Lunch was very good, as usual. After lunch we all went to go sort roots for 3 hours before work got out at 4. You're probably wondering what made today fun? Well here it is. Every Wednesday about 10-16 people get together from ZALF and we play soccer (football), at a local park about 2km from ZALF. I was looking forward to it the whole day and couldn't wait to play. I must admit, I'm pretty awful when it comes to offense, but on defense I thought I did pretty decent. Some of the players were very good with their feet, it's crazy what they can do with a ball. I should probably mention that I scored a goal. The game was very fun all throughout. It was a tie game, 6-6, all along until Michael said that next goal wins. Five minutes later, an opposing player kicks it to our goal and our own player accidentally kicks it in, scoring an "own-goal". They win 7-6. Kofi, who was on the opposing team, would not stop giving the guy who scored the own-goal crap the next two days, it was pretty funny!

Thursday started very early, and this was because I was headed towards the field. I got up and arrived to the warehouse at 7:30. We loaded the large ZALF van and we're started our 1.5 hour drive to the field location, which was about 65km NW of Berlin. On the way there we picked up two other interns who took the train from Berlin to a location only 4km away from the site. Once we arrived at the site, we unloaded all the chambers and set them up. We put them on their respective stands on all the sites (we usually split up and did two sites at a time),  and started measuring methane concentrations by opening/closing a valve on these bottles every 20 minutes for one hour. This is about all we did and then we came back to ZALF around 4pm with all the samples. These samples will be analyzed at a later date and their contents will be recorded to develop a model on the respiration of methane from soil. It was a very cool area and there were lots of cows, hopefully I'll be smarter next time and bring my camera. ( I won't forget that tomorrow, I promise!).

I'm going to skip Friday because all I did was sort roots with some interns. We all also had a very nice dinner outside the guesthouse under the beautiful German weather. Enjoyed some beers, some more than others. I just had two, a very strong pilsner, and the other was a beer-cola mix which I have taken a liking to.

On Saturday we were supposed to go to Poland, but a good number of the interns (all but me and one other), had a little too much to drink the previous night, and they decided to sleep in a little. I woke up around 9 to start my day of relaxing! I met Nathan around 10:30 and we started the process of putting Windows 7 on my laptop, which I am fully enjoying now. After getting all that settled, and hanging out with everyone, I retired to my room early to get back in touch with Miranda, whom I miss so much!!

Today was a good day I would say. I went bowling this morning to keep the muscle memory going strong through the summer. I did fairly well, averaging 194 (Would have been higher if I didn't leave 4 pocket 7-10 splits!). After the bowling alley, I made my way towards Alexanderplatz to take some of the beautiful scenery that is the Berlin City-Center. There was a very cool Lego exhibit on one of the displays in Alexanderplatz, there was some crazy creations. I also found a Dunkin Donuts which I will be visiting fairly often now! Click the slideshow on the top left of my blog's home page to view photo's from my trip, and all other photos. After enjoying the donuts, I headed back towards Müncheberg to hang out with the other interns before settling down for the night.

Tomorrow, I'm headed back out towards the field again. I'm excited on one end to be going to the field, but not excited on the weather end of the spectrum. It's supposed to be a little rainy and cloudy, but it won't be all bad. As long as I can stay dry and warm, it will be all good. I'll remember to bring my camera, I promise! I'll try to update at least twice a week from now on out!

Sorry if there is some grammar/punctuation, mistakes. I wrote this fairly quick and I need to be up early tomorrow (It's 12:00am here now). 

Thanks for reading, shoot me an email if you have any questions! wrightdobbs@gmail.com

-Wright