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| 27th June |
| (Cont..) - I spent the first month settling into my new job with KUKA Roboter GmbH (see the link to the company web site on the home page for more info on the company). I also went to AIESEC events and spent a lot of time with the AIESECers including 2 weekend trips where we stayed in the countryside and played drinking games, took it easy e.t.c (click here to see photos from these 2 weekends). |
| So who is KUKA Roboter and what kind of work am I doing for them? KUKA Roboter is the 3rd largest robotics company in the world, 2nd largest in Europe, and largest in Germany. They make robots used in manufacturing (particularly car assembly), packaging, laser cutting, and other industrial applications. I work for KUKA Controls which is the division responsible for developing the robot controllers and the software that runs on them. I'm mainly concentrating on distributed application development building client applications that talk to the robot(s) over a network. I'm on a 6 (just became 9) month traineeship organised by AIESEC. KUKA has provided me with an apartment and a basic wage for the duration of the traineeship and the benifit to me is I get to develop a whole heap of new skills that are going to make it a lot easier to find good work when I finish in January.. |
| - Lou flew into Munich on the 2nd of June and quickly settled into the apartment, displacing my piles of clothes to places I'm still discovering. It's amazing to look around the apartment and think that we some how manged to bring all this gear from overseas. It's been great having Lou all to myself again and we've managed to cram a lot of sightseeing into the past 4 weeks. On the first week we travelled to Ingolstadt for an AIESEC beach volleyball competition and then we headed to a big university party that night and did some sightseeing the next day. The weekend after that we headed to Neuschwanstein which is a kind of fairytale castle set in the Bavarian alps. It's actually a very young castle, bulit in the late 19th century well after the era of the original castles. The castle was built by King Ludwig the 2nd who is meant to have been a little on the crazy side so it was a pretty amazing place to visit. You can see photos from both Ingolstadt and Neuchwantsein by clicking here. - Since then we have been settling into life in Germany, trying to grasp the local language, and doing the odd bit of sighteeing when we get the chance. We're heading to the Love Parade in Berlin in 2 weeks which should be awesome. It's the biggest electronic music street parade in |
| the world with some 1.5 million people attending it each year. Anyway I've just spent an entire Saturday afternoon on-line getting the photo pages to go so I think I'll wrap this update up but I will put another update on in about a week so come back and visit and sign the guestbook while you are here if you get a chance (the link to the guestbook is on the main page). Seeya, Ned. |
| 27th June 2003 New Photos! - Latest photos from Germany here. - Latest news & photos from Australia here. - Photos of all things German here. Well is seems like an eternity since I last did a decent update to this web site . As you might have guessed the transition to a new country created some challenges, to say the least, in getting access to my web site so that I could update it. My Internet access at work restricted access to the web sites I needed and Internet Cafes are far and few between, let alone affordable, in Augsburg. I'm glad to say though that Lou and I have got the landline connected in our apartment and I can now regularly update the site using Lou's laptop (thanks Lou!). So, you're probably wondering what the hell I have been doing for the last 2 months that I've been in Germany. Well let me quickly summarise what I've been doing to date (sorry to repeat stuff but I know there are some people who haven't visited the site for a while).. - Lou and I spent the first 4 months of the year living and working in Ottawa, Canada, where I managed to pick up job as a barman/waiter in a hotel. We endured the Canadian winter, went skiing, visited Montr�al, and took in the great Canadian lifestyle. - After finding out in early April I'd gained an AIESEC traineeship in Germany I gave notice to the Novotel where I was working and started making arrangements to get to Augsburg at the beginning of May. - Lou flew back to Adelaide on the 8th of April to spend time with her new niece, Eliza Lovelock, who popped out of Lou's sister Emily on the 3rd of March. - I packed all my gear up, said good by to my Canadian friends, caught a bus to Montreal, and then flew to Munich via Vienna on the 2nd of May. |