The rest of the Work Week

The rest of the days this week were rather repetitious this week, so bear with me.

Wednesday, I helped clean and protect these giant museum display cases. It was all by accident, but it worked out, but I hope that solution wasn't toxic or anything. Frau Contenz asked me to help her with a project, so I went gladly. Basically, we first had to clean all the glass on these cases. The short sides were about two feet by three feet and the backs of the cases were about four and a half feet by three feet. How do you clean those? you might ask. Windex? No. There was a special solution we (actually just me) sprayed the glass with and then took a razor blade and scraped all the water and dirt off. Spray again, take a windshield wiper blade and go one direction, spray, wipe the other direction. Then, once its perfect (with no streak marks), spray it all again, grab this giant sheet of adhesive plastic, spray that, stick it to the glass, and smooth it out. Its much harder than it seems. We got five done during the entire day. Whatever that solution was, I got it all over me and my clothes. And my arms were rather sore from scraping and wiping the glass and holding up the plastic.

Thursday, I went down to the foyer by myself to conduct surveys with anyone who walked in for tourist information. I wasn't supposed to be alone, but Matthias was late and no one knew why. But I got a lot of surveys completed while he wasn't there...I'm chalking that up because I smile at people. But he eventually came, his late excuse was that he had to help his dad fix the motorcycle. We just sat down there all day and did the surveys and talked. Lunch was about two hours, though, because he went at noon and I went at one. Monika, the other German/Education Major at Webster was in town, because her sister lives in Villingen and then she and her Dad were going on to visit Bosnia (the homeland) and we were going to go grab lunch. This didn't happen because Monika's sister didn't come home from work on time to take her into the city. I wasn't mad,at all, she called me. I tried to help make her feel better by telling her about the time Mom left me in Walmart. I"m not sure if it really helped, but she laughed.

Friday Matthias and I did more of the same thing, but with a coffee (or tea) break and two cigarette breaks. Friday we didn't have so many people because mostly everyone were tourists, so they'd never visited the Museum or had a city tour. And if they had visited the museum, they were from Villingen and informed us they didn't need to take a city tour of where they lived. But the day ended early, because I got to leave at noon. Before we adjourned, Matthias copied my Tour worksheets for Monday. Despite the fact that I sit right next to the copy machine, I have not learned how to work it.

But, one thing I did learn on Friday, was that I was in the newspaper that day. No one told me I was going to be. But during the coffee break, the janitor (house master, literally) was reading the paper and told me there was an article about me in it. I asked, "Really?" and he said there was a picture, too. This was more concerning, because I wondered where the hell they got the picture from. There was no picture, but the article was real. Basically it was announcing that the American intern would be conducting her first tour for students on Monday about "Giants, Dragons and Mythological Creatures." I don't think there was really much point in putting that in the paper, since its a private tour and not a public one. And Frau Auer didn't mention it at all to me. I still probably would have been OK with it, but it was weird. I was told I should go immediately and buy ten copies of the paper. I didn't.