This time on "How it's Made" - Pills and Glass

Another very busy week in Weimar has come and gone, and I’m finally getting a chance to write about it on the train ride back from Ingolstadt. We had a quiz on Monday and that went well (I think) and after class we had a tour of the Bayer facility. Bayer produces medicines in the form of hard pills, and at this plant in particular they produce “The Pill”. We were greeted with cookies and drinks, and the guy that was giving our introduction and tour kind of reminded me of Phil from “Better of Ted”. The tour was pretty cool. They began by showing us their shipping and inventory. All incoming supplies have to be taken off of the wooden pallets and moved onto what looked like stainless or aluminum pallets for sanitary reasons. The whole plant is kept immaculately clean…for obvious reasons. Their inventory system was also really interesting. The entire process is automated and whenever something is needed in the factory, a forklift retrieves the item and puts it onto a conveyor where it is then delivered to the desired location in the factory without ever needing human assistance. After exploring shipping and inventory we went into the manufacturing area.

In order to get into the manufacturing area you first have to suit up in the proper attire. A smock, hair net, and shoe covers are required to enter the manufacturing area…so we were touring in style – lab-tech style. We also had to go through several different rooms and cleaning processes. Again, most of the manufacturing processes were automated, but there were some people needed to operate and monitor the different machines. Unfortunately the machines were not running while we were there, but we still were able to get a pretty good idea of how the manufacturing and packaging processes work. It was kind of like being in a German “How it’s made” show. After we finished up in manufacturing we headed back to the good ‘ol Hedwig Pfeiffer House. We have been allowed to cook at the house, and there is a little market just down the street from our house, so I have been cooking dinner for myself to save some money. By cooking myself I can have a pretty large diner (zB. Porkchops, apple sauce, and a large salad) for around 4 Euro – not too shabby. The only thing cheaper would be dönner, but I have limited my dönner intake to once a week on Dönerstag.

Tuesday was a normal day of class. In the late afternoon we had a tour of the Anna Ammalia Bibliotek (library), but before the tour Dr. Cothran set me up with an interview for my project on life in the DDR. My interview was with an old toymaker who had lived through the Third Reich and the entirety of the DDR. We met at his toy shop, which was full of handmade toys and old books. In the back of the shop he had built a playground for the local children, and we had our meeting there. He described his accounts of life in the DDR and later one of his relatives showed up and joined the conversation. It was all pretty fascinating. After the interview Dr. Cothran showed us a little garden with flowers, herbs, and fruit and nut trees across the way from the toyshop and then when journeyed over to the Library. The library had an enormous collection of books, with some dating back to the time of Charlemagne in the 800s. There were also some signature books (which were popular back in the 1700s) with signatures from numerous notable figures…including Galileo Galilee. The main hall of the library was in the Rococo style and consisted of three levels. Around each of the etages were the busts of various significant figures from the enlightenment period. Goethe was at one point the head librarian of the Library. Oh yeah...the floor in the library was a really old wooden floor, and in order to preserve it we had to wear these giant felt slipper things over our shoes.

Wednesday we had a shortened class period, because we were leaving early to go and visit the Schott glass works in Jena. When we got out of class we had 30 minutes to get to the Hauptbahnhof. We all went to the main bus stop, and for some reason we assumed that all the bus lines went through the Hauptbahnhof. Unfortunately, that was not the case. All but two lines run through the Hauptbahnhof, and we unknowingly decided to get on one of the two lines that doesn’t. At first the bus was headed in the right direction, and then at an intersection where we should have turned left we turned right, and started to drive through the country…oops! We got off as soon as we could, and we only had ten minutes left to get to the Hauptbahnhof. Given our limited time we decided to start running. I should remind you that for all company visits we are required to wear business formal attire. So we were all running through the streets of Weimar in full business suites. I’m sure that we were a sight. Anyways, we all made it to the train station just in time – and we were all also thoroughly soaked with sweat.

The Schott glass factory was fairly interesting. Like Bayer they provided cookies and drinks (which was good, because we all needed something to drink), and they gave us a solid overview of the company. Schott specializes in special glass (ie. for solar, medical, and technical purposes). We then toured through a museum about the Schott family and another about Schott’s products through history. I was hoping that they would have a gift shop so that I could get a “Schott Glass” (see what I did there), but they didn’t. After the tour we headed back home and commenced studying for our test on Thursday. In order to make up for lost class time on Wednesday we had to start class all the earlier on Thursday – yuck. We started class at 7.30, took our test at 9, got out of class at 12.30, and promptly started our long free weekend.

Some people were leaving immediately after class for such destinations as Prague, Paris, and Rome, but I decided to start my weekend with a nap! After taking a pretty solid power nap, Charlotte and I decided to take a little day trip over to Erfurt. A group of girls in the LBAT program had recently gone there and found a coin store that sounded pretty cool, so we wanted to go and check it out. The coin store was actually located atop a bridge. There was a whole street of stores on top of the bridge, and it took us a little bit to find it, but we managed. In the back of the store there was a large chest filled to the top with old coins from all over the world. We took about an hour looking through the coins, and we found some from the DDR, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich. They were only 25 Euro cents apiece so we bought several. We walked around and went into a couple more stores, and went to an ice cream place where I had my first Spaghetti Eis. Spaghetti Eis is pretty much extruded ice cream that looks like spaghetti, and it was really good. After walking around a little more we found a nice little place to eat on the riverfront, and there were some very brave little French fry stealing birds and an Aflac duck that joined us for dinner. We finished up and headed home to pack and get to bed so that we could be ready for our early departure to Ingolstadt in the morning!