Europe Trip: Dortmund

Fall storm "Xavier" caused on Thursday afternoon total chaos in Northern Germany, including the capital city. The wind speeds were up to a 100 kmh, which caused lots of trees falling on to roads, power lines, killing 7 people and the shut down of major public transportation systems. I barely landed from my trip in Helsinki and made it home safely before the storm shut down the entire public transportation system in Berlin. This is what rush hour looked like on almost every train station:

So on Monday afternoon, the trains were still delayed and after spending an hour at the customer service desk, I was still able to make it to Dortmund that night. It was important that I get there as my co-workers and I had to set-up our booth and attend a work shop for the next three days at a trade fair there. This trade show was much smaller than expected; however, our company was one of the presenters and the people who did attend where very interested in learning about reliability. Also, there were people from all over the globe in attendance, ranging from Australia, India, America to Africa and Europe. One of the workshops was very interesting as it talked about Errorism and how error can be good.

After a successful first day, James, Brittany and I ventured to downtown Dortmund for a bite to eat. 

The next day, more work shops and presentations:

On Wednesday night, the fair hosted a participants dinner and quiz show. While we all were tired, it was a very fun evening. The food was good and with our Jack Daniels bottle, we were the most popular and loudest table.

Our Australian and Belgium friends

Despite our good moods, we even won 2nd place: a bottle of wine. The joke is that we each carried multiple bottles of Jack Daniels with us to Europe to give to our customers and for the trade show but we didn't expect that we would end up winning more alcohol. We were relieved when we were able to unload all the liquor from our luggage. 

The next day, the trade show finished at noon and by 2pm, I was sitting in the train back to Berlin. While the business trip was very interesting and I learned something new, after three weeks I was also exhausted. I definitely was looking forward to spending our last day in Germany with my family before we had to say our goodbyes.