Study Abroad Blog | Blogging From Abroad

14 Dec

While writing these lines, I’m right now sitting in an Chevy Pick-Up Truck heading back to Morgantown. It’s raining heavily for hours now, the window wipers make a horrible noise and I am actually being late for my own farewell party? at least, Modest Mouse keeps my mood up.

Colin (who is actually steering the truck, you know him from earlier posts) and I went to Mooresville, NC. This city is not only home to dozens of NASCAR racing teams, but also USA headquarter of the Weinig Group. This is a German company building machinery for the wood industry. Colin’s master thesis deals with utilization of low grade lumber by the means of fingerjointing and that’s exactly what we were up to, earlier this day.

On the way southwards, we stopped at new river gorge. It was really worth seeing it. What a bridge.

Fingerjointing is nothing more than milling a zig-zag-pattern in the on end at a board and joining it with another board with exactly the same grooves. If you apply some glue, you can easily achieve a very good bonding. Now, this Weining Group build pretty decent devices who do this almost automatically. And since Colin had a lot to fingerjoin he was glad that he could do it at their facility.

Not the very best, but a good example of a fingerjoint. This one is unfortunately a bit misaligned but you can see the tines.

Therefore we took a university truck, filled it with wood and headed south. Unfortunately we had the wettest weather imaginable, especially on the way back. After a night in a random business traveller hotel we processed the boards, filled the truck now with 8 ft long planks and headed north again. The weather was heavy rain alternating with exceptionally heavy rain and storm gusts.

This is the machine we made the joints with. A very decent device, made in Germany. I am acutally playing with the thougt of applying for a job at this company… Ah, we’ll see.

In Princeton, WV, we stopped by to meet Robert Kincaid, President of Accurate Millworks Inc., a company producing wooden shutter components. Colin interviewed him to learn about the economic background of fingerjointing (a technique used by Accurate Millworks).

When we were done with this interview the watch showed 5pm. Unfortu nately we thought, that we’ll be back at around 6pm so I invited friends for a farewell party at our home. So, this party is starting in exactly one hour and we are right now in – just a second, need to ask Colin – he say’s he doesn’t really know where we are, a few miles from I-79. The map tells me, we’re right now not far from Hookersville.

So… I am going to be late to my own party – embarrassing, isn’t it? Thanks to my new laptop and a battery life of about 6 hours, I can take the opportunity and tell you about my last days in Morgantown. Final went well (thanks to fortunate choice of courses, I only had one), all my courses are over. I will write another post wrapping up my MoTown experiences on- and off-campus later.

My flat mate Eric has his convocation on Sunday. We’re invited to attend this event and I’m looking very forward to that. In Austria graduation (getting the bachelor degree) is nothing special – we just go to the dean’s office and get a confirmation, that’s it. But getting the master degree (which is the Diplom-Ingenieur – engineer’s diploma) is a very big thing.

Addendum: Since Eric successfully graduated today, I am glad to congratulate to this major achievement. And I can blog another nice picture ; )

Anyway – after convocation we might go with Eric’s family back to Washington and rent a car there, or go with Eric northbound (maybe Vermont), to be honest, we don’t know yet, depends even a bit on the weather. In the meantime we made it to I-79, still it is raining as strong as all day, brrr?

Our next big goal is New Year’s Eve in New York City. We already booked a hostel room there and – believe me – we’re looking very forward to go there. It’ll be even nicer, since we’re going to meet there a friend from the BOKU, Helmut, who’s going to start his semester abroad in the United States right when we leaving. He will be in Atlanta, though, and I hope he will write a blog, too.

Okay, we’re just passing Exit 79/Burnsville (I’m a pretty slow writer, when it comes to English) and I am ending the last post of my blog during the regular semester. There’s a lot different if you make a semester abroad. Not only food tastes different, you’re constantly meeting people from places you didn’t even know they existed; not only you’ll visit more cities in a few month than ever before; not only that you’re living in a different time zone. I am absolutely positive, that I was living in a different time speed? The last month just flew by and a hardly can believe it’s already almost over!