The Deutsches Museum is one of the largest museums I’ve been to. There were so many topics on technology that the museum had. They had the usual topics on flight, ship building, engines, etc., but they had even more exhibits on classical mechanics, electromagnetism, chemistry, nuclear physics, mining, semiconductors, computers, cartography, microsystems, space exploration, printing, etc.

There was even a cool demonstration of arc lightning.

The section of space exploration was quite interesting too, but it wasn’t as big as the exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Flight.

The clean room exhibit reminded me a little bit of the type of work I did during my internship at Bosch.

Of course in any exhibit on computers, there has to be a computer from Remington Rand.

Here is the experimental apparatus that was used to discover nuclear fission.

The stuff I looked at was only scratching the surface of the museum. I pretty much skipped entire sections like time keeping, wind turbines, bridge building, among other things. I was there for four hours too and I didn’t even look at any one section in a lot of detail. To see everything, one would have to spend days here.

Link to photo album here

At Frankfurt Airport, when Edward and I lined up to check in, we were the only two Chinese people in line.  We seemed very out of place.  Some of the people gave us these stares that seemed to ask “why are you flying to Kiev?” We wanted to visit Chernobyl and shoot AK-47’s.

Our experience on the plane was dreadful.  Four crying babies/toddlers plus jet lag plus one hour delay was not a good combination. No sleep for me I guess.  Worst flight ever.

Awkward Car Ride

The hostel arranged transportation for us and so when we arrived, I looked for someone holding a sign with my name on it (first time ever!).  The driver was not happy at how we were late (not that we could do anything about it).

Probably since he was late, he drove like a maniac.  He drove way faster than the posted limits and passed every car on the highway.  The expected 45 min ride was reduced to almost 20 minutes.  The driver didn’t speak English.  No one said a word during the entire ride.  Awkward.

I had read before that people sometimes get driven to random places by taxi drivers before they get mugged.  By getting the hostel transportation, we minimized that risk.  Despite that, I was at peak alertness the whole time, making sure he was going the right general direction (I vaguely remembered the directions from the airport to the hostel).

Dream House Hostel

This is by far one of the hostels I’ve ever stayed at.  The staff were extremely helpful.  We asked them like a thousand questions and they happily answered them every time.  They treated security very seriously.  Kiev might not be safe, but I felt safe leaving my passport and cash in the locker in the room.

Security Measures

During our trip planning, we had read about the potential dangers in going to Kiev from the Canadian travel report about Ukraine.

The report tells travelers to “exercise a high degree of caution”.  It warns of dangers such as pickpockets, passport scams, armed robbery, racially motivated violence, muggings, etc.

Seeing how the hostel’s security was pretty good, we left our valuables in the room.  We each carried a decoy wallet with nothing in it except a scan of our passports and the cash we needed for the day.  No credit cards, no real ID, no cards at all.

If anybody steals a wallet, no big.  Better to lose $30 than all our money.  Nobody can scam us for our passports if we aren’t carrying it.  I didn’t even put on a hidden money belt.  The less I brought the better.  We felt pretty prepared, and luckily nothing happened.

Language

People in Kiev generally speak Ukranian or Russian.  I know neither.  I also don’t know the Cryllic writing system.  Even if I wanted to ask in English how to get somewhere, I can’t even pronounce the name of the place.  When I went to Greece, I could at least pick out the greek alphabet (side effect of studying math and physics), but in Kiev, I can’t even read anything.  Too bad.

Food

The first night we arrived in Kiev, we had no idea what kind of food was around here.  We couldn’t even read the menus anyway.  Picking a restaurant was a matter of randomly walking into a restaurant.  To our surprise, our random pick turned out to be Japanese food.  Interesting.  No pictures needed.  Vancouver has an abundance of Japanese restaurants.  Beer is worth taking a picture of though.  I can’t even read the label.

One of the hostel staff had recommended to us the Golden Dukat Coffee House.  I wish I took more pictures here, but I found someone else’s travel blog with good pictures of it!  Good coffee, good dessert.  And they have an English menu!

We were told that Borscht is one of the traditional soups in Ukraine.  When I tried it, its taste was so familiar and I had to think about where I had tried it before.  It tasted a lot like the vegetable soup that people can get at Hong Kong style cafes (羅宋湯).  I Googled it later, and apparently the Hong Kong recipe (while a little bit different) is a derivative of it.  What a coincidence.

Independence Square

By far the largest city square I have been to.  For me this was the place to see in Kiev.  The pictures here don’t do justice to how epic it was.

At the square, there would always be these people carrying pigeons around.  They kept coming up to me with me and I had no idea what they wanted.  Later I found out that apparently they’re trying to get tourists to take a picture with them holding a bird.  Not sure why that’s cool but okay.

There were also people dressed up like Mickey Mouse or Shrek trying to get little kids to take pictures with them for money.  They did this even when the temperature was above 30 degrees Celsius.

St. Andrew’s Church

Nearby our hostel, there was a nice church.  It’s architecture was quite different from anything I’d seen before.

Friendship Arch

This arch was built to commemorate the unification of Ukraine and Russia when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union.

Street Market

On the way from our hostel to Independence Square, we walked along a long stretch of road with many street vendors selling souvenirs, trinkets and other random stuff.  People there even sold gas masks, replica German WWII medals, and fake guns.

Trip Ideas for Next Time

After we came back to Vancouver, we found out that the hostel started offering tours to abandoned missile silos, helicopter rides, and Yak plane acrobatics!  If only the hostel were offering those tours.  We would have totally gone to those.  There’s always next time.

Links to photo albums:

• Kiev
• Kiev (Edward’s Photos)

The last two were pretty artsy, and I felt that as fun as it was, I never thought I was good enough to actually pursue it as a career (and I still think so).  It could also be because the way I was raised taught me that a career in the fine arts would be useless in the real world.  I’m not saying that it is, but that kind of thought very often prevailed when students made career decisions.  I forgot about pursuing web and graphic design as a career and left it alone as a hobby.  I still do this today and am still quite satisfied with this decision.

When it came to math and the sciences, I did really well in high school (which doesn’t really say much as university showed).  I thought about what I could do with these.  The few career choices that came to mind were careers like: computer programmer, mathematician, physicist, chemist etc.  Surprisingly, the thought of being an engineer never came across my mind.  At the time, I had only heard the word being used, but never knew what it was.

I talked to a few of my friends about what they were going to take in university.  A few of them told me they were going into engineering.  Intrigued, I looked to find out more.  The gist of what I got from the Internet was that “an engineer applies math and physics to design things that makes life better.”  I also found that UBC and SFU both had information sessions for engineering.  I visited the information session at SFU.

There, I got a whole slew of information about engineering.  Each department in the faculty and a lot of student teams set up booths explaining what they were all about.  To entice potential incoming high school students, they displayed a lot of cool things that they designed like helicopters, computer games, and just fancy gadgets.  At that point, I thought to myself, “wouldn’t it be so cool to build something like that?”  I had no idea what kind of work the projects entailed.  I was really focussed on the final product.  I had no concept of what happened in between.  To me, engineering seemed like the first half of that picture at the top.

I also went to the mechatronics information session there and that’s where I first learned about that discipline.  I really liked the idea of blending mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer engineering together.  It seemed like a great combination.  The first thing that popped into my juvenile mind after was, “Cool! I can build robots like the ones people see in movies!” That kind of thought was quite naive, but regardless, it was the thought that dominated at the time.  Such was the thinking of a child.

That pretty much convinced me to go into engineering.  The next question was, “what school should I go to for that?”  I knew I didn’t want to go too far away from home, so I really only had two options: UBC or SFU.  I thought long and hard for a long time and eventually decided on UBC.  At the time, I didn’t know if I made the right choice, but I did have two reasons for doing so.

One was the international reputation that UBC commanded.  I could go to Hong Kong and talk about UBC and people would know what I’m talking about.  Even people in Germany have heard of UBC.  SFU?  Not so much.

UBC also let me live in a home away from home in a way.  I lived in Port Coquitlam and the commute from there to UBC took 1.5 hours each way.  In order to avoid having to deal with that intense time sink every day, I got a spot in residence.  That would teach me to live independently while having support from my parents.  To this day, I am still glad I made that choice.  I really did learn to live independently.  In fact, I wrote this while I was still in Germany, thousands of kilometers away from family.

After making my choice of doing engineering at UBC, I got acquainted with the UBC campus and the residences and so once school started I was prepared.  I was totally taken aback to how university life was different, but I managed to adjust.  In the end, I went through first year with pretty good grades (high enough to be guaranteed entry into whatever specialization I wanted).  Even then, I still had no idea what engineering was all about.  The stuff I learned was all just theory.  If anybody asked me to design anything, I would have been clueless.  I still had not bridged the gap between theory and practicality.

During the summer after first year, it became time to make yet another career-defining choice: What discipline in engineering should I do?  I researched pretty much every single one and I was left with three choices: mechanical engineering, engineering physics, and computer engineering.  Even though I researched them all, I had no idea what they were all about.

I remembered the mechatronics info session I went to a year ago.  The thought of building a robot still floated in my mind.  As naive of a thought as that was, it got me really considering the mechatronics option in mechanical engineering.  I looked on the Mech website and found out about the Mech 2 program.  I really liked the way the curriculum was organized.  I thought it had a great mix of learning theory and actually applying that theory to projects.  I agreed with its goal of breaking down the artificial barriers between subjects.  At that point, my mind was set on doing Mech.  I had already missed the deadline for going straight into mechatronics from first year, but I felt that I could get in after second year.

Second year in mechanical engineering really taught me what it meant to be a mechanical engineer.  I found out that Mech wasn’t just about cars, planes, trains, and boats, and that those things were only a small facet of a discipline with an abundance of possibilities.  I found out that not every single engineer does design – some are in research, product safety, and even maintenance.  Despite those other kinds of engineers, my primary interest still lay in design.  I learned the process of actually going from just an idea to a final product – something that no info session ever taught me.  In fact, some engineering curricula programs don’t teach it either.  They seem to half-expect its students to figure out on their own and know how to apply the theory themselves.  I had really interesting and useful classes that I could really apply in engineering designs.  I could go on forever here, but the important thing is that after knowing all this, I still wanted to stay.  It’s what I wanted to do.  I wanted to design and build things.  Every now and then someone will talk about some other profession having a better salary, but that doesn’t matter.  Interest trumps that.

Looking back, I found it quite absurd as to how I ended up in mechanical engineering, but it’s what happened.  I started off knowing next to nothing about the profession, and now I can’t think a better option.  I am now in my fourth year of mechanical engineering, and if someone gave me the chance to go back and pick something else, my choice would not change.

For last weekend’s excursion, I went to Munich. Munich is one of Germany’s largest cities and has culture that totally differs from the rest of the country. Although everyone here still speaks German, I felt like I was in another country.

The City Center

We began our journey in the city center. There we saw much of the historical buildings like the Rathaus and the Frauenkirche. While walking around the city, I saw many people wearing the traditional Bavarian clothing with those really old style German mustaches, like the ones that the Prussian Kaisers used to have.

Hofbraeuhaus

For lunch, we decided to eat at Munich’s famous Hofbraeuhaus. Founded in 1589, it was once the royal brewery, but now it serves as a restaurant and tourist attraction. There, I ate their Surhax’n (salted pork knuckle), a Bavarian specialty. It tasted so delicious, but it was so incredibly fatty. Layers of fat were sandwiched in between the skin and the thinner meat. We also ate a brezel that was almost one and a half feet wide. The ones I eat in Stuttgart are only around 8 inches wide. For our drinks, we each ordered a “Mass” (usually the “ss” is replaced by the beta sign), which was one liter of beer. I think the only people that didn’t drink that were the kids. It also seemed customary for people to write something on the table since every table had graffiti from previous customers all over it. I did the same and wrote Newton’s Second Law, representing mechanical engineers and physicists everywhere. While we ate, there’d be a band playing traditional Bavarian music.

Englischer Garten and the Hofgarten

After lunch, we went to the Englischer Garten and the Hofgarten. The whole place was just a huge park where people just suntanned.

Olympic Park

Afterward, we went to the Olympic Park of the 1972 Summer Olympic Games. I saw a memorial there for the Munich Massacre, in which a Palestinian gunman murdered 11 Israeli athletes. We visited the football field and its size was rather deceiving. It looked so small, but the bikers took a really long time getting from one side to the other, so it had to be huge.

BMW Museum

We only looked around the rather large lobby of the museum, but since we already saw the Benz and Porsche Museums in Stuttgart, we didn’t bother spending that much time there. The cool thing about this museum was that we actually got to sit in the cars and motorcycles, unlike the Benz and Porsche Museums.

Starkbierfest

The Starkbierfest is a beer festival that lasts for a month, because of this, there were tons of people at all the local beer gardens. Everyone went there in the evening and as usual, people ordered their beer by the liter.

Dachau Concentration Camp

At the front gate, one could immediately see the camp’s motto that the Third Reich once displayed, “Arbeit macht frei”, which literally translates to “work makes free”. Each incoming prisoner would see this sign without realizing the horrors they would be face. We visited the interrogation rooms, now devoid of anything from the Nazi regime except for the slowly decaying wallpaper.

The museum on the site outlined the history of the camp and the stories of some prisoners and staff that were once there. Also at the camp, one could see the “houses” that the prisoners stayed in. It was hard to believe that the building once contained as many as 2000 prisoners. Outside was also the Ashes of the Unknown Concentration Camp Prisoner. On the wall, the words read, “Never Again”. I went up to the tomb and paid my respects.

Inside the house, we saw the beds that the prisoners slept on. In one room, I counted 72 beds, but obviously back then, more than 72 people slept there.

We also visited the crematorium which contained the ovens once used to cremate the dead. There was also a gas chamber. Although Dachau was only a concentration camp and not an extermination camp, it still made use of it. Each of the gas nozzles was disguised as a shower and room even had drains on the ground so that the prisoners wouldn’t refuse going into the room. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it was a shower too.

On the exterior, one can still see the measures that the Nazi’s took in preventing escapes such as the use of watchtowers, electric fences, and a moat.

The Isar River

For lunch, we went to the a beer garden close to the Isar River. I wanted to eat the Bavarian Weisswuerst (white bratwurst), but they only served it in the morning. After lunch, we briefly stayed at the Isar before it was time to go.

Physics Experiment on the Way Home

While on the back, my friend put his water bottle on the table and every time the train accelerated, the bottle would move due to the inertia. Like the nerd I am, I got the idea of measuring the train’s acceleration. But to do that we also had to know the train’s speed after acceleration. We’d do this with basic vector kinematics. We measured the time it took for the train to travel 200 m, by looking at when the train passed the markers on the side of the track (at least I hope it’s 200 m). We then timed how long the train took to accelerate. Our results: the train travelled at 120 km/h and accelerated at 0.85 m/s^2. It was really nerdy of us to do that, but since we’re all mostly engineers, we found it quite hilarious.

More photos here

Link: https://www.societyofrobots.com/actuators_steppers.shtml

Speed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(speed)

Mass: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(mass)

The section about the robot factor is basically about DC motor selection.  All it does is do a power balance between the energy provided by the motor and the energy required to move the vehicle at a particular speed an acceleration.

http://www.societyofrobots.com/mechanics_dynamics.shtml

http://www.roymech.co.uk/Useful_Tables/Tribology/co_of_frict.htm