[Updated] Europe is Too Small

[Update] After my snide remarks about how quiet Gutersloh is, Turkey went and won a soccer match last night. This is, apparently, the cue to get in your car, drive in circles and make lots of noise with your horn. For three hours. I didn't sleep until around 2AM. Petrol is around 1.6 euros per litre here; it can't be a cheap passtime.

The moral of the story is: Don't stay in Germany when Turkey are winning soccer matches.

A quick update on where I am up to:

I have now worked for Garrad Hassan and Partners for eight days. GH are a company in the renewable energy business, mostly to do with wind energy. My particular role is in writing controller software for wind turbines (and potentially marine turbines).

I am presently in a hotel in Gutersloh, Germany. I (and two others from GH) are here for a training course with a controller supplier. For some obscure reason, we got here by flying to Amsterdam last night and then driving for three hours this morning. I think it is because there are a lot of flights from Bristol to Amsterdam and not many flights from Bristol to anywhere else. Frankly I would rather the three hours it takes to get from Bristol to London and through security at Heathrow than the three hours driving, but there you go.

Actually the drive was sort of fun. I had to drive about half the way. This included a few firsts for me:

1. I have never driven on the right-hand side of the road before. This causes a number of problems, including passengers screaming, "No, right! Right!" and frequent digging in the driver's door for the gear stick.
2. I have never driven on a road without a speed limit before. It is nice being able to go fast, but there are inevitably lots of lorries doing 80 km/h, and a few people doing 180 km/h. There are only so many lanes to spread this speed difference over. It is easy to check your mirrors, see an empty fast lane, move into it, then have someone angrily honking on your tail only a few seconds later.
3. I have never driven across a border before. Doing this in Europe is now a total non-event; we went past a sign and one of the passengers said, "Oh, I think we're in Germany now." That was it.

The car we have is some make I have never heard of and can't remember, but it is a bit of a rocket ship. It doesn't have keys, it has a sort of thick credit card thing you stick in a slot in the dash. It has a very nice six-speed transmission, enough power for our purposes, wheel-mounted controls etc. It also has a Satnav which only knows about roughly half a dozen cities in Germany, and no actual streets in them.

Germany, based on my unbiased observation so far, is covered in trees and cars. And lorries. Lots of trees, though.

There are also lots of wind turbines. You can't drive far on the autobahn without seeing a turbine.

Gutersloh is a pretty dead town; we walked out to a restaurant and back for dinner, and the streets were deserted.

Somehow, everywhere we go we end up eating Greek. We arrived in Amsterdam last night to find a beautiful early summer's evening, and decided we could head into the city for dinner. After wandering through an area basically populated with restaurants, we selected on at random and it was Greek. We arrived in Gutersloh this morning to find that our hosts had booked us into a Greek restaurant for the next three days for lunch. Oh well. We ate German tonight.

The scale of Europe is still taking a bit of getting used to. I still think of Great Britain as being about the same size as Australia, and the continent as being about as far away as China is from Australia. That would make Bristol to Amsterdam about the same distance as Adelaide to Hong Kong, a flight of around 11 hours; actually it takes about 55 minutes.

This is all turning very boring, so I will stop.