Game of Thrones

Howdy,

Team Romania (the 4 of us Aggies) started work this week. Monday, was a religious holiday, as mentioned, so Tuesday was our first day. It mostly consisted of safety training and coffee. But, we all met our supervisors, tutors, and buddies (re-met our buddies) at the beginning of the day in a conference room. As part of the internship, we are given a project. The primary purpose of this project (as described by me by my tutor) is to learn something. While in Romania, we are each assigned 3 people (or more if you include Codruta and the rest of the HR staff). Each of us gets a mentor, a tutor, and a buddy. In my case, the mentor (Morent) is simply there to supervise, but very little interaction with him is done. My tutor (Sorin Blaj), on the other hand, is my go to guy. He explained to me my project options, talked me through which I could get the most experience in, and then offered himself for daily meetings with me, half an hour a day for questions or examples. Very helpful. (We decided that I could just message him any time and he would help at his earliest convenience, but that would always happen in the same day.) I am already appreciative of his efforts. And last is the buddy (Mircea in my case) who is more in charge of the cultural experience.

I will talk about Alex in a bit, but before I do, here is the super market experience. First of all, the supermarket we went to is tight. It's not super big, but when you don't know where anything is, it feels like it. The buggies (baskets, grocery carts, w/e) require you put a half lei (Romanian currency) coin in the buggy to use it. You get the coin back when you return it, but it was a little funny to figure out when the rest of the customers, if they already couldn't tell we were foreigners, were definitely coming to that conclusion at that point. We were so lost. Luckily, one of our coworkers, Alex, found us in the market! He probably stayed there an hour longer than he should have helping us find things and interact with the cashier. He even taught Haegen how to say "dumb foreigner!" in Romanian, so Haegen could now successfully appear to be the shy local who only speaks up to make fun of me. Alex, though, saved our tails. What a guy.

Wednesday is when the fun began. We arrived to the office at 9:00 PM. This is customary for a lot of departments at TenarisSilcotub (the Romanian mill of Tenaris) as the typical workday is from 9-6. We went straight to the medical office for a physical and other tests. Well, the methods for a Romanian physical was quite different than in the US. We had to read a book with blurry numbers in it for part of the eye test. When administering the eye test where to cover one eye and read the letters on the wall, there was no line of distance. The nurse simply pointed to an area on the floor, shrugged her shoulders and said that would work (I assume those were her words; it was in Romanian.) They also had us bop our noses with our index fingers as the opposite arm went into a full extension the other direction, and this while holding eye contact. Yeah, I don't know either. My favorite, as well as the most interesting, was the psychological test. Or, the crazy test. This test, will turn you insane if you are not already. There are only 3 pages: (1) rank yourself in certain categories from 1 to 5 on how much you agree with them, (2) an entire page full of squares with hashes through them on only one of its either 4 sides or corners, and you had a legend of 3 types of the 8 possible shapes, now circle/mark all the matching symbols, (3) a large box with so many squiggly lines in it, and each of them is connect to a small box on the left and a small box on the right, the left boxes have numbers 1-25, and the right boxes are blank, fill in the right side. SO, that was weird.

That was the first half of Wednesday, until lunch rolled around. One cool guy, Alex, who is around 25 years old I would guess (Alex from the supermarket), was at lunch and interacts with Haegen a good bit. All of our buddies we met the first day and have hung out with pretty regularly, but Haegen's "official" buddy was busy this past weekend. So, we have kind of claimed Alex as Haegen's "unofficial" buddy, whether Alex is aware of it or not. The second half of Wednesday were tours of the mills. Hot rolling mill, cold drawn, components, premium, and the lab (we were supposed to do boiler as well, but are legs were tired and it was late, Valerie works there though if we ever want a personal tour later in the summer). Well, the people giving the tours were pretty cool. Alin, our good buddy gave the premium tour and he looked a little like this:

Glamour Shot

I had already learned a lot about premium connections, thanks to my wonderful co-worker Laci (the Hungarian) who got all of his sexual innuendos out of the way in the first 5 minutes of our conversation. But he talked to me for an hour and a half the day before and explained everything very well. More pictures, oh and one of our new friend Aly from Egypt:

Leon, Haegen, and Valerie

Me and Aly

My desk at work, Italian Espressos

Later that evening, we crashed hard in bed.

I will talk later about our projects (or at least mine, but the others too if they would like to share). Now I will end on the random things I either learned or observed these few days.

1. Today I had lunch with my co-workers, and they taught me new phrases and had me guess their ages (got most of them right but was scared to death when guessing the only girls age, Christina (American spelling)).

2. We are allowed to listen to music in headphones where I work, and when Remix to Ignition came on, I looked around for someone to sing it with me, but realized where I was so sunk down in my seat and continued reading.

3. For all numbers here, commas are used as decimal places.

4. Mircea taps his feet a lot at his desk, the headphones help get rid of the tapping.

5. Almost everyone I have met (Italians, Romanians, Hungarians, and Moldovians) all like Game of Thrones.

Off to dinner with the gang, ciao.