That's his grandpa. The rest of the pictures can be found on Facebook. :) I got there after the family had eaten lunch at this Gasthaus: Mönchhof
We stayed there for coffee and cake and then drove back to Martin's family's house to have a party in their garden. It was a lot of fun seeing Martin's entire family again - they're really nice and fun!
As far as work goes, this week was an eventful one. I got to meet the rest of the congressmen/women in the party this week, as well as the opportunity to go on some of my first "business trips."
On Tuesday I got to meet Katja Wolf, and I sat in on a budget committee meeting. Katja is very young and friendly, and she was also in charge of the meeting. There were about 15 people present, so it wasn't too bad, but Katja had me introduce myself to everyone at the meeting. Little did I know that was just preparation for the 40+ people I'd be introducing myself in front of the following day.
Later that evening I traveled to Eisenach. There was a committee meeting in Eisenach with Congressmen from the neighboring state of Hessen. The committee was discussing the problems with K+S - the potash mining company dumping their waste into the Werra river. I was excited to go to this meeting since the topic is what I've been working on for the past two weeks at the Landtag. Tilo and I traveled from Erfurt to Eisenach together with the ICE train (normally I use the cheaper regional trains, but I wasn't the one buying my ticket this time so it was nice to be in the fancier, faster train!). When we got there, Tilo and I had some extra time, so he invited me to dinner. We went to this really neat all organic restaurant in the city center - Tilo paid for everything too (the internship keeps getting better and better). ;) Later Tilo and I met up with Katja, and she gave me a quick tour of Eisenach. It's a really beautiful city, and Katja informed me that it wouldn't be the last time I would be there. The meeting was also really interesting; I learned a lot more about current issues going on (e.g. K+S's stance/claims about the pollutants), which made my research all the more interesting and relevant.
On Wednesday I sat in on a Fraktionsitzung, which is a meeting where the party discusses current debated issues and establishes their policy for the respective debates. I got to meet the party leader, which is somewhat comparable to the Speaker of the House in the US government. The meeting lasted for about 3 hours, and some points were harder for me to understand since I had no background information on some of the topics. Without the technical vocabulary, it's pretty easy to get lost in these meetings. This meeting was in preparation for the Landessitzung, or the Congress meeting next week. This upcoming meeting will be the first meeting of Congress since June - July was a vacation month.
Today I spent 8 hours traveling around Thüringen with several Congressmen from all of the five represented parties. Our first stop was this agricultural technical school in the city of Apolda. We listened to 4 hours of presentations about what the agricultural schools do for Thüringen and why they need government support.
Our next stop was a flower/plant seed company. The company has been family owned and based in Erfurt since its founding in the 1860s. We got to tour around the 10 acre property, got free flower seeds/herb seeds, and we got to learn about an organic energy source they are developing with the seeds from a certain flower. The company wanted subsidies to buy more property to cultivate this flower as a renewable energy resource. One acre of this flower is equal to about ten acres of corn as far as the energy yield. (I'll also be pictured with all the congressmen in the company's newsletter!) ;) This part of the day was definitely more interesting.
Because of all the running around today, no one had time to eat lunch, so as of 5:30pm today all I had eaten was a cup of yogurt at 7:30am. I went straight from work to the city to grab lunch - I had forgotten that I had used the last of my cash the day before and hadn't gone to the ATM since. I realized this as I was about to pay, but luckily Martin met me there and had just enough money to cover for me. Phewf.
This week has been fun, but it has been very busy. I'm looking forward to a relaxing weekend. Tomorrow I'm going to get my bike tuned up and ride around for a bit (hopefully). On Sunday I'm biking to a neighboring city, Weimar, with a friend of mine. :) I'm excited to get back on the bike again!
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