Some more Stuttgart, Berlin, and Work

Hi everyone,
I figured I would address everything at once for increased efficiency :)
Pictures from Stuttgart are being uploaded onto facebook as we speak! They are taking quite a while though because there are quite a few!
The last day of Stuttgart was fun. We went to this neighbourhood park (think any regular park in a regular suburb), but of course this one had the remains of a castle, some ducks and geese, some baby ducks and baby geese (see pictures for cute furry birds!) and some canoe type boats that we took a ride in!
I have a feeling that if this sort of park existed in Toronto, it would be a huge attraction, like one of the top 5 things to do in Toronto, it would be like the next Casa Loma...
We then visited another small town called Ludwigsburg which incidentally had a parade that day so there are some pictures from that :) This city also has a huge castle which we saw a bit of, it looks sort of like a mini version of Versailles. Then we went back to Stuttgart, took some more pictures, and then I got on the train and finally finished the Undercover Economist, which is like a slightly more technical version of Freakonomics, I think its almost as entertaining though!

Back in Berlin I finally met some more people from my program :) We went to Cafe Hardenberg (which is amazing, so this was the second time I was here) and had Berliner Weisse (I of course had to look up the proper name because I can't seem to remember the second half of most German words because they are quite long...maybe this isn't the best example for long word, but still). Its pretty much a light beer mixed with raspberry syrup so it turns pink and tastes great! Yay authentic food/drink! We then proceeded to wander around the city and I had to take 4 different trains to get home so that was sort of exciting.

I have been meaning to write some more about work. There is a really cool theoretical component to what we are doing which I will probably dedicate an entire post to later this week. But in terms of the actual mechanics of the work...well its starting to resemble some sort of design/architecture project rather than a psychology/ergonomics one, which is sort of interesting. We are pretty much trying to build a driving simulation that is realistic (so that the reviewers can't complain about that) but still tests basic assumptions. So for the past 2 days I have been trying to learn a bit of this program called Blender in which you can design pictures in 3D. I have been trying to add some things (like fog and text) to the pictures...but, since this program in itself is sort of a mystery and none of the people I work with really know it too well, we are sort of reluctant to use it. So at the same time, I am trying to export pictures out of it so that we can use them as frames in a simulation and insert them into my very favourite program Presentation (I have luckily worked with it before :):):))... Anyway the point of this long rant is that we are doing the same project in parallel on 2 programs because we don't know which one we will have to use...I guess its sort of productive...

Hope all is well! Leave comments...and if the commenting tool doesn't work (as I have heard from someone) you can just email me or message me on facebook)...

Talk soon :)
Alina