culturemash

Ahhh, jetlag … can anything be any more useless in life? On my second day back from German, I crashed out at 8pm and woke up at 5am. I am officially on my grandmother’s schedule.

Stuttgart was an amazing city, highlights including the land of Porsche and Mercedes … and naturally, all things German like beer. Though, I’ll tell you one thing that really annoyed me about this trip. I arrived on Saturday night, after flying next to about 9 Greek people from Los Angeles who ignored me the entire time while they shouted over me the entire 11 hour flight. Also, I had a lovely 7 hour layover in Frankfurt airport, which was mostly used to sleep. And after a good night’s rest, I decided to go shopping on Sunday, trying to make use of my only free day the entire trip. This was useless, because in Germany NOTHING is open on a Sunday. Even more shocking, people still go out. Weird, I know.

The FMX conference was pretty interesting, far smaller than anything like SIGGRAPH. It was however lacking in many things as well … such as say… air conditioning. Hosted in the Haus der Wirtschaft , the building used to be an old stock exchange place. Loads of cool marble all over the place, and where I stood it was roughly around 90 degrees.

Apparently, in addition to air conditioning, elevators and anything besides 7 flights of stairs are also considered a German cultural barrier. Who knew?

And now for your viewing pleasure, a very brief video of the techno klub place the FMX party was held. The same party that was held about 8 floors down below, like a friggin’ German bunker with no ventilation, thousands of computer graphics nerds with no deodorant, permitted smoking, and contained mostly people over 6 feet in height. Asides from having Gulliver’s Travel syndrome, I felt uber Euro cool!

FMX Party in Stuttgart Germany from Leyla Tirgari on Vimeo.

Tagged as cultural, germany, regions, travel, work + Categorized as non-American culture, travel, work