Sunday, August 05, 2007
Its August!
Well folks it’s august, and two more events have taken place which are worth noting. On Wednesday, August 1, 2007, we went on a tour to Airbus. Our friendly tour guide was a retired Airbus employee who has been called back to duty. We got to see two different hangers. On Saturday, August 4, 2007, we all headed up North to Bremerhaven to see the Emigration Museam, or in German Das Auswanderunghaus Museam. On the 1.5 hour tour we learned what emigrants from Europe had to go through to get to America.
To read more about the Airbus and Auswanderunghaus tours, click the Read More link below.
We hopped on the tram at 9:15am Wednesday morning to make it to our 10:00am scheduled tour at Airbus in Bremen, which is its second largest production plant in Germany. Now, I know what you are thinking, How did we land this sweet tour? Thanks to a current Calvin College student named Jordan Wanner. Jordan is a senior mechanical engineering student at Calvin College. For the summer, he is currently living in Bremen and has an international internship at Airbus. At first, we weren’t going to be able to go, but then Jordan worked his magic and secured this incredible tour for us. Anyway, back to the tour. After checking in at the front desk, we walked back to one of the hangers and had a look inside. In this hanger they were making the flaps. The flaps are on the wings of the plane, and they help with the braking and landing because once they are activated they fly up almost perpendicular to the wings and provide tons of air resistance. In the second hanger we went to they were putting together and inspecting all the wings. There were six stations that each wing had to go through before it could be assembled to the body of the plane. And people these hangers are huge. Both wings were in the hanger spread out as if they on the plane. We couldn’t take pictures, otherwise I would love to put some up. Our tour guide then took us to another little hanger where the project he was working on was located. He, alongside with many other retired former Airbus employees, was reconstructing a plane that was recovered from WWII.
On Saturday, August 1, 2007, we got on a regional express train from the Hauptbahnhof and were on our way to Bremerhaven. Here is a brief history of Bremen and Bremerhaven. 7.2 million europeans emigrated from Bremerhaven, which made Bremerhaven the largest German Emigration port during the 1800’s and early 1900’s. In 1827 Bremerhaven was founded as the main port for Bremen, because Bremerhaven was just up the river from Bremen. Before that, any emigration or trade would simply take place in Bremen itself. The reason that emigration and trading stopped taking place in Bremen was that the Weser River was silting up and that large ships could no longer reach the city docks. So basically all the paperwork and business was still transacted in Bremen, and then the people would travel by river barges up the Weser to Bremerhaven where they would then board their main ships. This journey up to Bremerhaven took 3 days. In 1847, after the development of steamboats, the journey to Bremerhaven only took one day. Finally, in 1862, once the railroads were constructed, this trip was much shorter and made things much simpler for travelers.
The Auswanderunghaus is located in Bremerhaven, which is on the mouth of the Weser River up by the North Sea. The museam was pretty good and entertaining. We got to see and explore a typical ship that emigrants would have taken across the Atlantic Ocean, hear the stories and read about many real emigrants that emigrated from Bremerhaven, go through a fake Ellis Island customs station, watch a movie telling the stories of living people in America who are emigrants from Germany, and finally you could search through all the records located on site to try and find any of your relatives who may have emigrated out of Bremerhaven.