Budapest

Well we have been in Budapest for two days. We are leaving for an overnight visit to Slovakia on the way to Poland tomorrow. It has been pretty cool here in Hungary. Yesterday was mostly traveling from London, but in the afternoon we went to a transportation museum. It was pretty cool, but all of the signs and literature was only in Hungarian. Because of this about every 10 minutes or so someone from the museum would come be and tell us not to do something in Hungarian. For the most part we figured it out. I was suprised how clean the rode was.

The rest of the city was more typical, but rather dirty.

Today was a really cool day from an engineering perspective. In the morning we traveled to a aluminum extrusion plant. After telling us about what they did (mostly producing parts for Ferrari and Porsche cars) we took a tour. I was able to see one of the coolest manufacturing processes I have ever seen. It was a hot rolling mill. Basically they took a 1.25 meter thick, 6 meters long slab of aluminum and heated it to 500 C. Once it was hot it is shoved (and I do mean shoved, it makes a huge noise) between to huge steel drums. The "ingot' of aluminum is squished to about 1 meter thick. As soon as it is out of the rollers, the rollers close the gap between them and the process is done again. After about 5 minutes the ingo is now a sheet about .04 meters thick! For me this was really cool. We werent allowed to take any pictures, but it I did have one I would have posted it.

After the aluminum company we headed to the other side of Budapest to Proctor and Gamble. P&G make 300 different consumer goods, here in Budapest they make Always and Tampax products.

Yup thats right we went to see how feminine hygiene products are made. At first is was really weird. They passed out samples and invited us to open them up and take them apart. Just imagine 20+ men engineers awkwardly trying to figure out how this stuff works. It ended up being really interesting. We discussed some of the difficulties and technology needed to provide this essential product to 1/2 of the world. After we had destroyed some 100 odd products we went to see how they were made. Iwas rather impressed. This facility supplies all of the product for all of Europe. We were able to see several machines which produce several million pads a day! Again we were not able to take pictures, which I am sure you are thankful for.

Tomorrow should not be as weird, but will be just as nerdy. We are going to a local university which is one of one a few universities in Europe with a nuclear reactor. I am really excited (as I should be). If I am able to get pictures you can guarantee that they will be up here.