10 Years

The day before we were set to leave Germany, the German portion of the company that Darren works for (Climax Portable Machine Tools) celebrated its 10-year anniversary. They had a big party, opening its doors to customers, vendors, board members and employee families and invited them to come celebrate in an open house with live music, dancing, a golf simulator, free food, and lots of free beverages of all sorts. They did a great job in setting up for the event and completely transformed the warehouse portion of the business into a nice place for a party.

The night before, Mikayla and I joined Darren, people from the German portion of the company, people from the USA portion of the company that had flown in, and some of the board members for dinner at a nice steak house in Düren. It was wonderful food and fun to meet some more of the people that Darren works with.

On Thursday, the day of the open house, I spent the morning trying to clean up the apartment some, do a little packing, and get things ready to leave the next day. We needed to be in Düren, though, at a little after noon so that we could join some of the board members for a tour of Düren. The tour lasted for a few hours and included a meeting with the deputy mayor (the mayor was in Berlin that day), a tour through some of the important buildings of the city by one of the directors of the city, a tour through a paper museum (that is one of the major industries of the city), and a tour through a moated castle near the city (I hadn't known it was there). It was nice to learn a bit more about the city we had been living by and working in, even though a lot of the information came on the last day we were there. I spent much of the tour walking around with Mikayla since she wasn't really up for sitting through meetings, but I still learned a lot.

The party

Part of the photoboard display that was set up. This picture shows the people who work in the German portion of the company, and Darren's coworkers for the time he was here.

Yes, it is an engineering company

Mikayla as she wandered around City Hall while the meeting with the deputy mayor was taking place. She had fun peering over the railing to the floor below.

It was a little hard to say goodbye at the end of the day, even though we knew that we needed to head back to Embken and finish packing and getting the apartment ready to leave. Darren really enjoyed working with all the people here and we appreciated how much they reached out to us and made us feel welcome in a foreign land. We hope that we can see them again in the future.