Tuesday, 6/26

I have no idea how these things happen. But at least they make my life interesting.

I'm leading a downtown tour tomorrow. Now, those of you who've been reading these forever may be muttering to yourself “Jim, you lead downtown tours all the time”. And that's true. I did the Great Fire tour two weeks ago, and I have the “Docks of Iron Bay” tour two weeks from tomorrow (hint, hint). But tomorrow's tour is unique, if only because I'll be showing off downtown Marquette to a bunch of mechanical and software engineers from Germany.

See? That doesn't happen all the time.

I'm not quite sure how this all happened. I received a call from someone organizing a corporate retreat/seminar for the engineers in Marquette, wondering if I could lead the tour. That's a no-brainer. I love doing tours, I love going to Germany (in fact, according to my DNA test I'm 19% German myself) so why not? Admittedly, I don't speak much (if any) German, but if there's one thing I've learned is that Germans, especially highly educated ones like engineers, often speak English better than some people for whom it's their first language.

So that shouldn't be a problem.

However, there was one slight problem we had to work around. Germans are huge World Cup fans; in fact, Germany's the defending champion. We were originally going to do the tour tomorrow morning; however, that's the time Germany's taking on South Korea in their final Group F match. If Germany wins they will probably move on to the next round (depending upon the final score and winner of the Mexico/Sweden match), so it's been arranged for the engineers to lunch at Aubrees when the match is on (amazingly enough, during the lunch hour here in the U.S.) So most likely I'll get to lead them around after the match, which means they'll either be very excited by what they just saw or they will be slightly depressed.

I'm hoping for the former. After all, one of my favorite RB Leipzig players is on the German team, I've kind of been cheering for them, as well, especially after an amazing last-minute win for them this past weekend against Sweden (a team with another of my favorite RB Leipzig players on it, sadly). So with any luck, the tour will following a lot of cheering on their part.

Sp if you see me leading a lot of people around tomorrow (or happen to be eating lunch at Aubrees tomorrow and hear a lot of German being spoken), that's who the group is—German engineers visiting Marquette. Guess I can cross that one off my bucket list, now.

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)