Glasgow, Schotland

Ben and I decided to go all the way up to Schotland this weekend, to visit one of his studying friends there. So we took our bold shoes, rented a car and off we went! We left on saturday morning for a horrendous 7 hour drive in the rain but finally we did arrive and it turned out to be a great weekend! On saturday afternoon we visited Glasgow city centre, and in the evening we went to a student bar in the University and afterwards had a few drinks more in the student-house Bens friend lived in. On the right here you see the university of Glasgow. Why don't we have buildings like that :(

The next day we wanted to see some cool sceneries, so we went to Loch Lomond. There's no monster in this one so I felt pretty safe (monster of loch ness?). We came at great timing, since the sun was setting (at 4 o clock) and we were treated to some wonderfull sights. On the right here you see the south side of the Loch, with trees a hill and some sky stuff ^^ (Darn, I could work for the national geographic channel!)


The rest of the pictures here are some of the scenery around the loch.
Afterwards we went to the local McDonalds, grabbed a bite, and went all the way back to Kings Lynn again, encountering snow and fog on the way back! But we arrived safely without any scratches.

Next week is my last full week here, and it's going to be a busy one. With a christmas party & drink on Thursday, and another party on saturday, this should keep me busy.

Then afterwards on the 23d i'll be back in Holland to catch up with you guys again.

Cheers!

Closing stages

Hi peeps! Small update again!
Last weeks I haven't been really active, at work it's mostly helping out where I can and working on my report for the university. On the social side it's getting better and better though.

We went to Cambridge, a 3pm till 12 pm pub visit tour! This was the best night out here by a long shot, and I have some really stupid pictures somewhere! I'll try and find em and post them here. Robin came over from Holland especially for this, and I think we made it count!

Next week is gonna be really busy though! I have been assigned a project for logisitics, looking at a cheaper way to do it, so basically make it more efficient. This should be really interesting, and I'm looking forward to do it! Also, I'm going out with logistics and with Lewis to chicago's (some disco in Kings Lynn).

This is it, I'm getting myself a decent coffee now! I'll post something better in the following days!

Edit: Some pictures here!

Cambridge and more

I figured, it's time for a new blog update! I know you're all dying to hear more of my journeys here!

Last weekend, my mother and Carel came over to England to say hi. It ended up being a really busy weekend, but fun nonetheless (2 bad Hamilton won though). SO! On saturday we went to Cromer, Great Yarmouth and afterwards to Cambridge. On sonday we went to visit Wouter in Cranfield, see how he was doing and we went to the mall and afterwards to Cambridge again (to watch F1 in an English pub). Here are some pictures
On the left you see Cromer, with the cliffs down to the see. The top left is the harbour of Great Yarmouth (this is were Carel used to be stationed on the Smithloid 9 or something) and on the right a college in Cambridge with some scenery in the foreground.


Left is a bar in Cambridge on saturday evening. Top left is Wouters Mansion in Cranfield. And on the right at the university in Cranfield itself.




Then the rest of the week. This week was with the sales guys, that meant traveling around the country and visiting them! Train journeys were horrible but lunch made up for that ^^ Pizza hut rules.

Anyway we went to: Peterborough, Ely, Huntingdon, Leicester, Birmingham and some more places. Looking around supermarkets and calling customers if they wanted orders etc. All-in-all interesting.. but we didn't play golf:(

then on Wednesday, Bens birthday! Ben is the other intern at pinguin and we had to celebrate his birthday. So we decided to go to the globe and afterwards to go to Chicago. I don't think Ben had a lot of fun since he was Face down sleeping inside Chicago (that's a disco with a lot of noise). What an accomplishment!

That's it for now!

Ciao

Procurement

WELCOME TO PROCUREMENT! AAAAH!!! Yeah, that's what I thought ^^

Procurement is the part of the organization that buys goods from growers and companies alike. So, that's what I did this week, and we did alot! Procurement is based in Boston (50 miles away from Kings Lynn) So every morning I had to go with Lewis whose pictured on the right here. He's 29, self-assured, and says he won't stop going out till the younger girls stop paying attention to him.. O dear..

Anyway! On Tuesday we went to LFP (Lincolnshire Farm Produce) to have a meeting, and see what they were doing. They were based in Spalding, another half hour drive from Boston. So, alot of travelling ^^ On wednesday we went to parkfresh, yet again another supplier, had a meeting, and watched how the cauliflower was floretted.


On Thursday I went to London! This wasn't for the Procurement team, but for Technical. They invited me to come along, and I took the opportunity of course! Anyway, it was a Marks & Spencer innovation centre, which was meant to get everybody into innovative thinking. I'm not sure if it worked for us, but it was interesting to see anyway! They had like restaurant tables with a touchscreen layer. So you could change the scenery of your table to your liking, also you could play games on it and even order a taxi.
Another innovativity was laserburning smileys into vegetables (which was a bit weard to be honest) and so on. I didn't have a lot of time to make pictures, BUT, I made one of the train station of the Harry Potter movies. Enjoy Harry Potter lovers!

All-in-all yet again a busy week. Next week is going to be a bit more laid back, since I'm gonna have fun with the ladies from Finance. Party!


PS: This is Stewart, I didn't want to hurt his feelings by not posting him on my blog (in case he checks my blog). Here you go Stewart! Your moment of fame!

Tourist!

Connichua.

I've done the tourist tour a second time now, with friends from Pinguin. But this time, I made some pictures!

On the left here, if you look carefully, you see a heart stone. The story goes that in one of the previous centuries, a 'witch' was burned. But in truth, she wasn't. So when she was burnt, her heart flew out of her body and ended up there at the exact spot of the heart stone! How cool..




On the right, you see the customs house. It's one of the most well-known pictures of Kings Lynn. As far as I know it's just a nice building, nothing really exciting there:(





On this picture, you see a dark alley. I just found it beautifull to look at. Kings Lynn is full of these places, built a few centuries ago and they left it standing. Spooky isn't it.




On the right is another example of an English pub. It's always beautiful to look at and I wonder why we don't have more of these in Holland. This bar is the oldest one in Kings Lynn. And the story goes that it is haunted by a female ghost, so we went ghost hunting, but too bad.. We didn't find her. The place is haunted because the girl was murdered I believe. Scary stuff.



And last but not least! proof that I am in Kings Lynn! I deliberately made this picture smaller than the others, since I hate looking at myself.

That's Kings Lynn for now! Cya!

Week at Technical and Quality

So after a short week, I'll give you a heads-up of what I'm doing and a side note: I can finally understand most of what the people are saying ^^ Hope I don't get the same accent though..

In Technical and Quality, you make sure that the customers gets what he ordered. So without mould. blemishes, weard bits, wood etc. This is checked on every pallet that goes to the customer, but of course, there is always a chance that something slips through. I went with 'mother' (her nick name) to check the quality of some products. So the first thing she said was: let's go check the Gelly Wourten (or something like that), I had no clue whatso-ever what she meant, but on the pallet (which happened too come from Belgium, and according to the English are always full with crap btw) it stated Gehele Wortelen. This went on most of the week.

If the consumer then files a complaint at the supermarket, Pinguin gets the complaint in effect. You sometimes have to start an investigation, of where the pallet came from, and what might have been the problem with it. The product from that pallet can accordingly be traced all the way back to the field it came from! And pinguin might decide not to use the same grower again (rare of course).

Another task of the Technical/Quality is conducting audits (for the environment people or customers) you have to make sure everything is 'clean and tidy' and everybody knows the safety procedures etc. This might seem to be a small task, but on a site this big, it realy soaks up all your time. All hands on deck!

On Thursday, Seminis (a seed company) invited me to a showcase of a new machine that could harvest Brocolli automaticaly (till this moment, it is still done manually). This might be big for the years to comet. In the evening, we went to have dinner with a few guys from Pinguin, and a new intern who came all the way from France.

This sums up most of my week. Next week I'll be working in Procurement, the Buy-side for Pinguin. This means I'll be visiting growers etc, to buy Carrots! On Thursday, there is an innovation conference from Marks & Spencer in London, which I probably will attend as well!

I'll upload some pictures later-on.

Cheers!

Logistics

It's been a while that I've last posted something about England. So brace yourself! Here it comes.

Last week, I've been working at Packing. So this is the process where frozen products come out of the storage facilities, is being checked and packed, who are then weighed to be in a certain weight range. Afterward they are boxed , weighed again, printed (with some info on the boxes), palatalized and eventually stored again. This process is mostly automated. The only hand-work is inspection, which is done by some nice Lithuanian girls.

The other work is mostly checking, if everything is working correct, fixing problems where necessary and modifying parameters to process other lines. I've done most of it, except for the inspection, since I'm not a Lithuanian girl!

This week I'm working in logistics. So this is more the storage part and transportation part of the job. The job involves a lot of calling, drinking coffee, and trying not to freak-out. It can get really hectic at some times, but then again it's fun! What I've also done is labeling and processing incoming products, which have to be stored (to be processed in packing later on). It's really diverse and I must say it's quite cool being there:) On the right here, you can see Nicki. She's one of the blonds at logistics. She was pretty hard to get on a picture, since she moved around a lot (I'm not saying she actually got mad, because the fax machine wasn't working, and couldn't get it to work, which made her even more mad and even harder to get on the picture^^ This was my best try).


At the left side, you can see one of the bays. This is just one half of it, and as you can see, it pretty goes as far as sight will let you. It's not that hard to imagine that you can get lost on this site ^^ Which I did of course. This is where trucks are loaded and unloaded and afterward stored in the cold-stores (who also stretch all the way to the back).
At the right you can see just 1 lane of the cold-stores, there really are more then you can actually count! And! After 2 mins your nose freezes off..

Also, I went out on Friday in Lynn center. We went to a pub called the Globe, which normally is a pretty busy place, but we weren't in luck and it was a bit dull to be honest. They do have a nice collection of worldly beers, including Belgium ones, so they'll be seeing more of me in the next couple of weeks!

I've added more pictures on the bottom, or on my flickr place. Shows off a bit more of the Kings Lynn factory, but not all of it. I'll go to the packing hall and production areas tomorrow or the day after, since you have to dress up like a clown before you're actually allowed inside. I'm going to Technical/Quality next week. And as of now, I have nooo clue whatsoever what those guys do.