Still tired after the last night, I woke up around 7 a.m. again and started writing on my (then already late) blog. If we had started at 8h30 I'm sure I could've made it and wouldn't need to catch up now. Unfortunately, we started at 8h15 and this made it impossible for me to complete my entire post then.
Our day at Skyguide began with asking if our badges had already arrived. Unfortunately, they hadn't, so we we got visitor badges once again. After entering the building, our first course was a 3 hour-introduction to the SCS and LMS, by Cornelius Bona. In short, this was an introduction to the e-learning system used by Skyguide.
After this lesson, we were allowed to go have lunch, only this time we didn't get it for free and had to pay CHF 12 instead of 10, because we were externals according to the lady at the cash register. Our badges said so, so we didn't really have a chance of arguing (which doesn't mean we didn't a bit).
Luckily, she came around and asked who our contact was within the building and after a while, we all got CHF 2 back. Doesn't seem like a lot, but in this country, every franc is welcome.
In the afternoon we were once again welcomed to Skyguide. This time by Bruce, an ozzy who appears to have been appointed as our class teacher. He was the only one left out of a group of ... well, one. He introduced us to a small part of the instructor's team, gave us our locker keys, containing our study material, and also gave instructions on how to know the weekly schedule, as well as what the school rules are. To end his course, he showed us around some buildings, including the simulation in Building A. These sims are identical to the real radar and tower environments, as they are needed to familiarize the students with the environments and are used as platform to check if licensed ATCO's still know what to do in certain (rare) situations.
Luckily, this is only a sim.
After the visit to the sim, we were handed over from Bruce to Simone (or Simmie as we may call her, if we want to) who is the only 'licensed' staff member you can go to if you have serious pedagogical issues. If you have, she will try to help you discovering learning styles and techniques which may aid you in studying easier. A lot of useful information, so I took a lot of notes, in case I would need to find out what kind of a study person I am.
At the end of the day, or so we thought, we had a Q&A - Open Forum. In short, this was the right moment to ask questions to some members of the staff, concerning the training here, the school, the rules etc.
To our big surprise, we weren't done yet. We were expected in Hanger 11, which is the name of the Skyguide-restaurant, for an introduction on where and how we had to queue for food. Since we had already done that the same afternoon, it wasn't really a mystery anymore, but it was obligatory, so everyone went. Some of us (including me) were late, because we had to ask Leda about our EUROCONTROL-badges, but we still managed to hear the most important things (different types of meals and prices and stuff like that). At the end, we received a coupon of CHF 5, which we could use in the restaurant, for free. That would mean that, if we bought the cheapest dish, we would only have to pay CHF 1,50 ourselves for a complete meal, which as you can imagine was like a godsent gift to us.
After school, we still had some shopping to do. We still needed a water heater, a toaster, microwave oven and a VGA-cable, for which we went to Media Markt, where I also bought a webcam as my built-in one doesn't work apparently. The guys from the other apartment bought the same as us, with an additional sandwich maker and electrical adapters so they could fit their plugs in Swiss sockets.
We also needed some food, so we went shopping in the nearby Aldi. Nothing fancy there, so not a lot to tell about.
We came home much earlier than the night before, so we still had a lot of time left before going to bed, which we used to eat, I continued my blog and we ended our day by hooking up my laptop to the TV and watch a movie (The Invention of Lying, for those interested).
As we now have our schedules, I can tell you what classes I'll have, but I'll do this in a separate blog.
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