The team arrived in in a snowy Steinebach on Sunday evening after a long journey from Edinburgh. It was schnitzels all round at the restaurant across the road, and then off to bed in preparation for the most important day of the training week, as our Preliminary Design Review was scheduled for Monday afternoon.

We were up bright and early on Monday morning to start the week at DLR Oberpfaffenhofen. Throughout the day we attended lectures including how to design a payload, how to implement the electronics on a balloon or rocket experiment, and how to go through a Preliminary Design Review.

At 3pm we were called into the boardroom as the first student team to go through the Preliminary Design Review. Overall it went very well. The experts on the board provided us with a lot of valuable feedback on our experiment and its design, and spotted a few silly (and sometimes humorous) mistakes in our Student Experiment Document. There were no show stoppers, and we didn't get quite the grilling we were expecting, but maybe the board was still getting warmed up in preparation for the rest of the week.

With the day's formalities out of the way, it was onwards with the other students and the experts to the monastery and beer hall Kloster Andechs, where we had a traditional Bavarian time. Big pretzels, big beers, and a meal of pork, potato salad and sauerkraut. Later on in the evening we even had a pair of Lederhosen on show from one of the experts.

Tuesday was a variety of talks on different aspects of space engineering. Along with the other BEXUS teams, we built a mock up of our experiment out of cardboard and duct tape. This was a fun exercise, and got us working together with the other teams to fit the experiments in the gondola. We rounded off the day by presenting our experiment to the other REXUS/BEXUS teams, and then hearing about their experiments. It was then back for dinner to Gasthaus Dietrich, followed by a few games of Tichu (a pretty complex Chinese card game) with some new friends. We're looking forward to what is in store for the rest of the week. Tschau for now!