Carpentry?

On Tuesday evening, when I got home from class, I had the opportunity to help my host dad with some carpentry/creative engineering. A new couple had moved into the apartment downstairs which my host family rents out, and discovered that one of the cabinets in the kitchen had become warped. When I walked in the door that afternoon, I was greeted by the cabinet in the entry hall and offered to help. The problem was a loose end-to-end panel connection on one of the sides, where one of the boards had warped and disconnected from the other panel. This caused the whole cabinet to twist around the central axis a couple of degrees, and made the door sag a little.....not good. The original idea was to insert a small dowel through the problem boards to keep them from moving vertically and theoretically fix the twisting problem. This would have worked, but we realized AFTER we had pulled about a dozen nails and removed one of the sections that there was no way the drill would get where it needed to without further disassembly. Dead end. So, we put the board back on and ended up with a simple bracer on the top edge of the cabinet at an angle which, when twisted by the cabinet, would pull the boards closer together and prevent further movement. Then came the task of carrying it downstairs, installing it, and putting everything back together. An evening well-spent!

Long story short: If you come to a country for intellectual pursuits, it will undoubtedly throw a few situations at you that actually use some practical aspects of what you are studying.