Aachen

The weekend of June 6th, we decided to take a day trip to Aachen. There isn't too much to do in this city, but it's a very old and typical European city, and it was close enough to take a day trip easily enough. It was about 2 and a half hours to get there, and we ended up arriving at the Aachen Hauptbahnhof (Main Train Station) at about 11:45. After getting there, we spent about a half hour looking for the tourist information center, since it was all the way in the center of town and the main train station is usually at the edge of town somewhere. The first place we ventured to visit was the infamous Lindt Chocolate Factory of Aachen. Unfortunately, when we got there, we discovered that they don't ever offer tours. There seemed to be some kind of big company party there that day, so we got turned away as all the other Lindt people got to go in to whatever big thing they were having.














After the Lindt factory, we wandered up and down some of the small streets of the city. We found an interesting fountain that had a bunch of strange statues of what looked like beggars. We observed these for a little bit, and then moved on.











The streets were really cool, very narrow with cobblestones and tall shops on either side. We found a small restaurant and ended up having this interesting dish made from a cow's upper thigh that apparently is extremely popular in Bavaria.



















That afternoon we made our way to the big attraction of the city, the giant cathedral that was built by King Charlemagne in the late 700's AD. This cathedral has a museum of treasures and had these strange chalices that have capsules containing some of Charlemagne's bones and hair. It was kind of weird, but they were all perfectly intact and turned into this really funky shrine. We took a tour of the church, where we saw the stone on which somewhere around 10 different kings were crowned. The church was one of the biggest I'd ever seen and really well preserved. After that we wandered around the city for a while in the afternoon, took some pictures, grabbed some baked goods at one of the local bakeries, and eventually headed home.

High Ropes Course

The Thursday of June 6th, two days after visiting the Brauerei of Dortmund, our group took a trip to a high ropes course a few miles outside the city. It was a free event that the program put on for us, and so I felt it was a pretty good deal for my first time high-ropes-walking. When we got there, I immediately noticed the huge jungle-gym of giant wooden poles and ropes all around us. It looked like a grown-up's playground, and we couldn't wait to get on. Below, Heiko and I are already a bit frightened at the idea of these super high ropes.














The first task we performed was the climbing of the president's ladder. This ladder was made of wooden, circular logs and they were spaced further and further apart as you climbed up the ladder. We formed groups of three to climb, one in the center and one on either side. The second rung of the ladder was pretty easy to climb to, since it was only at about shoulder height. That was the only easy rung, though. After that, the next rungs were at head-height or higher, and because the rungs were attached via ropes, the ladder swung as we tried to climb. So there was no way whatsoever to climb the rungs by yourself. If you tried to jump off of one of the rungs, the ladder would swing in the opposite direction and you would lose any counterweight you'd been using to jump. What we ended up doing was I was in the middle, and i would kneel down into a crouching position, placing my knee at a 90 degree angle. After doing this, the others could use my knee as a step and climb up and be able to reach and swing onto the next rung. After each of the other two people climbed up, I then jumped, and they grabbed onto me and helped me up. It was a 20-30 minute ordeal, but was ridiculously fun and we eventually finished the ladder.



















After the ladder was the high rope bridge. This was a bridge made with 2 ropes strung from one giant telephone-like pole to another, with planks of wood across it (It's viewable in the background of the president's ladder). The trick was, the bridge likes to swing if you don't balance correctly, and it's also missing a bunch of planks throughout. There were places where it was missing 1, 2, or 3 planks in a row. This made the trek across especially fun, as you had to almost jump from one to another. To make the walk even more exciting, they gave us a blind fold we could choose to wear and have someone from the ground guide us across the bridge. This is what I chose to do, and it was definitely the right choice. I had Heiko (our program coordinator, see first picture) direct me across, and I managed to get all the way across the bridge without falling. There was one spot where I kind of tripped up, but I made a few leaps my feet found the bridge, and I managed to stay on.














(Notice me blindfolded, above). After finishing the bridge, they let out a bunch of rope and we jumped off the bridge. We free-falled about halfway-2/3 the distance from the bridge to the ground, where the rope caught and we bounced a little bit and almost had a heart attack. The fact that we were blind folded throughout this made it that much better. The third and final part of the ropes course was the swing, which basically we were strapped to the giant structure, pulled up by everyone else, and let go, where we swung some 100 feet in the air. It was a pretty huge swing, and as awesome as the high bridge. All in all, the ropes course was an awesome experience, and we had a ton of fun trying to get around the obstacles.

Dortmunder Actien-Brauerei

The Wednesday after going to Dusseldorf, we decided to take a trip up to the Dortmunder Actien-Brauerei: the official brewery of the Dortmund Area. This brewery pretty much brews all of the cheapest local beers, so as you might guess, we've gained a fair amount of knowledge about the tastes of these local beers. The beers we've drank of the local beweries are called Dortmunder Kronen, Stifts, Hoevels, and the DAB Beer, all pilsners except for Hoevels, which is an Alt.











We wandered up to the brewery and noticed that it was absolutely huge, probably because it owned all the beers around the region, having bought all of them up throughout the 1900's. However, when we got inside the visitor's welcome center, we noticed that the publicly viewable part of the brewery was very small. There was a small gift shop area in the welcome center, and then a couple rooms that had a lot of artifacts of the brewery's past, but no user-friendly touching type of exhibits. Also, all the exhibits were captioned in German, so we didn't actually understand any of the captions of the exhibits we looked at. We got to look at a lot of cool things though.














In the first room of the brewery, there was a giant container where the Barley was stored and boiled. They were pretty cool, huge and made out of copper. We then wandered around, found a touch-screen interactive computer screen that showed the progression of breweries throughout the 1900's, and how Dortmund arrived at its one, large brewery. Dortmund used to be known for its beers and steel mills, but as the steel industry died down the beer industry kind of died too, and all of the smaller plants were bought by the one big one.














This picture showed the different advertising posters and slogans the company had throughout the years, this one dating to the 80's sometime. They all had some sort of attractive woman somehow accentuating the positive qualities of the beer. Really, very good advertising. we enjoyed ourselves a lot. They had old beer bottles, coasters made throughout the 1900's, and old machines that were some part of the beer brewing process. After getting to look at all of these things, including some statues of people promoting the beer, one of them, the most famous, being King Charlemagne. A very fun trip in all, even if we didn't get to understand or learn a ton, we saw some awesome artifacts and a timeline of the beer industry developing in Dortmund throughout the 20th century.

Westfalenhallen Park

After a long day in Dusseldorf, we decided to spend a lazy day in the 75 degree sun hanging out in the park being lazy. The local park in Dortmund is beautiful, one of the biggest parks I'd ever seen. Only 3 Euros to spend as much time in there as you want.



















The first thing we noticed as we walked in was the pond. The pond had friggin flamingos in it! We were astonished by the number of ducks and flamingos in the pond, and had to go over and watch them for a while. We then found another pond that was almost exclusively ducks. There were families of small, normal ducks and a pair of geese who looked particularly hungry. I had an old loaf of bread that we decided to feed to the ducks, and they were extremely appreciative. We were able to get the ducklings to jump into the air to grab the bread, and had a good time feeding them all.














Afterward we had a quick lunch at one of the vendors there, and made our way to the grassy areas, where we stretched out and hung out in the sun for a while. We brought a soccer ball, which was brought out after a few minutes, and kicked it around the field.















There was a huge ampitheater behind some trees that there was a 6 hour a capella concert in. All in all, it was an extremely relaxing day that we thoroughly enjoyed.

Dusseldorf

Our first free weekend in Dortmund, we decided to take a day trip to Dusseldorf to tour the sights. It only takes an hour on the train to get there. When we got there at 11 or so, we just started walking around the area outside the train station, getting a feel for the downtown city. There was a really cool shopping mall that we stopped and walked around in. It had this really funky elevator in it that we decided to have some fun in.


































After walking around the shopping area of the city, we went to get some lunch in the sun and relax before we took our tour. We then took a tour on a boat that went up and down the Rhine, talking about the different sights and major points to the city. The tour came in both German and English, so we were fortunate to be able to understand it. The weather was fantastic, in the high 70's or so (One of the main reasons we decided to take a tour on a sunny boat). We enjoyed some refreshing wheat beers (Schofferhofer Hefeweizen) that were perfect in the Sunny weather. There were also a bunch of soccer players from a team in Stuttgart on the boat, who were here on some team trip and definitely looked like they were having a good time.

























After grabbing lunch and the tour, we walked around the old city, where it was all cobblestone and the streets were literally lined with bars. Dusseldorf is known for having one of the longest bars in the world (possibly the longest?) because it's old street has so many bars in a consecutive line that have outdoor seating that it forms one huge bar that's almost a mile long. There was an outdoor band playing for the afternoon too, so it made it pleasant to stand around and have a drink. Apparently that was the weekend that everyone and their mother decided to have their bachelor party, and so the streets were littered with groups of guys wearing T-Shirts with different German phrases relating in some way to a Bachelor party.














After walking around the bars, we noticed a guy doing the robot. He was pretty awesome. Definitely got the most attention out of any street performer there. People giving him a lot of money. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_W_4K1V0kM Pretty Awesome. All in all, Dusseldorf was a great day. We also went up an observation tower that was about 150m high. The FA Cup finals was that day too, Chelsea v. Everton, so we got to watch some quality soccer.

Technische Universitat Dortmund Campus und Classes

After a week of German class in Dortmund, I can kind of get by in restaurants. I can speak a few broken sentences, and a few key phrases. I think as we go into the advanced class, we'll learn a lot more about sentence construction so I don't sound so illiterate. The vocab for German isn't too difficult, since so many German words translate directly into English, but the endings, the articles (a, an, the), and the pronouns have 500 different endings. I'm excited for the advanced class, and hopefully being able to be conversational with people around Germany.

Instead of having the previously predicted 8 hours of class per day, we only sit through four hours of German class from 8:00 to 12:00, and are free for the afternoon to buy groceries, explore Dortmund, take afternoon trips, and go to the park to kick around the soccer ball or throw the frisbee.

I would assume things will change once our actual classes start, but the environment has been very laid back so far, even with the intensive German all the time. The commute to school is short. A 5 minute subway ride (called the U-Bahn here), a 10 minute train ride (called the S-Bahn), and a 1 minute mono-rail ride (called the H-Bahn) takes me pretty much to the doorstep of my class. In all it takes about a half hour to get there, but it doesn’t seem long because you walk so much on public transport.

The school is awesome, with a dining hall far classier than anything I’ve ever seen at Penn. The food is good, although they like to eat a lot of salami sandwiches and schnitzel. And it has the H-Bahn, a monorail that has 3 different branches that run across campus. It stops at each station about once every 5 minutes, and it takes you over the huge forest in between the north and south campuses. The forest is some wildlife preserve that exists between campuses and when you travel above it on the H-Bahn it looks really woodsy. The campus is almost the complete opposite of Penn, where it’s almost completely rural with a hint of being next to a city, since there are 2 main roads that run through it. I’ll have to take pictures of the H-Bahn and the forest over the next couple days and post them to give a feel for what the campus is like.