Cologne Week 1, Thursday

Today in class we each took turns telling a story about our past and the class had to guess whether it was true or false.  Some of the stories were hilarious.  I shared about how I dressed up as a woman for Halloween a few years ago.  Others had hospital stories, stories about meeting famous people, and various life-endangering adventures.  Some of them true, others not, but it was a ton of fun.  After that we listened to Justin and Corey give a presentation in German about Formula One racing.

After class during the lunch break, I went to the Dom/Hauptbahnhof area to exchange the dollars I had in my pocket for euros at the information center.  The dollars were completely useless here.  After lunch, we went on a city tour of Koeln, where we spent most of it learning about the Altstadt (the old, historic part of the city).  It was all in fast German, so it was often hard to understand the tour guide, especially with all the background noise, but I understood a lot of it and it was all very interesting.  At the end of it, we did a short brewery tour, where we tried Paeffgen, Pfaffen, and Sion beer.  None of them are bottled, but are craft koelsch brews only found in Koeln.  They were all very good, but the Paeffgen was the best of the three.

After the brewery tour, we went back to Lidl to get groceries.  Then I separated from the group to go back to the Dom/Hauptbahnhof area to attempt to find an ATM that would take my debit card from my bank.  No luck.  I have tried every type of ATM here, but none of them will take my card.  It is on the Pulse network, which I had heard is not widely accepted in Europe.  Then I looked it up online and confirmed that not only is it not widely accepted, but it is completely exclusive to the United States.  This was not good news since I have almost reached my monthly credit card limit and I’ve got to pay for a train ticket to Munich next week and a place to stay for next Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night before I can move in to the BMW dorm.  My mom and I are trying to figure out how to get me some money.  It’s frustrating, because I have money in my bank account, but can’t get access to it because my debit card doesn’t work and my credit card has almost reached its limit.  Worrying about money is starting to make it hard to enjoy it here.  But I can't thank my mom enough for how much she has helped me.  I love her and the rest of my family dearly and miss them a lot.

After that, I went to Starbucks to message my mom and happened to catch Janie on video chat again!  After that I went back to the Jugendherberge to eat, finish homework, and hang out a little before going to bed.