Saturday, April 2, 2011

Cologne Week 1, Friday

Today during class we went over our homework, which was 50 trivia questions about various topics about Germany, such as food and drink, politics, sports, literature, geography, etc.  We learned a lot about Germany that I didn’t know before.  After that, we got into groups and did a fun activity where we got into groups and created our own restaurants.  We designed the restaurant and created the menu and then presented it to the class.  Some went the more serious route with this, but we didn’t.  Our restaurant was shaped like a euro € and had a roller coaster and an arcade included.



Our afternoon activity was a scavenger hunt through Köln.  We split up into two groups and looked for certain items throughout the Altstadt (old, central part of the city).  When we found those items, we had to answer questions about them by asking people in the city.  This helped us practice our German and we learned a lot about the history of Cologne.  I’m amazed with how almost every building has a story to it and there are so many little artifacts hidden throughout the city that have historical significance.

After the scavenger hunt, I went to Reisebank to receive a money transfer from my mom through Western Union.  After that, I went to the Hauptbahnhof to the Deutsche Bahn Reisezentrum (travel central) to apply for a Bahncard 50.  This card gives you 50% off tickets for train rides within Germany for a whole year, and I got mine for half the price because I am a university student.  I had to prove that with my International Student I.D. Card (ISIC) that UC gave me. The only hitch was that I had forgotten to bring a passport-size photo with me, so the clerk just grabbed a digital camera and told me to smile.

After that I went to Starbucks to create this blog.  I have been writing this journal all week, but am just now getting around to uploading them.  I’m not sure if it was the internet connection or what, but it turned out to be a very time consuming endeavor.  The pages wouldn’t load correctly half the time and uploading the pictures was time consuming too.  I’m writing all of these journal entries in a word document on my computer, so I think for the time being, I will try to upload them all one time a week to save some time and trips to starbucks.  Once I get to the BMW dorm, it might be easier to write straight into the blog, we’ll see.

After I finished with this week’s posts in the blog, I met up with a lot of the UC people near Köln University.  There’s an area there called Barbarossaplatz that has tons of bars and we decided to go into an Irish bar to have some beers and play darts.  When we got back to the hostel, some people wanted to play ping pong, but I was too tired and went straight to bed.  Tomorrow we’re spending the day in Duesseldorf!

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