Today during class we did our presentation on Venice and learned more about German grammar. We also talked about the Gestapo in Cologne, the Nazi’s, WWII, and the torturing and murdering that happened at the LD Haus in Cologne. We are going there tomorrow as a class. The LD Haus used to be a Nazi headquarters and place where they tortured people. Now it is a museum, and from what I’ve heard it is going to be really heavy stuff.
After class we took a train to Düsseldorf to take a tour of the Fachhochschule, which is connected to the University of Düsseldorf, but it’s more like the U.S. equivalent to a technical school. There it costs between 200-300 euros per semester, and I think the tour guide said that at the most expensive universities, it costs maximum 700 euros. That’s about $1,000 per semester! Why is UC so expensive?
There we toured their machine shop, which was very impressive. They talked to us about the research they are doing and took us into some of their labs. One of the labs we went into was for biomedical research and they were running tests on flow of the blood stream. So they told us they were going to show us a video, little did we know it would be an open heart surgery. It showed the person’s chest opened up and the heart beating and they were making some stitches or synches, I can’t remember. This was already a stretch, but when they started cutting into the artery and blood was squirting everywhere, I started feeling very nauseous. I looked around and found a trash can so that I was prepared to throw up. Two other guys were so nauseous they had to take a seat. Other than a few people with nerves of steel, pretty much everyone was shaken up by that. It was super graphic. Normally in the U.S. they would say something like, “just a warning this is graphic content. If you’re not confortable you can look away or leave the room”, but here it was like no big deal. I haven’t seen the news on the TV yet, but I’ve heard it’s the same way. For murders and stuff, they’ll show the actual graphic footage on the news. In general, there’s a lot less censorship here, with both violence and nudity.
After the tour, we went back to Brauerei zum Schluessel because it was so good that everyone wanted to go back. This time I got a bigger meal that had bratwursts with mashed potatoes w/ bacon and sauerkraut. It was SOOO scrumptious.
After dinner, some people went for ice cream. After we walked away from the ice cream place, we ran into the only Americans we had seen there, but when they asked us where the ice cream parlor was, we gave them directions in German by accident. We were laughing so hard because we realized after the fact that they asked us, “How do we get to the ice cream place?”, and we responded “Gehen Sie rechts und dann gerade aus.” Then they responded, “Ok, so we go gerade aus this way?”. I think you had to be there, but we were dying laughing. I guess it’s a good sign that we’re confusing English and German now. German is getting more natural to us to where we don’t even realize it’s a different language anymore, we just hear the words, understand it and reply in the same language (ideally, though we got it confused today! haha).
After that, we took the trains back to Köln. When I got back to the hostel, I got on the internet and skyped with Janie for a couple hours before doing some homework. Tomorrow we’re going to the LD Haus, which is going to be emotionally intense, but I’m looking forward to experiencing it. Then we’re going to Bonn for the afternoon, which is the former capital of West Germany, and today is still a center for politics and economy.
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