Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Bonn

March 15-18

I promised to write a blog entry about my trips, mostly because I know I'll forget about them, but I'm leaving for Berlin tonight, so here is a seriously abbreviated version (for real, guys. I promise).

Cologne - Day 1

• Kölner Dom (cathedral) -- highest cathedral tower in the world (not highest church tower--that's in Ulm)
• Tour of the Roman churches in Köln (btw, Cologne is just the English name for Köln)
• St. Andreas
• St. Mariä Himmelfahrt
• St. Ursula
  
• St. Gereon
  
• St. Aposteln
• Klein St. Martin
  
• Groß St. Martin
• There's 12 Romanesque churches, but I didn't get a chance to see them all.
• In between, I saw
• Remains of the former city wall
• Old Rathaus
• Rhein promenade (really really nice! It was such a nice day)
• Walked across the Hohenzollern Bridge
• Synagogue

Hmm, I feel like I'm writing an outline for a class. It was a really nice day and not cold at all, so I really enjoyed all the walking. Cologne is not really the most beautiful city, but it has a lot of history. It was a Roman city, or colony, or something, so it's really old. Of course, practically everything was destroyed in the bombing after WWII so a lot of it has been rebuilt, but it's still cool. The churches were surprisingly interesting. I expected them all to look the same on the inside, but they all their own unique character and I enjoyed looking around (which is saying something, considering how many churches I've seen by now).

Cologne - Day 2

• Today was rainy, but I had planned for that. I went to several museums:
• Römisch-Germanisches Museum (museum about the Roman and Germanic history of Cologne, actually not that large of a museum, and a little boring, but prob just bc I saw so much old stuff in Italy)
• Käthe Kollwitz Museum, which I had been really looking forward to. A fairly large collection of her work. Also not a huge museum, but I spent quite a bit of time looking around it
• Ludwig Museum, which was some kind of modern art museum. It was interesting, but really really big, and honestly, modern art's not really my thing.

• At the end of the day, I went to a Palm Sunday vesper service in the Cathedral, which was really nice. I thought it would just be ok since it was a youth choir singing, but I guess in the most-visited tourist attraction in Germany they don't do things halfway. Only downside: no heat. FREEZING.

Düsseldorf - Day 3

• I went to Düsseldorf with no map and not a clue what I wanted to do or see. Luckily the tourist information office is near the train station, so I got a free map there. I followed a walking tour it suggested on there.
• St. Andreas Church (nice, but eh. I've seen a ton of churches)
• Jan Wellem Monument in the square by the old Rathaus
• Schlossturm on the Burgplatz. A tower that used to be attached to the castle, except the castle is no longer there. Also saw a statue of a kid turning a cartwheel, and a rather creepy monument to the city history.
• Walked along the river promenade. It was really nice, except it was windy and cold. Needless to say, I hurried.
  
• Anna-Maria-Louisa-Medici Platz and St. Maximilian Church
• Königsallee, the "Champs-Elysees of Germany", or so they claim. Not as nice as I expected it to be--not enough high-end stores. But it had a big mall that I walked around in to get out of the cold, so that was good.
• Rheinturm and the Landestag. The Rheinturm is a 172 m high tower that you can take an elevator to the top of. Really cool. Also, the Landestag is right next to it, so that was cool to see from above.

Bonn - Day 4

• Also did a map-suggested walking tour here. Along the way I saw:
• Bonner Münster
• Rathaus
• Beethoven's birth house (really cool!!! even though Beethoven didn't like Bonn. Had a ton of original stuff)
• Rhein promenade
• Alter Zoll (old toll-collecting station along the river)
• Egyptian Museum at the University of Bonn (not that impressive...only one room of artifacts)
• University of Bonn (amazing. Why didn't I go there?)
• Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany), one of the most interesting museums I've ever been to. I spent 3.5 hours there, and that was with kind of skimming the main exhibit, which was huuuge. It traced the history of Germany from 1945-present. It was really interactive and had lots of stuff to look at, but it was just too much info. There was also a side exhibit about scandals in Germany from 1945 to present, also really cool, but by then I was too tired to look through it in depth.
• Walked past Villa Hammerschmidt and Palais Schaumburg, which were, respectively, the residences of the president and chancellor of West Germany, before unification when Bonn was the capitol

There you go, my 4-day trip written up in less than 4 posts. Impressive. I'm not sure if I'll get around to writing about Copenhagen before I leave tonight, but if I do, consider yourselves lucky!

Trip summary coming soon....

For real, I promise. I know I said I'd write about Cologne last week, but I only had one free afternoon before I went to Copenhagen, and that was spent packing and trying to stay awake (stupid night trains). I got back from Copenhagen this morning and I'm trying to sort through all my pictures from both trips, but I promise promise I'll write something soon. I better, because I'm going to Berlin on Wednesday!

Wegetable?

I really need to get back into the posting groove. I feel like I have a ton of stuff to say! Not too much has happened, but I have a bunch of cool stuff coming up!

I'm really that I've been able to meet all these other aupairs. I don't see them that often, because obviously none of us have cars and we are all slaves to the loser bus schedules in Heidenheim, but it's definitely nice to have people to do stuff with, especially people like me who WANT to do stuff. I met up with Carole and Milka on Saturday and we took the train to Ulm, where we met up with an aupair Milka knows through her agency, Vianca. Later on, Dianny (my aupair friend from my German class) joined us too, so there were 5 of us all together. Raffaella, the Italian one, couldn't come because she was in Italy taking a test (I don't know, that's just what Carole said). The weather was kind of gross naturally, since every other day that week had been beautiful. It was cold and overcast so there wasn't much to do besides just look in stores, but it was still nice to do something, and with other people!

After getting back from Ulm, I met up with Tabea and Judith so that we could eat a quick dinner before going to Gegenwind. Milka came with to eat, and ended up coming to Gegenwind as well (she didn't seem to like it very much though...). Weirdly enough, it turns out that the aupair who worked for Milka's family before her not only went to Gegenwind a few times, but was friends with Vivien, one of the Eders' old aupairs. I'm pretty sure Vivien and Olga (Olla? no one seemed to know) knew each other through their German class. And also weirdly, my German teacher gave me the name and phone number of a former aupair who she said still lived in Heidenheim...and turns out it was Olga/Olla (I never did call her). It's so weird how meeting an aupair completely randomly leads me to meeting another aupair who, if anyone had been paying attention, I could have known way before now. But after all this run-around and realizing that there are a lot more aupairs in Heidenheim than anyone realizes, I've decided I'm going to collect phone numbers and addresses of these aupairs' families so that the aupair after me will have some contacts as soon as she gets here. I definitely know how hard it is to meet people!

OK, here's the big news. Dominik has two weeks off for Easter vacation and Johanna has one week off, and in that time they're going to Oma and Opa's next Monday and Tuesday, then Dominik is going to the other set of grandparents for a week, and Johanna will be at Oma and Opa (here) for 2 days. Soo that's two extra weekends I have to travel! The family doesn't want me to go anywhere "just in case anything happens" and the kids can't go to Oma and Opa's, but I think that's kind of mean of them to ask me to stay on the off chance something happens. I don't have much time to travel, so I want to take advantage of every opportunity I have. Anyway, I'm going to Cologne this weekend, with side trips to Bonn and Düsseldorf (I hope), then the weekend after that, over Easter, I'm going to Copenhagen, where I'll be meeting up with Jonathan for two days. The weekend after that I'm going to Berlin for 3 days with Vianca and Carole. Thennn the weekend after that I'm going to Amsterdam to meet up with my parents. It's going to be a crazy couple of weeks, and I already know I'll be exhausted from taking so many night trains, but I think it'll be worth it. I've already been to Berlin twice, but there's soo much stuff I didn't get to see. I saw a lot of stuff from the outside, but I didn't go in any of the major stuff, like Checkpoint Charlie, Fernsehturm, Gedächtniskirche, Reichstag, Deutsches Museum. Man, I'm so used to getting to travel on any weekend I have off, I don't think I'm gonna be able to get used to having a normal life when I get back to the US! Thank goodness my boyfriend is a pilot and I'll be able to go somewhere on a weekend if I feel like it.

Hmm, I think those are all my big updates. Now for the weird thing. Judith and Tabea came over last night and we watched "Freedom Writers" (ended up being better than I thought it woudl be). But afterwards, I don't know how, but we got to talking about weird accents and stuff, and I asked them why so many German people confuse the "W" and "V" sounds in English. For example, I've heard soo many Germans pronounce "vegetable" like "wegetable". Both Tabea and Judith said they had no idea what I was talking about. It turns out...neither of them could hear a difference! I said "vegetable" the right way and the German way, and both of them thought I was saying the same word. They both tried saying it, but neither of them could get it consistently right, and they didn't know when they were saying it right or wrong. I thought about it a little, and I realized that there is no "w" sound in German. "W" in German is pronounced like "V" in English, and "V" in German is pronounced like either "V" or "F" in English. But the "W" is a sound that is never at the beginning of words (although it's often in the middle of words, like "raue"). I guess it's one of those things that if you don't grow up hearing it, you can't distinguish the difference between the two sounds. It's like me with "R" in German. I'm better with it now, but I still can't hear it all the time in words, and I know I can't pronounce it the way a native speaker can, although I can fake a pretty good approximation.

Oh yeah, another cool thing about my German (this blog is called "Laura Learns German", so I feel like it's a good idea to write about stuff like that). First off, my reading skills have gotten much better. And even cooler, so have my skimming skills! Every since I got here I've realized that there are so many things in reading and writing that native speakers take for granted, and one of those is skimming. You have to have a really thorough, in-depth knowledge of a language to be able to skim stuff in that language. Well, I can finally skim stuff! Definitely not well, and I don't usually pick up extra stuff like I can when skimming in English, but I can do it! I don't have to read an entire page of German text where there's one specific thing I'm looking for. I can skim!!! And, I can understand when the kids yell stuff across the house, and TV shows that are playing on the TV upstairs (I never realized how hard it is to understand something when it's echoey and spreading until I tried to understand echoey and spreading stuff in German). I really really really really really x 10 hope that I can keep up my German skills when I get back to the US. I'm already realizing how fast it's gonna go downhill. I guess I'll have to find a group of native German speakers to hang out with or something...

So, that's my big update. Check back next week for a short run-down of my adventures in Cologne!