A bit of Germany

Okay, so to start I had my first week of classes. Here's a brief schedule.

Monday:
Stat discussion 10:15-11:45 (meets every other week) in Garching
Stat lecture 12:15-1:45 in Garching

Tuesday:
Organic Chem Lecture 10:00-12:00 in Garching
Organic Chem Discussion 12:00-1:00 in Garching

Wednesday:
Construction of Traffic Infrastructure 8:30-11:00 (it's an English taught Graduate level class that Kristina and Tim might be taking... and I'm hoping to get 400 level Technical Elective credit for... pending approval) at the Main Campus
Novellas of German Literature 12:00-2:00 at the LMU
Genocide in Eastern Europe 2:00-4:00 at LMU (hoping to get Non-western credit for this but kinda doubtful... Kristina and Tim are taking it too)

Thursday:
Organic Chem Lecture 8:00-9:00 in Garching
Organic Chem Discussion 9:00-10:00 in Garching

and that's it! granted two of those classes are still waiting for approval in the US so I might end up dropping them... so we'll see what happens. But I have Fridays free again! Yay!

Anyway, so that was my school week... then Friday I hopped on a train to Cologne to meet James who I'd never met before. We've got a group of mutual friends and he's in the Netherlands on Spring Break this week with a EuroRail pass. I got in around 8 pm and we introduced ourselves and wandered around looking for dinner and then just around the city. Headed back to get a club recommendation... James was looking for the Industrial German music scene... well, apparently that doesn't exist in Cologne. Just everywhere else in Germany. We took a 20 minute tram to the recommended spot and walked in... it was after midnight on a Friday night. The place was completely empty. The bartender looked surprised to see us. We left.
The next morning we headed over to the Cathedral and wandered around inside. I said it last time I was there and I'll say it again. Massive. We opted to be brave and hike up the 509 steps to the top. We regretted it pretty quickly. You're literally hiking straight up a spiral with no landings. 509 steps. On the way there was a stop off so you could see the bell- this is the largest swinging church bell in the world. Then we went up farther. We thought we were at the top! The spiral ended! We entered a large room! With another staircase! Ah! But we finally made it to the top. Awesome view. The entire thing is caged in on top and all sides though.
After we made it back down we headed over to the chocolate factory. That was pretty cool. There was a bit of background on chocolate as well as a climate-room with cocoa plants, and then there was a working factory where you could taste the end product. They were also making the Lindt truffles that they were selling there too. Then came the awesome gift shop. Chocolate pretty much anything and everything you can imagine. Chocolate Cathedrals, beer bottles, noodles... So then we stopped for some food and to rest our feet for a bit. Afterward I headed over to this old Gestapo prison museum. It's one of the best preserved in Germany. The basement has a bunch of cells. You can see the scratchings in the walls from the prisoners. Upstairs is a war museum. Then I stopped by the Ludwig Museum, which is a later art museum. It's got the second largest (after Paris) Picasso collection (mostly later works), Surrealism, and as part of the more recent collection, Andy Warhol. Following that came dinner and then a walk outside the Roman-German museum... no point in paying 6 Euro since the walls are glass and a good portion of exhibits are outside. Cologne used to be part of the old Roman Empire... from the year 300. There's a lot of stuff from Rome still there and it's all over the city.
Also, as a side note, I found my numbers on the Cologne parade that I was wondering about last time: "more than forty tons of sweets, 100,000 chocolates, 100,000 packets of popcorn, flowers, and cologne are hurled into the crowd!" That's a lot of chocolate/sweets.

Anyway, Sunday morning I took an early train to Heidelberg. James was going to meet me later for the castle tour since he wasn't interested in the Altstadt. I wandered around on my own and found all the churches, the University (the oldest in Germany), The City Hall, and Hotel Ritter, which is apparently the only building from the 17th century still standing due to invasion/war, etc. (now, obviously, a hotel). At 2 I met up with James and we hiked up to the castle. Pretty cool. It's half ruins and half standing and it was pretty awesome on both halves. There was enough to walk around on the outside that we opted against touring inside. We did head to the "grosse Fass" though as I didn't remember exactly what a Fass was... wine barrel. We saw one that was about 12 feet in diameter and started snapping pictures. "Yeah, this is a big barrel..." Then we walked into the next room and found the real one. It's 9 meters in diameter... that's like 30 feet. Wow. Apparently the kings here liked wine... Anyway, we wandered around the castle a bit more and then figured we were castled out. I stopped for crepes at the base for lunch... which proved to be a bad idea as I will shortly explain. Then we crossed the famous "Old Bridge" (not really all that old but looks cool and is pedestrian bridge) and headed to the other side of the river to hike the "Philosopher's Path" which was apparently frequented by philosopher's back in the day. Well... Heidelberg is in the mountains. The path is on the hill... which means we had to get up to the path first. We of course had hiked 509 stairs the day before and had just hiked up the hill on the other side to get to the castle. I think James was regretting letting me plan the day out... needless to say having eaten salty crepes (ham/cheese/tomato) was not helping the lack of water we had... It was quite steep to get up but we finally made it and then had a lovely time hiking along the gardens/vineyards/trees on the hillside. Lots of really good overlooks to the river (Neckar) with the bridge and the castle and the city. We got to the Philosopher's Garden which is where it looked like it branched off on the map and decided to take the downward route. This turned out to not actually be the route which maybe we should have noticed... but we ignored. So we jumped down a 6 foot tall stone wall onto a grassy path, and walked through two wooden gates (in our defense they were unlocked) and jumped down another wall until we realized that we were in a private garden area and could go no farther... Oops... So then we had to turn around and go all the way back up the hill and back up the walls and go the actual marked way down... and then we trekked back across the city to the train station, bought ourselves cold liquid from the supermarket inside and got on the 7:00 direct to Munich.

And that was my weekend. James hung out till this afternoon. Yesterday I had my two Stat classes and then research which went till 6 so he went on a city tour and wandered around the English Garden. Tim and Kristina joined us for dinner. Meanwhile I've got quite the to-do list for this week with homework and research and planning because... Thursday night we fly out to London! Update on that next week...

Pictures:
Heidelberg:
View from the castle across the river
View of bridge and castle from Philosopher's Path
Me on bridge with castle in background
Castle Ruins x2

Cologne:
you've already seen these, so just a picture from the top of the tower