a note on traveling

I always have a lot of fun just walking around cities.  I found out a lot of information about the day passes for Milan’s metro and bus system but eventually decided to never partake.  walking everywhere allows you to see all of the city instead just what the tourists see.  plus you get lost a lot more and stumble into things you hadn’t planned or take detours when you see things that interest you.

although, your feet hate you later.

in my other trips I have not usually had such a long list of things I wanted to see as I did for Milan.  in hindsight, I actually think I took the weekend a little too quickly and tried to see too much.  at times it felt less like a leisurely trip and more like a scavenger hunt.  don’t get me wrong; I had a fantastic time!  I think in the future though I will try to walk a little more slowly.

sorry friends

no time for blogging tonight.  Milan tomorrow and I have so much to do to prepare!  there are a lot of travel arrangements to be made.  oh, and we talked about drugs today at work.  second day in a row.

my most adventurous day yet

I took a chance and booked a surprise flight* to Milan! for this weekend and then trains to Amsterdam and Rotterdam and then back to Koln for next weekend.  and all for under 120e.  I was literally sweating while I booked all my trips.  D and E can attest to that.

now I am just working on finding places to stay.

* a surprise flight = blind booking through GermanWings where you pick a list of cities that you might fly to, pick your dates, pay and then find out where you are going.  I got Milan.  badass.

and then

I biked through a small suburban town called Merkenich.  it was really cute and not really suburban in the American sense of the word.  I mean, the houses were really close together but the entire area was surrounded by farmland and grazing animals.  I think little towns like Merkenich have as much to show as the bigger cities because they are where the people really live.  I wish I spoke more (ha ha any) German because I would like to hang out in some of the more remote areas in Germany and talk to people there.  I didn’t stay long in Merkenich; just long enough to bike through.  but I got a really good look at the entire place from above when I was crossing the Reine over to Leverkusen. 

I stayed in Leverkusen for about an hour and a half.  I walked around the city center and went into a really amazing antique store that had all kinds of neat things.  I found a lot of things I wanted to get my parents and sister as gifts from Germany but in the end I left them all there because the prices were a little too expensive.  but I have some pictures inside and they are fun too.  there were a lot of people out and about shopping and having fun.  it was a really colorful area so naturally I enjoyed photographing it.  you can see the whole day’s adventures here.

bike ride

yesterday I biked to Leverkusen.  M had first suggested it as a destination I was capable of biking to after my trips to Bonn.  I had never biked up the Reine so it was a really fun and exciting trip.  when I first left the house I actually had no intention of really going on a long bike ride because the weather looked awfully threatening and I didn’t want a repeat experience of getting poured on like last weekend.  that was poop.  once I had gotten sufficiently far up the Reine I finally decided to make the entire trip to Leverkusen.  luckily the weather stayed looking only ominous and luckily I brought enough water and some brotchens to tide me over on my trip. 

the trip itself was really fun.  the majority of the ride there was a wide beautiful tree lined pathway with lots of runners and fellow bike riders.  it was very beautiful and actually a lot more fun to ride than the very narrow and jungle-like path towards Bonn.  no brush scraping at your legs and buggies zooming into your hair.  plus it wasn’t nearly as crowded as the southern part of the Reine.  it was quite pleasant.  I also stopped under one of the bridges to take some photographs of some really beautiful graffiti.  oh!  and some sheep.

I am really proud of myself for making it all the way to Leverkusen because, like the ride to Bonn, it is not as simple as just staying along the Reine.  there are industrial areas a ways both north and south of Koln that prevent you from riding right along the river and the bike trails lead you on more circuitous routes around the factories.  I got lost trying to follow those routes both times I have biked to Bonn so when I made it to Leverkusen basically incident free I was very proud.

delightful

J drove E and I to Aachen today to see both the diploma (translate = thesis) projects for the graduating senior architecture students at RWTH Aachen University and take a bus to Maastricht for a day on the town.  it was a wonderful day.

the diploma projects were very good.  it was really cool to see how different but also how very alike the projects we saw were to the final thesis projects we saw in May at Georgia Tech.  I guess some things transcend the language barrier.  architecture is architecture after all.  my favorite part was seeing some of the unusual and new (to me, at least) ways that some of the students built their models.  I have a lot of ideas now for future models.  fab.

new things

we are traveling some more tomorrow!  we are leaving early with J to drive to Aachen and then the schedule gets blurry.  we are hoping to see some of the senior thesis projects in Aachen while we are there but also take a bus to Maastricht to look around the city and see some cool things.  all I know for sure is that we are supposed to be at work at 7:45 tomorrow morning and that J is planning on driving back around 6:00.  I am sure it will be a badass day no matter what ends up happening.

new things everyday!  I am continually amazed.

beautiful day in another new city

today was a really fantastic day.  we left in the morning from work to drive to Münster to take down an exhibition that D and J put together before E and I arrived.  we had never seen what it looked like but were forewarned that it would take a long time to disassemble because it took so long to assemble in the first place.  we had to leave early.

the drive out was, of course, seemingly endless and very beautiful German countryside.  it was very different from what we saw on our way to Liechtenstein; no mountains and few hills.  but it was very beautiful farm country.  I thought of my dad a lot because it had a very distinct Iowa feeling to me.  although, with a lot more trees between farms.  but there was corn everywhere.  D and J said it wasn’t corn for people to eat though; a different kind that is mostly fed to cows.  I need to look into this.

when we arrived to Schöppingen, which is a very rural feeling suburb of Münster and where the exhibition was located, we discovered that the exhibition was being housed in a renovated farmhouse type of building.  it was very cool.  the exhibition itself was absolutely stunning.  we spent a good half an hour just photographing it.  it was created using different plastic modules that were either riveted or screwed together.  disassembling it actually went extremely quickly and we were able to drive into the city center of Münster to see the cathedral there and have a little snack at an Italian ice restaurant.  before we left, though, we were given a quick tour around the exhibition buildings and where visiting artists can stay and work.  we saw a lot of really interesting things including a completely broken apart boat and a room tilted on its side.  E even did the Michael Jackson Smooth Criminal lean in it.

in Münster we saw St. Paul’s Cathedral, St. Lambert’s Church, the Prinzipalmarkt in the main city center and, of course, a million zillion bikes.

St. Paul’s Cathedral was a very interesting church because it is a mixture of both Romanesque and Gothic styles.  the outside of it has hints of the Gothic we’ve seen over and over on the Koln Cathedral but also some very different stylistic elements too.  it was huge on the inside and has an equally huge astronomical clock on the interior.  a lot of people were gathered around it!  I wish we could have seen all the dials move while we were waiting but alas!, no.

St. Lambert’s Church was especially neat because we kind of stumbled onto it.  you can see the spires from a lot of places in the city but sometimes, of course, you can’t.  at one point when we were wandering around we couldn’t see it and then, turning a corner into the Prinzipalmarkt, all of a sudden it was looming ahead.  it was enough to stop both E and I in our tracks and take photographs right in the middle of the street.  St. Lambert’s Church has a very similar history to the Koln Cathedral, and it is similar in its Gothic style, because it was started very early, ran out of money and postponed and then picked back up again for finishing when the Gothic revival happened.

conclusion: Münster is so gorgeous!  I am reasonably sure that it is near the top of the list in my favorite visited cities even though we did not spend more than a few hours there.

Münster = bike capitol of Germany

D and J are taking us to Münster tomorrow to take down an exhibition they put up before we arrived in May.  after a quick wiki search I have learned two very interesting things.  1, Münster is one of the biggest cities in Germany, in terms of actual land covered.  2, it is also known as the bicycle capitol of Germany.  I don’t think we’ll be doing much biking though!

after we arrive and take down the exhibition, we think there will be time to have some dinner, look around and then go home.  hopefully I’ll get some fun photographs while we are looking around.  driving through the German countryside is always incredible also so I am really looking forward to that too.