First Few Days

July 5: While I was waiting in line at the train station to get my Eurorail Pass validated, one of the TVs in the room started showing international news. After stories about the recent wedding in Monaco and unrest in the Sudan, the news report briefly mentioned that yesterday “Amerika [something something] Tag der Unabhängigkeit.” This was accompanied by a video of a street in some American city festooned with red, white, and blue and crowded with dancing drunk people. Independence Day, one of the most important American holidays, was relegated to a fifteen second video clip. For the first time since arriving here, it hit me how non-universal the experience of life inside America is. I realized that I had vaguely assumed that the rest of the world had a perpetual feeling of “being on the outside looking in” on the Greatest Country on Earth.

I like everything about Germany, so far. I like having a pair of palaces two and a half blocks from my house. I like how almost every street has a bakery or café. I like how you’re allowed to bring your dog with you almost everywhere. I deeply and passionately love the public transportation system.

I still don’t have German culture figured out. I knew that Germans sampled from other cultures, but I didn’t know how that would manifest itself.. The radio will play German pop back to back with Shakira and Katy Perry. Gelato stores are everywhere. Pizza and spaghetti are available everywhere. A street musician plays smooth jazz next to the statue of Beethoven.

So far, we’ve toured the city and visited the König Museum. On the city tour, we saw a sample of the Roman ruins that lay under the city. Bonn is old and rich in history in a way which makes it feel very unlike all but a few places I’ve been to in the US, but that could just be the jet-lag talking.