Grosse post

I am going to be a blog-exclusive rebel and not post with well-written eloquence and connecting thoughts. Instead, I feel poor grammar and dated thoughts will yield better insight.


7/4: Our host family speaks no English. Our dinner consists of outstanding food and furious page flipping through a translation manual to figure out what we are being asked or told.

7/5: Juice and I decided to wake up early and go walking down the Rhine before we met up for our tour. I pulled out a notepad and tallied responses to “Guten Tag” and “hello” to test how people treat friendly Texans. Most people who didn’t avoid eye contact gave us scorns. Favorable responses were usually from the elderly or young women our age. I blame Juice’s good looks for this deviation. I am hoping a free afternoon and a biergarten will yield a similar survey on courtship.

7/6: We got lost on the public transportation system and ended up spending 3-4 hours touring far suburbs and different parts of the city. We were told lots of people spoke English here. Our parts of the city must have been ‘dead zones.’ Ironically my cell phone didn’t work in one of the areas either.

7/8: Today was our first German workshop. We followed it with a scavenger hunt that sent us around the older yet ironically ‘hipper’ part of the city. The city is quite pretty and the people treat us pretty well.

7/9: Cologne is fantastic. I don’t think anyone believed that we would have such a wonderful tour of the cathedral. The Elde Haus pulled a bit of emotion into everyone. Seeing is truly understanding and all that. We ended with some breathtaking heights on top of the cathedral.

7/10: After lecture and another German workshop my associates and I headed up to the ruins north on the Rhine to find a similar riverside beauty like that of the Benrather ‘pink castle’. It was pretty, but the pink castle still is the group favorite.

7/11: Our guest lecturer was really engaging and entertaining. His knowledge was vast without coming off as overwhelming. We shared our feelings in cultural studies and found that many of us feel the same way about things. The consensus is the lack of personal space is our main concern.

7/12: We journeyed to the beautiful city of Trier and found that its small town feel was exactly what we all needed. Involved was a walkthrough of a building from 16 BC and many beautiful churches. I would compare it to Fredericksburg in Texas with the exception of architecture diversity, automobiles, and a language barrier.

7/13: Amsterdam is gorgeous. Amsterdam drivers are jerks. Between gorgeous architecture and rich history are drivers born with the intent of mowing you down. The Anne Frank house was the most positively moving part of the trip due to its actual artifacts and actual walkthrough of the living situations that we have all read about. Any one of the many walkthroughs of an Amsterdam alley was the most negatively moving part of the daytrip. There are some pretty sketch stores and characters that are all but ubiquitous in portions of the city. Luckily, it was completely overshadowed by the beauty of the city and the good company of fellow group members.

7/14: A beautiful journey through the German countryside brought us to a tour of a research farm. They were extremely informative and seem to be doing great things with such a small setup. They could probably do just as much groundbreaking research as A&M if they had similar resources.

7/15: We toured the Cologne zoo. Talking with other tourists reminded us of the progress we have made with both our German linguistically and culturally. After returning home from Cologne, Juice and I realized how we have come to understand Germany as home. We no longer miss our morning drives to school and we know our public transportation routes and times. I tried to celebrate this personal groundbreaking time by ordering extra mustard on my sandwich during dinner. The lady just gave me an empty expression and had to speak English to me to try to understand what I was saying. Totally shot down. Despite the language butchering, she was quite nice.

7/17: The Hannover facilities are fantastic. We stayed the night on a hostel and ended up suiting up to watch a lung transplant. Additionally we toured the mice facilities that are used with an emphasis on genetics. The rest of the tour showed us different parts of a hospital and several doctors talked to us about the pros and cons of the German healthcare system. I am a strong believer in American healthcare and was disappointed to see a punishment system for malpractice and a lack of ability to choose a doctor for surgery. I refuse to believe that healthcare should be practiced with anything short of excellence and was therefore disappointed to see what I feel is a tolerance for exactly that.

7/18: The DLR added a new angle to what medicine is used for. I think we all thought about it but never actually got to see how and where they do physiological tests for prospective and current space travelers. Apparently they pay people to be bed-ridden to test the physiological changes in order to mimic zero gravity conditions. We toured these rooms and nearly unanimously agreed that they would need to increase the compensation to make us participate in such studies. The experts had no comment.