Little Sleep and Sore Feet

Our first official week in Germany started as a long one! In order to see more of Paris, we decided to stay in the hostel again Sunday night and take an early early train back to Bonn Monday morning for classes. This turned into us waking up around 4:30 and having an incredibly long day. But of course, Paris is always worth it!!! 

We arrived to class right as it started at 10:15. After a full day of History of Medicine and German classes, we got a tour of Bonn from the head of the AIB. Every little part of every little town here has so much history! I suppose some of our towns have more history then we assume too, but I guess European towns just seem so much cooler! We finally got to crash Monday night, but were up and at em' Tuesday morning in class by 8:45. After another day of classes, we were taken to the House of History Museum. I'm not a huge fan of museums, especially when everything is written in German. But our tour guide made this museum one of the best I've been to! Instead of having some student worker who has memorized the details, our tour guide actually lived through the rough times of German history. He remembers what it's like to go to bed hungry because your family has zero money for food, and he remembers the day the Berlin Wall came down. That made it one of the coolest experiences so far! Wednesday, we had another early day and then went to the Anesthesia museum in Bonn. I was a little skeptical as how a whole museum could be made about Anesthesia, but turns out we scored a private tour with one of the guys responsible for many advances in the world of Anesthesia. While he was a little hard to understand, he genuinely cared about what he was showing us and had years of knowledge working in the field of Anesthesia to back it up.

On Thursday we embarked on an all day trip to Köln, not Cologne like American's usually pronounce it. Köln is about a 30 minute train ride from the Bonn central station, so it was nice to go somewhere that was easy to get to. Upon arriving and walking out of the train station, you immediately see the Köln Dom, or Cathedral. This cathedral is beautiful beyond all belief and so huge you couldn't miss it if you tried. Later we got a private tour of it and were taken all the way to the top, but first we had a tour of the city. Köln is an old city, like most in Europe, and all the buildings are so cute and adorable! Most of them are built taller then they are wide and it makes them so charming looking.

Friday was a full day of German class, and then we all went out and ordered our meal in German. It's crazy after just one week of living in the culture how fast you can already pick up so many words and meanings of things. When I first got here, every sign and menu was nothing but foreign words. Now I can not only pronouce most of the words correctly, I can understand what most of the menu is saying or what a sign is indicating.

Saturday we slept in, which was very much needed!! Then we went to a welcome party thrown by the AIB for all the students and host families. Each group had to introduce themselves and we chose a line dance. It was kind of embarrassing at first, but we just embraced it after a couple minutes and had everybody clapping at the end!

Sunday involved packing and the World Cup Final. Being in Germany during the Final deserves a whole post of it's own- coming soon! And with only an hour of sleep between us getting home from the soccer match and us leaving for Vienna, the start of our second week abroad started just as crazy as the first one!