Monday-Wednesday week 4
Trip Start
Mar 19, 2008
1
14
61
Trip End
Jul 01, 2008
Cologne,
Germany
Monday, April 21, 2008
Monday:
Just regular school day today. I tried doing pushups today and ended up aggravating my stupid shoulder...damnit. The weather was awesome today, I rode my bike to school in the morning; it's a great way to start the morning.
Tuesday:
Another awesome day today. I rode my bike to school again. I didn't do anything after school today really; just hung out with friends for a while, did a little bit of homework, and cruised around on my bike. A bunch of friends and I went out to a great all you can drink bar tonight. Well, it was great until I left. I was given two cards upon paying the 5 Euro entrance fee. One card was for receiving free drinks, the other was not explained. Well, apparently it was pretty damn important, because the cashier wanted 40 euros to replace the missing card!! Outrageous. I had the card earlier, but when I set my sweatshirt down on a table to go dance (my card was in my sweatshirt), the card was missing when I picked up my sweatshirt to go leave. Bah. And to piss me off even more, my retarded ass train kicked everyone off midway home, so I had to walk most of the way home
Execution 1
. My train is SO unreliable and crazy. It's gone on strike for a day, and is always randomly closing. Whatever.Wednesday:
I woke up angry about the previous night, tired, and a little hungover. Man...I only had classes for half the day today. This afternoon we had a tour with Hartwig. We started out at the Gestapo Museum of Koln. This was a very sobering yet good Museum. It was the jail and interrogation center for the Gestapo covering the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. At least 600 people where killed at this location, and during its entire existence, only one person escaped. We saw lots of messages written on the walls, and a few cases of bloody handprints pressed into the walls. Many people held in this prison were actually loyal German citizens, and we saw many examples of people writing on the walls expressing their confusion on being detained. After this we went to a small church containing a black Madonna. I don't really know the significance of this because Hartwig didn't explain it, but apparently it's a big deal. After the Madonna, we went to Koln's famous Cologne shop 4711. It's pretty much an old woman's perfume, but it's a couple hundred years old, and a big part of Koln's history. Hartwig told us a tradition his grandmother always used to do; rub the perfume all over her hands and inhale it deeply a few times. This pretty much equates to huffing, but neither Hartwig nor his grandmother knew this. We did some bakery testing after the perfume tour, which is always delicious and very welcome.
