Cathedrals and Concerts

It's official - I'm moving this Sunday the 29th to Berlin! I can't believe my awesome time here in Cologne is already over, especially since I'm still processing everything that I've experienced - and blogging about it. Oops.

So as for the week of August 18, on Monday we headed out after class to  the botanical gardens to see some serious foliage and enjoy the not-so-great weather. Lots of cities here in Europe that we've visited have botanical gardens, and Cologne's garden is one of the very best. The plant lover can find everything from cacti to old, thick trees to tropical plant life in its enormous grounds. But the gardens do more than just provide plants for a place to grow - they are also fertile grounds for great pictures!

Not everyone appreciates my excessive enthusiasm for photos

Hooray, a photobomb-free photo

Really though, how often do you come across an empty pedestal just begging for a statue?

Daredevils

Intrepid explorer

I crack myself up

A corpse flower! They're hardly ever open, but when they are they smell like death. Whenever the one in L.A. opens up, it's big news

Palm trees offer a taste of home

We weren't the only ones in the gardens taking pictures. I observed some German parents taking pictures of their small toddlers. In order to get them to smile, rather than say "Cheese!" or the German word for cheese, the parents encouraged their kids to say "Armeisen-Scheiße." I was quite taken aback, as that literally translates to "ant shit." I asked my host dad, and apparently that's a fairly standard phrase for getting Germans of all ages to show their pearly whites in pictures. It's not good, it's not bad, it's just different. Like many things here.

But anyway, the botanical gardens were a hard act to follow, but my absolute favorite activity of the week was going to a free organ concert in the cathedral. The Germans are pretty serious about classical music, and classical organ music is no exception. We got there 30 minutes early and just barely got seats on the wall of the cathedral on a stone ledge. Everyone else had to stand, with the exception of a few dozen Germans who came prepared with lawn chairs. 

I wasn't about to go to the cathedral and not take pictures

Listening to music floating through a 1000 year-old church was such a neat feeling! That feeling could best be described as 'sleepiness' for some of the less-classical-organ music-inclined among us, but I was in awe the entire time. I took a short video of an excerpt:

The rest of the week was more relaxed, although some of us went to a free indie music concert in a trendy part of town a few days later. There, once again, we were confronted with the German manner of dancing, which is really characterized more by how little dancing is involved. Judging by the enthusiastic cheers after each song, Germans at the concert clearly enjoyed the music, yet they were almost all perfectly stationary whenever music was playing. We Americans were simply bopping or swaying in place, but compared to the rest of the crowd it looked like we were having a violent mosh pit. This sort of behavior carries over into clubs as well, we've determined. 

Then it was time to gear up for a weekend excursion to Frankfurt. More on that next time!

The other USC student in the program and I love reppin' the brand

Media Park near our language school