I also rang in my 22nd birthday just a few days ago! My generous host family made me a cake, gave me champagne, bought me candy and snacks, got me a Berlin sightseeing book, and also bought 2 tickets for an ice hockey game next month!
On Monday, classes start up and life will get hectic again. So before that occurs, here's what happened in my last weeks in Cologne:
On September 11, we had a cultural training seminar in Bonn. We were pretty well prepared for the cultural differences thanks to the material we received while still in the U.S., so we didn't learn a great deal, but one part of the session was particularly satisfying: the German moderator asked us to anonymously write what about the German culture bugged us most.
Don't get me wrong, I think we are all loving our time here and we highly appreciate the German culture. But it being a new country, there are still some things that are hard to get used to. I personally wrote that I couldn't stand how commonplace smoking is and how hard free water is to come by when you're out and about. Some of the myriad other complaints our poor moderator read to us included how terrible customer service is, how annoying it is to pay for bathrooms, how strange it is that Germans stare so much, and how there's too much bread in the German diet.
Afterwards, we let loose by visiting a store dedicated to Haribo candies. Haribo is a wildly popular brand of German candy. You have probably seen their famous gummy bears on U.S. shelves.
 |
| Unfortunately this life-size gummy bear wasn't edible |
 |
| Bonn seems like a neat city, although I never got much time to explore it |
That weekend, 3 friends and I went to BELGIUM! It was a seriously amazing trip, and my photos were also amazing. You can see for yourself at the next post.
The next week, I had the idea to grab some friends and head to a church called St. Ursula. This church was built in the 13th century on what turned out to be a massive gravesite - during the construction, tons of bones were found! They were attributed to St. Ursula and her 11,000 companions, who were all martyred in Cologne in the 8th century. The bones were later elaborately arranged on the walls of a reliquary inside the church, which we were eager to see. But just our luck - we arrived to find the room was being restored. Whatever, I bet photography wasn't even allowed inside anyway.
 |
| But first, a stop in the park. Parks here have delightfully dangerous contraptions that would never fly in the litigious U.S. Here's an example! That thing spins. Additionally, there's a guy who's nearly totally blind in our program. That's him! Yes, he survived. |
 |
| St. Ursula |
 |
| We also stopped in a Baroque church from the 17th century, St. Mariä Himmelfahrt |
 |
| Any tour of Cologne churches has to end with the cathedral |
The next day, I headed out on my own to the other side of the Rhine River to get a neat shot of Cologne at dusk. I was far from the only photographer with that idea - I found myself jostling for space with at least 30 other camera-wielding shutterbugs! But the result came out great nevertheless.
And to wrap up the week, my German class visited the EL-DE house, which was the headquarters of the Cologne Gestapo from 1935 to 1945. We saw up close the prison cells used to house political opponents of the Third Reich as well as the rooms in which they were tortured and the courtyard in which over 400 were executed. It was a particularly powerful experience since one could also still see messages scrawled on the prison cell walls by despondent prisoners. Germany has done a lot in terms of confronting and atoning for its troubled past, and museums of Nazi sites like the EL-DE house are factual and informative. Germany's culture, institutions, and government have all been geared towards making sure nothing like the horrors committed during the Third Reich ever occurs again, and museums like the EL-DE house still remind us today of past mistakes so they will not be made again.
 |
| Spotted during our class trip to Dusseldorf - a market stall dedicated purely to a myriad of different types of potatoes. Only in Germany |
 |
| Our class, featuring students from Iraq, Kyrgyzstan, Vietnam, Serbia, Mexico, and the USA |
After one last class field trip to Dusseldorf, it was suddenly time for us German language school students to part and go off to our new cities throughout Germany. The 12 of us in our class had gotten to know each other very well over the past 2 months, so it was bittersweet as we had to bid each other goodbye for the last time. I also had to say goodbye to most of the other 40 Americans in my CBYX program here in Cologne, as only a few of them moved to Berlin with me.
It was sad to leave so many new friends behind, but it was time to branch out and explore the Berlin scene for the rest of my time here in Germany. Auf Wiedersehen, Cologne!
In my last several weekends in Cologne, I planned and went on four exciting excursions. Check out the next posts to see what I experienced!