Thursday, January 23, 2014

Day 12 - Extra info on Bonn

So like the last few days, today has been absolutely chill with not a lot to report on today. I woke up (on time today, yay!) and got ready to leave for my class. When I got outside, I got a bit of a shock as it was rather cold. As I passed the pharmacy, it showed the outside temperature to be about 1 degrees Celsius (about 34 degrees Fahrenheit). Luckily my big poofy winter coat has kept me nice and warm in the face of cold, wind, and rain (thanks mom!) however I'm thinking that in the next few days/weeks I'll need to break out the gloves and earmuffs to go along with the wonderful infinity scarf I got from Glory to keep my head and fingers from freezing. Still, this winter has been relatively mild compared to other years according to the locals and we haven't gotten snow yet. Hopefully that will change for at least a day or too. As a Texas gal, the chances to see real snow are few and far between and I'm interested to see how childish a bunch of college students can become in the face of the novel wonder of snow. I predict snow angels, snowmen, and lots of snowball fights at the very least.

Anyway, I started school off with Physiology. Thankfully I did a better job at staying awake this time than I did yesterday and I got to learn more about the electrical activity of the heart and some of the pathologies that can happen if something goes wrong. I never though to appreciate how complicated the heart's structure was until this class. It's pretty remarkable when you think that the heart basically has to switch the electrical activity from top down (in the Atrium contacting down) to bottom up (the Ventricles pumping blood away from the body.) Anyway, after that class was a small amount of time to finish up any homework for the signals and systems class that came just before lunch. I think I'm getting the hang of what's going on in that class as I could follow almost everything. Lunch was quiet, I stayed at AIB and made a sandwich out of the bread and salami that I bought yesterday and would have stayed there until everyone came back from their lunch until I realized I hadn't gotten the meat I was supposed to get for our German class breakfast tomorrow. When I came back, some of the students were already sitting at a table in the back and we just talked until everyone else returned and started to do homework (yes, boring but necessary).

 Just some of the cool people I hang out with

After tomorrow's and Monday's homework was finished (with a lot of silliness and music involved,) I went home in the rain and spent the next 4 hours with my host family. In good news, Sophie is feeling much better...but Marie isn't feeling so good now and even Annette expressed feeling under the weather. I hope they all get better soon.

As you can see, today was just another day of school with little to report. So I thought I'd take a moment to say a little bit more about the nuances of Bonn city. The one thing that's really made me laugh every time I go into the city are the pidgins. Yes, the pidgins. They are so unafraid of people, they will literally walk within a group until it can meander it's way out. Seriously, the first few days in Bonn a lot of us students went around in packs to different food places and just generally enjoyed being tourists. While we were walking, a pidgin was in our way and we expected it to fly away the moment we got close. Instead it stayed put until we got too close, at which point it started walking in the same direction we were going, actually getting in the way of our feet before we accidentally kicked too close to it and it flew away. This wasn't the only occurrence of this happening, all the pidgins are this way and it cracks me up every time I see it.

Another nuance of Bonn is that there are tons of spires and churches everywhere in the city. On the second day of class a friend and I got lost and had to call AIB. We said "we're near a spire...oh wait, that doesn't help you does it?" There have to be at least 3 churches with spires in the immediate vicinity of where we're centralized, but I have no doubt that if I were to look around into parts of the city I've never seen before, there would be too many to count. They're also so beautiful! On the street parallel to AIB, there's a church or something that when seen at the right moment, shows such vibrant colors of gold and blue in the setting sun. I saw it completely by accident one day and I just had to take a picture. I'm glad I did as the sun hasn't been out much in the last few days and I wouldn't be able to take that picture again even if I wanted to.

 The picture doesn't do it justice, but this was the sun-lit castle
 Some important building
 A church...a tall church
All these pictures were different structures

Tomorrow seems like another chill day, but some of us might go out and do something. I know that some people were wanting to go to the various museums here in the city on Saturday. When we were signed up as temporary citizens of Bonn, we received a booklet of coupons that allow us into a lot of museums or concerts for a discounted price or for free, so that will probably be a fun thing that I'm looking forward to.

Until next time,
Erin Z

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