Jeff in Germany!

Just wanted to drop a quick line to let everyone know that my brother Jeff made it to Germany with no problems. We spent the past weekend in Belgium eating chocolates, exploring Brussels on bikes, eating mussels in Brussels, and took an afternoon trip to a town called Brugge which is considered the "Venice of the North". Jeff went to Amsterdam on Monday and I came back to Germany for classes and the first speaker event that my one class has been working on planning and promoting. Jeff had a great time exploring Amsterdam and got to see Darmstadt today. Tomorrow while I am at class, Jeff is going to go check out Heidelberg and go to the castle there and we will meet up at the airport to head to MADRID!! I am very excited, I was supposed to go to Spain back in highschool but our trip was cancelled due to heightened terrorist alerts, so now I finally get to go! Jeff's best friend David, who is fluent in Spanish and has been to Spain before, will meet us in Madrid so hopefully it will be much easier for us to navigate and we won't get sucked into any not worthwhile tourist activities. I will have my laptop in Spain so we will try and put some pics up from Brussels and Spain while there. 

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving, I am very sad I don't get to eat any Turkey this year. Luckily, both of my families tend to cook a similar Christmas meal which I can gorge myself on turkey and stuffing!! Less than a month until I am headed home with a world of awesome travels under my belt, a load of new friends,  and bags full of souvenirs!! Tschuss!

Koln and the Schokolade Museum

Because I am procrastinating/a bit stuck on my manatee project and have half an hour to kill before dinner plans, I will write a brief update about my recent trip to Koln (or Cologne). Jeff and I are off to Brussels this weekend and Spain next week, so there might not be an update until things settle back down, so enjoy this post about chocolate in the mean time ;)

After being depressed about not making it to Amsterdam, we decided it would lift our spirits to hop a train to Koln for the afternoon to go to a chocolate museum we had heard about. The chocolate museum was pretty much the only thing we did in Koln other than eat some rubbery chicken and walk around a bit to see the old town and the giant church right outside the train station.

The museum was working in connection with Lindt (aka the makers of the delicious truffles we all know and love). And we got to see a ton of chocolate memorabilia including posters, packaging, and old fashioned vending machines as well as recreations of old candy store counters (think WIlly Wonka style). There was also a tropical forest inside the museum where they were growing cocoa plants. It was quite hot, actually STIFLING, in this area and the air was crazy thick and hard to breathe. Luckily we were only trapped inside for a few minutes!

The most interesting part of the museum was the room where they were making Lindt candies. They were making tiny chocolate bars, truffles, and the large molded chocolates (think Santas and hearts 2 feet tall) and there was a chocolate fountain in this room with free samples of wafers dipped into it! The chocolate fountain was not your typical wedding chocolate fountain, but much thicker milkier chocolate, the same kind they were using to coat the truffles and make the mini chocolate bars! There was also a store selling all kinds of weird chocolate products including tons of Lindt truffles I had never seen before and chocolate noodles...Here's some pics for your chocolate enjoyment:

Delicious Lindt Schokolade in the making!

That poor boy isn't getting any chocolate! I would cry too!

That creepy knome on top of a cabinet is actually an old vending machine!

There was even a glass elevator, Wonka Style!

Truffles in the making

Chocolate fountain

Welcome to the jungle

A giant Lindt truffle

Paris Day 2: Super Tourist Attractions

Day two started with a frustrating trip to the Paris East train station. We were trying to book reservations to Amsterdam and the clerk informed us it would cost 52 euro for us to go. And since reservations are usually onle 4-10 euro, we decided paying that much more was not worth one day in Amsterdam, so we agreed we would go back to Amsterdam another weekend and would instead travel back to Frankfurt the next day. 

After canceling our hotel in Amsterdam and getting our reservations to Frankfurt, we set off to find the Arc de Triomphe, then went to the Eiffel Tower so that we could go up to the top. This involved a lot of waiting in various lines but was worth it for the view from the top! After the Eiffel Tower, we had lunch and went to the Notre Dame. After which we set out to find what Jenae's friend told us is the best ice cream in the world. We were told it was near the Notre Dame and had a yellow sign...alas we could not find it and headed to the Louvre. 

The Louvre is free on Fridays for people under 28 from 6pm-10pm. So we went and did a whirlwind trip through the Louvre. It is far too big and confusing to have any idea where to go, but we managed to go through the Egyptian wing, found the passageway that used to be the royal residence's moat, saw the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and the Victory of Samothrace and pondered the works of David and Delacroix  when we got tired and bored in a room full of large scale French paintings. Though we were both a bit "museum'd out", the Louvre was very beautiful and I am glad to say I have went. I wish that I could have visited the Musee d'Orsay and the Rodin museum as well, but 2 days in Paris is just not enough, plus one can only look at so many museums without getting delirious. 

After this we went to dinner at (of all things in Paris) a Mexican restaurant. Everything was really busy because it was a Friday night, so we went to the first place that had room for us and sounded good and reasonable priced. Reasonably priced was still pretty expensive for American standards I think as I ate some $20 fajitas but alas, upon being fed and a bit more walking around we were content to return to our hostel and leave Paris the next morning. 

Part of the Louvre

Inside the Egyptian temple

Paris at night

Inside the Notre Dame

Beware of pickpockets at the Eiffel Tower!

From the top of the Eiffel Tower

Croquette Madame...yum!

I watched people playing soccer from the top of the Eiffel Tower!

A super realistic wax figure in a scene recreation in the Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower

We thought we would look more French if we wore hats and ate baguettes...(secretly we wore hats because we hadn't showered because the hostel was nasty and ate baguettes because we were hungry and they were cheap!)

Paris Day 1- The Moulin Rouge and Eiffel Tower

So after Versailles we made our way to our hostel, which I can safely say is the worst hostel we have stayed in yet. It consisted of 3 sets of bunk beds in a room that smelled quite pungent. You had to walk outside through a courtyard to get to the bathroom which had no lights and hadn't been cleaned in who knows how long. And the roof had holes, so because it was raining, everything in the bathroom was wet. So that was quite unpleasant...needless to say we did not spend much time here, basically only sleeping.

After finding our hostel and throwing our bags down we set out to obtain some much needed food and to see a few sights. We ate at a little restaurant where we fell in love with a sandwich called a "Croquette Madame" which was basically a super glorified egg mcmuffin...a piece of bread with ham, cheese, and a fried egg on top served with salad. And they have free tap water in France, yay!! After dinner we went to see the Moulin Rouge, well just the outside. It was much less impressive than I would have imagined it and I'm not quite sure why I thought it would be bigger, better, and more exciting...and then we went to the Eiffel Tower which was magnificent at night! There is a light show and the tower light up for 15 minutes flashing different colors and patterns and twinkling. It was quite beautiful. After this we headed back to our seedy hostel to lay our heads down for the night on the foam pads (yeah, they were not even mattresses)...

Jenae and I in front of the tower

During the light show

More lights!

The Moulin Rouge

Paris Day 1- Versailles

Jenae and I met in Paris at about 11 am on Thursday, I had taken the straight shot train from Frankfurt which was a little less than 4 hours and Jenae was coming from Reims, a town in France where some of her friends from home are studying abroad. We checked our bags at the train station and decided we would make the journey to Versailles for the day to see the estate and palace built by Louis XIV. First, however, we obtained baguettes as we were hungry and thought this would be the most French thing we could do! ;) After taking the metro the wrong direction for about 30 minutes (Jenae has been to Paris before and claimed to be well traveled on the Parisian metro...right...) we finally got ourselves turned around and arrived at Versailles. The palace was stunning. It is amazing how much Louis XIV built for himself, all whilest the people of France were starving and dying. The rooms were very lavish and the corridors and rooms were ornately decorated with parquet floors, marble panels on the walls, rich colors on the walls, tons of painting, and detailed baroque tapestries draped throughout. But the most impressive part of Versailles was the outside gardens, which were the epitome of pristine. The shrubs were all shaped into conical or spherical fun and it was nice to walk outside as it was not very cold and sunny (which is far different than the blanket of rain that consumes Darmstadt...it has honestly rained at least a little bit everyday for the last 3 weeks I think...as I write this it is pouring!) We took a lot of fun pictures at Versailles because we were bored with just landscape pics or just the pic of the two of us holding the camera ourselves, so prepare yourself to see a lot of pictures of us jumping and laughing!

Leprechaun jump in front of Versailles

Jenae's jump...much cooler than mine

The obligatory "we're at Versailles" picture

The sun setting over the gardens at Versailles

A little buckeye pride in Paris

This was Louis XIV's bed, which was massive with feather puffs at each post!

The gardens outside the palace

One of the lavishly decorated rooms

In and around Hessen

So before I get to talking about Paris, I want to update that the two weekends after Berlin, I stayed in and around the Hessen state of Germany (mainly Darmstadt where I live and go to school). I used the time to hang out more with the Erasmus students. We had a party for Jackie's 21st birthday, took a day trip to Wiesbaden (sidenote: Wiesbaden is the capital of Hessen which has these natural springs you can get water from...hot mineral metal tasting water, but it is said to cure illness and since we were all feeling a bit rough from Jackie's birthday the night before, we filled up our Nalgene's and tried to choke a bit of it down. sidenote 2: Everyone finds it amusing that Jenae and I carry Nalgene bottles everywhere with us filled with water or crystal light, they are so into conserving and reusing and recycling and such here that you would think they would all use waterbottles...), carved some pumpkins for Halloween, and my Turkish friend Yaya had everyone over the other night for crepe night. Yaya makes the best crepes around and provides all the yummy fixings, so that was very fun and tasty! Our friends from Ohio State that go to Schwabisch Gmund (Jackie and Shaina) came in for the 21st birthday party and it is always fun to spend time with the Ohioans. Other than that I have been working on projects a lot, running, eating, reading, the usual stuff I would do at home. Travel was getting quite exhaustive so it was nice to be in Darmstadt for a bit, but it is always so darn rainy here!! Which makes it excruciatingly hard to get out of bed on a Sunday morning. Just wanted to throw a quick update in about everyday life here, which is not as comforting or familiar as at home. I have been missing being able to lounge on the couch and watch tv (my flat does not have a tv in our main room, it broke the day before I moved in) and I was sad I was not at the shoe for my last buckeye home game :( but alas, I was in PARIS, which I will detail in the next post :)

Classes

So I figured I should post an update about classes, seeing as I am here to study abroad. ;)

I am taking four design classes and a German language course. My design classes each meet once a week and are all very different from each other and quite different from what I am used to at Ohio State. The language class meets twice a week but tends to conflict with the design classes at times, and since I will get no credit for taking it, I only go when I do not have other classes, so it is more of an opportunity for me to pick up some new German vocab and such. Though I find the German language quite difficult and somehow I default to Spanish when I can't figure out what to say in German, yet my Spanish is still not good enough to effectively communicate anything but everyday chatter with the Spanish erasmus students. 

My design classes are taught in German, though some students speak in English (for my sake) and the professor's clarify important information to us in English. The main studio class is called Entwurf, and is taught be a man named Tom Philipps. The theme of the studio is "unterwasser" which means underwater. We spent the first week or two brainstorming about underwater technology and various areas of underwater interest including habitats, wildlife, exploration, preservation, observation, and pretty much anything involving the "deep blue". From there we each chose a direction and made mood boards and started sketching what we want to create. My proposed idea for the project is a communication device that works between wildlife and boats, more specifically to alert manatees when a boat is in their nearby proximity. Since manatees cannot hear the boat propellers underwater, I am investigating other forms of communication. While it is possible they can hear a noise on a different frequency, I am choosing to investigate using bursts or jets of cooler water to influence the direction the manatee is swimming and keep it away from the boats. The device will ideally have thermal vision that can alert the boat when a large animal mass is nearby as well allowing the boater to take extra precaution. I am not sure how this will work just yet, but my teacher seemed very intrigued by the idea of using water and/or temperature to influence the animals because previous attempts have been primarily using sound. So any advice and ideas are welcome!

My second course is a packaging design course taught by my favorite of the professors I have encountered, Frau Jagle (though I really like Mr. Philipps as well). Maybe I just like Frau Jagle because she thinks my wacky packaging attempts are quite beautiful and interesting. The intent of this class is to develop packaging for an egg using glorified copy paper. We have spent the first couple weeks constructing packaging in class and many different techniques have been tried by the class, from folding to weaving to crumpling the paper up and making a sort of nest for the egg. I am working on blossom like packaging that will hold a single egg. I have been looking a bit at origami and trying to learn more about folding and creating strong structures from paper. Though mainly it is just a free for all and sometimes I end up with something interesting and efficient at the end of class and other times I do not. In a few weeks we will test the packaging (I am not sure where we have to drop the egg from...hopefully not too far!). From there, we choose are best solution and create some sort of graphic detailing how the packaging is assembled and how it protects the egg. Though she does not want traditional boring graphics so I think we are allowed to really experiment with how we can communicate this. Then we are making a little process book including research, our attempts, our testing, and our final product with infographics. 

My third design course is called "halbfunf" which means "four-thirty" as in the time. This is a very difficult to follow course because it is basically a group of communication design students with maybe 4 industrial design students and we discuss the whole time...in German. The objective of the class is to invite speakers to our school and design all of the propaganda for their talks...so posters, fundraising, all kinds of good stuff. On the first day we were graced with someone offering to be our translator...he has since left the class. So our translator was replaced with another translator...who has also left the class. And I use the term "translator" loosely as they would only really give us a 3 minute description of everything that happened in 3 hours worth of class. So then we were without a translator and had no clue what was going on for a week. Then Jackie (another Buckeye in communication design) and I decided that it was stupid for us to sit there confused and we were just going to design something and see what they thought of it...and it went really well and we even earned ourselves a new translator! And we are most likely using our idea to promote the first speaker...who is the head of a fancy supermarket chain with really healthy and fresh foods...think Whole Foods at home. And we designed pinwheels which we are going to make really big and hang on the trees outside of our school. They were excited about this because the trees are being removed soon so it is one of the last times we will get to use them and they thought it would make a nice statement especially for a eco-friendly guest speaker. We were quite excited everyone liked our idea and told us that it was a perfect mix between industrial and communication design. And we earned ourselves a new translator because he liked our idea so well, so overall one night's work was quite successful for us! 

We also had a fundraiser for our halbfunf class last week. We made and sold soup at our school...well I carried tables, hung posters, and cut many loaves of very hard bread into little pieces. This was quite amusing because they gave me this bread to cut about 5 minutes before the event was to start. The bread was very hard and the knife was very dull...which resulted in me cutting at lightening speed and getting a giant blister on my hand from the not so ergonomic knife and then the blister popped and it was just awful! Then my forearm was super sore for the rest of the day....oy!

So, my fourth and final design class makes little to no sense at all to me. We each chose a topic based on a random discussion about helping tools. I told a story about how I was trying to eat a yogurt when mom was here but we didn't have any spoons. So we tore the foil cover off and folded it to use it as a spoon. My teacher loved this and we decided I should design some special yogurt or on the go food packaging that can work without utensils. My topic then morphed into mobile food in general and I have a slew of pictures of people I don't know eating assorted German fast food...we will see where this goes...

That's about all for now. I am headed to Paris on Thursday and Friday, and Amsterdam on Saturday and Sunday! A whirlwind weekend. I am going with Jenae who has already been to Paris so we may have to keep the touristy things to a minimum, but we will still see the Eiffel Tower and the Arch and the Louvre is free on Friday nights so I plan on doing that, and we might go to Versailles. I think maybe I will go back to the Louvre in December on a day trip (it is a 4 hour straight train) so I can explore a whole day there on my own. Then Jeff comes the next weekend and we are going to Brussels for 2 days and Madrid for Thanksgiving weekend and perhaps another daytrip to Amsterdam or Erfurt. After that it is only about 3 weeks until I head home!