Going Back to My Roots

A lot has happened since my last blog but I don't have a lot of time to write, which is a good thing! Lille has still been awesome and my classes are long but relatively interesting so thats good.

I'm about half way done with the final paper that is due at the end of the program and I chose to do why Americans are fat and French people are skinny. The research is about what I expected...French eat slower, therefore they eat less, they walk every where or take some other form of transportation other than driving, and a lot of them smoke which decreases appetite. However, as you must know, I am obsessed with working out/how to eat right so that is why I chose this topic. The French here do ride bikes a lot, I think everyone owns at least one, and there a lot of really cool biking trails just around Lille. Also, there are plenty of parks to go running around, and as you know from my previous blogs, they are beautiful.

Other than doing my thing in Lille, I have also been going to a few other cities and countries. I went to Douai and Lewarde which are both about an hour away from Lille. Douai didn't really have much in it and I'm not sure why we went, but we went to an old mining museum in Lewarde which was pretty cool. I also went to Ypres last Thursday and got see a lot of neat WWI stuff, Ypres, located in Belgium, was completely destroyed during WWI. There were no buildings, trees, or vegetation of any sort left as Ypres was the city that the Germans tried to pass through in order to invade France. Belgium was a neutral country during the war but the Germans made it hard for them to stay that way. Ypres was a medieval city and was beautiful. So after the war, they rebuilt it brick by brick to resemble exactly how it looked before the war. It really does look like a medieval town today even though the buildings were built in the 1920's.

On Friday I returned to my roots by going to Germany! I went with Morgan and Kristin. I left French class a little early on Friday and caught the 12:30 train to Brussels, changed trains, and headed to Cologne. Cologne is a beautiful city! The first thing we saw when we got off of the train was this huge cathedral! It is by far the biggest one I have seen in my entire life. The Germans call it the Dom (Cathedral, how original) and it is the largest Gothic churches in Northern Europe. It is also a World Heritage Site.

According to Wikipedia, the church is the seat of the Archbishop of Cologne, under the administration of the Roman Catholic Church and is renowned as a monument of Christianity, of Gothic architecture and of the faith and perseverance of the people of the city in which it stands. For four years, 1880-84, it was the tallest structure in the world, until the completion of the Washington Monument followed by the Eiffel Tower. It has the second-tallest church spires, only surpassed by the single spire of Ulm Cathedral, completed ten years later in 1890. Because of its enormous twin spires, it also presents the largest façade of any church in the world. The choir of Cologne Cathedral, measured between the piers, also holds the distinction of having the largest height to width ratio of any Medieval church, 3.6:1, exceeding even Beauvais Cathedral which has a slightly higher vault. ^[2] Construction of the Gothic church began in 1248 and took, with interruptions, until 1880 to complete – a period of over six hundred years. It is 144.5 metres^[3] long, 86.5 m wide and its two towers are 157 m tall.

As you can see, quite impressive. In all honesty, I had no idea it was there and I was stunned when I came out of the station.

My first adventure in Germany was attempting to find my hostel, Black Sheep Hostel. We came relatively unprepared with no map and no idea of where to go except for an address and some general directions if you took the metro...well my friend Morgan had just had her wallet stolen the day before and was very very low on cash so we decided to save a few euro and go on an adventure of trying to find our hostel by walking. The way we did this was by looking at the various but randomly located city maps that perused the city. It took us about 30-45 mintues but we found the hostel!! The actual walk is more like 25 mins so not bad for our first time. The hostel was brand new, only open a month, and very clean. We got situated there and then went out to explore the town!

The first night we decided to go to dinner then to go back to the cathedral and watch the sun set. For those of you who have never been to Europe, the sun doesn't set until about 8:30 or 9:00 so its pretty late. Or at least around this time of the year. We ended up eating at this restaurant that I can not pronounce but the menu was in half in German and half in English so thats why we chose it. I got an authentic German cuisine with sausages, sauerkraut, potatoes and baked egg as they called it. I also got the local beer, cheapest drink on the menu, for about 1.50 Euro and it was delicious! I didn't see anyone drink anything but beer in Germany, it was crazy. I enjoyed my dinner but I didn't finish the huge helping sauerkraut, it did taste good on my meat though. After dinner, we walked around this huge outdoor mall for a bit before finding a Hagen Daz (Sp), that's German right? The ice cream was delicious and we headed for the cathedral to catch the sunset. Unfortunately around this time, it started to get cloudy and we didn't see much of a sunset over the Rhine, but we did eat our ice cream outside of the cathedral which was beautiful in itself. After that, we did a little souvenir shopping, as those were the only shops still open, and headed back to our hostel.

We were exhausted from our day and wanted to sleep but that was not going to happen. Turkey won their soccer game and you would have though that we were in Turkey by the way the Germans were celebrating. It was so loud in the streets that it was nearly impossible to sleep. This went on for awhile and I finally had to result to putting in my head phones to drown out the sound. I wish I had been more awake so I could've joined the celebration, but this was definitely not the case.

The next morning we woke up and got ready by 10:30. We decided to go to the chocolate factory and take the tour. The walk there wasn't too long but now I had my book bag on and it was a little heavy. We got there around 11:00 and realized that it didn't open till 11:30. Luckily it was located on the Rhine so we were able to sit and look out over the water, it was beautiful! By the time it opened we went in to see how much it would cost...too much for our taste so we just glanced around and decided to find a cafe. We ate at this adorable place on the Rhine and got coffee and cake for 4.50 Euro. The men beside us were already drinking beer when the waiter brought out this long wooden plank with holes in it. There were about 13 holes, each had a beer it in...this was at 11:45 in the morning...4 men lots of beer. They had their ipod plugged into a radio thing and were jammin out to some ACDC.

After our petite dejuenr, we just walked around and asw more of the city before leaving. I would go into detail but this post is already way to long...basically we walked across the bridge to see more of the Rhine, went to the main square and saw people singing/people statues, saw a Roman museum and went into a few more shops! Overall, Germany was a lot of fun and I'm glad I was able to experience it!!