Recap on trips

Again, it's been a while! I just added a few more slideshows of my recent travels at the expense of your slow internet connection-- sorry in advance! So you should check them out :) Just a quick summary of my weekend trips:

Bonn

Bonn is a smaller, more industrial/commercial city just 30 minutes south of Cologne. Ordinarily, I don't think many tourists would choose to visit Bonn (over the other larger German cities), but I had a mandatory meeting to go to as part of some of the funding I received to travel over here (read: pay for my 7-day trans-Atlantic cruise). Basically my first day in Bonn consisted of hopping on the ICE and arriving at the hotel to sit through a 4-hour talk about the history of the organization/scholarship. Then I ended the day there with a tour of the Haus der Geschicte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (a museum on contemporary German history, starting circa WWII). The next day I went with the group to tour Henkel Technologies, a CPG company that makes some of the major value brands in the detergent, soap, and adhesive markets. The tour was very Engineering- and Life Science- focused, and I actually wasn't that interested in how to prevent mold growth in dish washing detergent. Plus, if you used P&G products (including Joy, Dawn and Ivory!), you wouldn't have to worry about that :) The actual walking tour of the Henkel campus in Dusseldorf, though, was pretty neat. We got to see their laundry test labs and go to the rooftop of one of their manufacturing facilities, where you could see the rest of the site and the neighboring Ikea. The best part of the tour, though, were the free Henkel products they handed out at the end:

The third and final day of the Bonn meeting consisted of a much-appreciated cruise down the Rhine River to Lindz, a really cute medieval town with amazing architecture. We even found a church on top of a hill that was older than the Kolner Dom

London

Although Mang-Git and I passed through London briefly on our way over to Germany from the QM2, we went back to do some proper sight-seeing and to visit some friends of mine who live in/outside of London (第5組是什麼？炸藥!). On the first day we were there, we met up for dinner (Peking duck, YUM!) and drinks :

We stayed the night at my friends' place in the city (Thanks Jing & Sandy!) and started the next day bright and early doing all the touristy things, like visiting Buckingham Palace, British Museum, London Eye, British Parliament, Big Ben, Wimbledon, Westminster Abbey, Platform 9 and 3/4 etc.

One of the hi-lights of the weekend, though, was that we were visiting London on American Independence Day. Not wanting to pass the opportunity up to be as obnoxious as possible, Mang-Git and I ran around the city asking locals to take our pictures in front of monuments while holding a massive American flag. Needless to say, the Brits were not amused:

I was disappointed to learn that Londoners are noticeably less friendly than the Germans. On several occasions, we witnessed locals going out of their way to be rude to the bus drivers and be completely unhelpful to out-of-towners. Everyone there seemed to be too occupied with their own agenda to give a crap about anyone else around them, which was the complete opposite of what you see in Cologne. To be honest, I'm actually not that big a fan of New York City, so I guess it's only natural for me not to like the European version of the Big Apple.

Berlin

I just got back from Berlin this past weekend, and in short, it's my favorite city that I've been to since coming to Europe. Not having to re-learn how to use the ticket machine at the subway stations, and being able to recognize some words on the menus when we went out to eat was definitely convenient. It also helped that the hostel that I booked (Menninger) was super nice and literally located next door to the Hauptbahnhof.

On Saturday morning, we checked out Brandenburger Platz and "took the U-Bahn to the East Side Gallery," purely because Mang-Git heard that sentence in a Bloc Party song. We saved the Gallery as our last stop before checking into the hostel because we figured escaping the 98 degree heat for an indoor gallery at 3pm would be a good idea. Turns out, though, that the "gallery" was really the east side of the Berlin Wall that was painted over by artists a few years ago. Even though it wasn't the oasis of air-conditioned exhibits as we expected, it was still pretty neat.

Sunday's temperature was expected to set a record high for the city of Berlin, not to mention the rest of Germany. We planned to escape the stifling heat by visiting the Bundestag in the morning, but at 8am there was already a small line forming at the door. After about 20 minutes, we were about to go through security, but realized that we wouldn't have enough time to walk around the Bundestag AND make it back to the hostel for 10am checkout. But what would really suck, is that if we left and go back in line after 10am, the wait would easily be 2-3 hours minimum. Left with no choice though, we left the line, at which point the Bundestag attendant pulled us aside and assured us that the wait wasn't that much longer. We explained our situation, and she was like "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that! Well if you come back before noon I'll still be here, so come find me and I'll let you guys cut to the front." Um, what?? Miss the opportunity of wasting half my day melting in direct sunlight into a little puddle of sweat? Yes, please! Hello, German hospitality :)

On the way home, we took the last train running west from Berlin, and it was absolutely packed with people heading home from their weekend trips. On the Bahn system, you have to pay a surcharge to reserve a seat, but Mang-Git and I decided to save some money and forgo the €2.50 charge since finding a seat on the train never was a problem for us before . That turned out to be a bad idea. We spent the first 30 minutes of the ride walking up and down cars looking for a place to sit. When we saw that several groups of people resorted to situating themselves on the floor between cars, we realized that seats wouldn't open up for quite a while. So we picked a car, piled our bags up at the end of an aisle and sat down to eat our doners until a seat opened up.

After getting slapped in the face a few times by passers-bys' duffel bags and having our toes trampled by several rolly suitcases, another passenger told us that there were seats in front of the train that were open, and that she was on her way to grab one. We were so confused, because having walked the entire length of the train just a few minutes before, we didn't see any open seats that would honor our 2nd class student rail tickets. Still, we followed her, past the stuffy 2nd class cabins, past the moms with screaming children in their arms, past the toilets that reeked of day-old urine, and finally arrived at the air-conditioned first class cabin behind glass sliding doors. The woman that we followed simply plopped her stuff on top of the luggage rack and took a seat next to the window, while we stood there, dumbfounded. Of course we knew the first class car had open seats, but we didn't buy first class tickets. All we had were our discount student tickets with no seat reservation. We didn't want to walk all the way back to where we were sitting before, so we decided to just sit and cool off for a bit until the conductor shooed us away.

We had barely put our bags under our seats, when one of the conductors asked to see our tickets. I handed my ticket to her nonchalantly, avoiding eye contact, thinking of how best to demonstrate that I was a confused American tourist. Just as I was stuffing my mouth full of doner again so I could prolong my stay in the AC for just a few more precious seconds before feigning ignorance, the conductor just handed my ticket back to me and moved onto the next passenger! We had generous leg room and were served packaged peanuts the rest of our 4 ours home :) So I guess apparently

1. she was either really nice, or
2. there's some secret policy where if there aren't chairs open in the 2nd class cars and you don't have a reserved seat, you are allowed to sit in first class....??

What? So we meet again, German hospitality! Love this country.