Biosciences Bonn: A Series of Unfortunate Events || February 9, 2018

Happy Friday! Or… not. The school week, even though it was a short one (no classes today!), has been especially stressful. After we landed from our flight from Budapest, we took a train from Düsseldorf to Köln, then from Köln back to Bonn. It wasn’t until I was at the bus stop in Bonn to head home that I realised I had left my purse on the last train. Needless to say, there was a very large amount of panic generated in a very short amount of time. The purse contained my passport, all of my cash, my debit card, house key, buss pass—what a mess! So I ran back to the station to see if the train was still there, which of course it was not, let out some tears, and headed back to try to catch the night bus (they only come once an hour after midnight). Ibk loaned me money for a ticket and when I returned home, I had to stay up to finish homework. Well, I tried to stay up, but I fell asleep really early on.

I told my host mom that I lost the house key the next morning, and she was very nice about it. It turns out one of her bags had been stolen on their way back from Vienna, so she sympathised. Next, I went to the train station to get some help filling out a lost item report with the train company, but they couldn’t help me so I left and talked to our program coordinator, Nick, at AIB. He submitted it for me and said he would call while I went to class. Later on, he came back with great news—my purse had been found by one of the workers at the end of the line! So now it is en route from Switzerland. I really hope it arrives soon, I have been living off of the 15 euro I had in my pocket (now down to 4) and the generosity of my friends since.

Tuesday was full of classes, homework, budgeting, and more stress--it was so bad that when Austen kindly gave me a bag of gummy worms out of the blue I just burst into tears. YIKES! Wednesday had a rocky start with the first test of the semester, but after classes, Izzie and I headed to Köln for a concert. It was fantastic—a great break from the week so far and quite possibly the best that I’ve ever been to, if we ignore the fiasco of our journey back to Bonn.

So why was it so great?

Here are some highlights:

Pre-concert grocery store run. I don’t know why I love going to the grocery store here, I guess it’s because there are so many foreign items that I find something interesting every time I go. For dinner, Izzie and I had sandwiches (I’ve noticed that the ham and cheese always have eggs too??), mini donuts, smoothies, and baby bell cheese. Yum!

The music (obviously). I'd never heard of the opener Coasts before but I really loved all of the songs they played, so I'm glad to have found a new band to listen to. The Hunna was as great as I'd expected, although the lead singer looked much different than I'd pictured.

Puns!

Lead singer: Oh, it looks like we're having some technical difficulties.

[Drummer asks the sound guy to turn something down a little.]

Lead singer: Oh, a lidl? There’s one of those just around the corner!

I think Izzie and I were the people that actually laughed, but we loved it because he was referring to the LIDL (grocery store) that we had gone to before the show.

The Hunna came out to meet fans after the show. While we were in the line the lead singer dropped a bag of greens from his pocket and just goes “Oh how did that get there?” — Also, it turns out they love Houston and they’ll be there in March if anyone wants to go!

We ran into Coasts as we were leaving. They were super duper sweet and saved us from a weird Texas-seeking drunk and/or high and/or homeless man with a giant wine bottle--"Okay, now run!"

Sadly, the fun was a bit short-lived because it took us about 5 hours to get back to Bonn afterward. We left the venue around midnight and since the subway lines weren't running as frequently as before, it took us until about one to get to Köln central station. And then once we got there, we found out that the next train to Bonn didn't come until 3:49. So we found a McDonalds (the rest of the station was absolutely freezing) and waited inside. I actually had a really nice time talking with Izzie, but at this point we both just wanted to be home and asleep. The McDonalds closed and kicked us out at 3:00, so we stood in the cold until we got on the train. At this point, I decided to check the bus schedule because I knew the night busses ran once an hour on the weekends but I had my suspicions that they didn't during the week. I was right. So when we got to Bonn at 4:15, we had another hour to wait until the morning busses began. I suppose we could've walked home in the time it took to wait, but it was really cold outside and both our phones were dead or very close to dying—I’d never had to walk home before, and since it's so far I didn't know the route on my own. We found that the McDonald's at Bonn Hbf is 24 hour so we went inside and waited in there. Shortly after we sat down, a lady came in and asked us for food money. She looked like she had been on drugs and I felt uneasy around her. We didn't give her any and honestly I thought she was going to attack us or something, so we moved seats to a more visible location. Later on she got some money from a kinder-than-us man outside—she looked so happy and immediately ran in to get food and a coffee, so I felt bad that we hadn't helped her. Although I didn't have any money to give, Izzie and I had some food in our pockets from the grocery store earlier, so we took them over to her table and she accepted them. I felt a lot better after that. We both caught our respective buses at 5:18 and I got home about 25 minutes later. Time to finish homework!! Just kidding. I tried working on it since it was due at 7:00 am (midnight in Texas), but I just couldn't pay attention to what I was doing, so I turned in the half I already had done and went to sleep. For about two hours. I had to be back at AIB at 9:30 that morning for the beginning of the Karnival celebrations, but more on that in my next post.

If all that wasn’t bad enough for you, now my laptop isn’t working! I spent hours this morning trying to reboot and fix it, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I won’t be able to do anything about it myself. Thankfully, the computer portion seems to be functioning just fine, the real problem is that the display no longer works. I now have it hooked up to a spare television in my host dad’s study--functional, but not ideal. Since this weekend is Karneval, I’m going to have to wait and try taking it to an Apple store in Köln on Tuesday, if we don’t have too many classes. Wish me luck!

Photo Dump: