Second week in

It is only the end of the second week and it made me realize how much longer I will be here! We still have ~14 more weeks to go and I can't wait for all of the adventures that we will go on.

Last week we only had the random class in between the orientation classes and expeditions. This week started the first week of actual class days. We had many classes this week but history of medicine was particularly interesting. Dr. Wasser has been learning Qigong, a meditation style that is the basis of T'ai Chi, so he started out the class by teaching us a few of the posts and exercises. We also started our medical device design class where the project for the semester is to reverse engineer an electric toothbrush in solidworks. I don't know how much work that will entail but it seems very daunting at the moment!

This week our host mom had an unexpected work trip that she had to go on, so instead of leaving us at the house to "fend for ourselves," we were placed in another host home for the week. It was very odd to switch houses after only a week but Uve and Renate were very hospitable. We got to see a different way of German life living with them, as they were older and retired. The first night we were there, their daughter came over for dinner with her host son who just  happened to be Sebastian, one of the people in our program. They always made great food but insisted on us "leaving no leftovers," which meant we had to eat a lot of food😂.

This week we went on two trips, both to Cologne or Köln, one with the program and one a spontaneous personal trip. On Tuesday we went with the program and we got to see the Köln Dom, which is a massive cathedral, and got to climb up into one of its smaller towers and around outside on the roof which gave us a great view of the city. The second trip was on Saturday and we bought the train ticket that morning and went to Köln in the 1st class train on accident... Of course the "train police" would come through on that ride and I thought we were fine but he looked at our ticket and said something in German which we didn't understand. So I stumble out "Sprechen sie Englisch?" and he looks at us and then says while writing down on our ticket "RB, RE, no IC" and then just walks off probably thinking we were just stupid Americans but at least he didn't make us pay extra. Once we got to Köln, we went to the lock bridge and walked across looking at the thousands of locks stuffed along it. We also went to the Ludwig museum where we saw some very "thought-provoking" at as well as a few works by Picasso. And to top that all off, we went to the chocolate museum and got free chocolate and learned about the history of chocolate.

Overall I would say that it had been a pretty fun and productive week, filled with cold adventures and lots of studying (and homework...).