This week classes really kicked off. We had Diff. Eq. over zoom for the first time. On Thursday the professor forgot to start the zoom meeting which meant that the four of us just spent the class period doing homework. I'm still not following most of what is going on in signals and systems but otherwise classes are interesting. I have to take a solidworks course for BMEN 253 which shouldn't be difficult just time consuming. On the other hand, knowing solidworks is bound to come in useful in the future. We were organized into our project groups but haven't done any work yet.
On Wednesday we went to Cologne and saw the cathedral. It's the second tallest in the world, Notre Dame being the first. It took 600 years to build. Frankly, I think there are better things people could do with their time and money but the resulting architecture is very impressive. The thing that always amazes me about these structures is that they were built centuries before Newton. They say that engineering is applied physics but engineers were doing pretty amazing work while physicists knew virtually nothing. Admittedly at that time most of the architects and engineers were probably physicists as well. Interestingly, while most of Cologne was destroyed by the Allies during World War II, the cathedral and bridge directly in front of it were not. Pilots used the towers as navigation points so couldn't risk bringing them down by dropping bombs on them. The bridge in question now carries trains into the main station and was destroyed by the germans to slow the Allies' advance.
Outside the cathedral we met our tour guide who showed us around Cologne and taught us about the history of the city. Later at lunch I had schnitzel for the first time. Basically it's chicken fried pork. I was not a fan. After that we went to the El De Haus; this is an old Gestapo prison. We learned about the history of the gestapo in Cologne from the 1930s to the end of WWII. We went to the basement to see the cells. Inside there are messages on the walls left by the prisoners. Some of the stories of survivors are surreal to think about.
Thursday and Friday meant classes as usual. On Friday evening nine of us at met at the station to head to Switzerland. I had bought tickets in advance but somehow managed to book them for the wrong days. So a hundred and fifty euros later I had a new set of tickets to Interlaken. We took a train to Basel and arrived at about 2:30am. Then we had to sit in a freezing waiting room for a couple of hours until our train to Interlaken. I didn't get much sleep that night. We arrived in Interlaken at 7:00am and went to the coffee shop across the street from the station. The weather there was, in a word, bracing. It was about negative five celsius and with a nice breeze to boot. I had a cup of coffee and then went back to the station to get the train to Lauterbrunnen. My plan was to take a series of cable cars up to the summit of the Schilthorn. I took the first cable car to Grütschalp then a train to Mürren. Mürren is a collection of chalets, restaurants and rental shops. There I found the finish line of a downhill race called the Inferno. It starts at the summit and goes right down to the bottom. Apparently its an annual event and anyone can participate. This year about 1800 people raced. I've added it to my bucket list. I took a second cable car to the Birg. It was still below the clouds so the views were spectacular. My phone did not appreciate the sub-freezing weather and the battery dropped to 5% in about ten minutes. That didn't matter much because it was so cold I couldn't take my gloves off to use my phone. The last cable car took me to the summit where it was negative twelve degrees before wind chill. Unfortunately I couldn't see much as the top was in the clouds. I wandered around for a while then took the cable cars back to Mürren. I decided to walk to Grütschalp instead of the train and then headed back to Interlaken. Once there I found the others and we made pasta and chicken for dinner. The next day Matt, Elizabeth, Errin and I built a snowman and explored the town until our train back to Cologne. We made it back to Bonn a little after ten and that was the end of the week.
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