Alex is abroad in Munich, Germany, until August 2009.

One of the more exciting aspects of my situation in Germany is a grant that I received from the German government.  Although the application process was rather grueling, it has paid off, quite literally, because each month I have a set amount of money deposited into my German bank account to use for life expenses here.  It’s called the Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst, DAAD, and this past week they held a conference for all of the scholarship holders in Bonn.  Thursday through Saturday I spent time fraternizing with my fellow scholarship holders and then made my way to Cologne for a short day trip.

The two other people from my program who also received this grant, Chris and Sybil, and I took an early morning train to Bonn on Thursday.  It was a surprisingly beautiful ride because around Bonn the train began running directly along the Rhein, which was picturesque in the mid morning sunlight.  All of the hills were various shades of red and golden brown from the fall leaves, and tucked away on the top of every other one was a small castle.  Once we got off of the train it wasn’t hard to spot the other students making their way to our hostel (somehow you develop this radar for English speakers when in a foreign country long enough).   A group of about 15 of us managed to find the bus station and make it to our hostel just in time.

The conference was short and mainly consisted of a few small presentations about what other opportunities the DAAD has to offer, which made graduate school in Germany sound like a tangible possibility for my future.  But that is, honestly, just because I am lacking direction right now.  Schooling in Germany is very different from that in the United States: most people get graduate degrees or PhDs before even attempting to enter the work force.  Also their tuition is usually only about 500 Euros per semester, which is roughly $49,000 cheaper than NU.  The presentations highlighted what an outstanding job the German government does of promoting study in Germany, which is possible because they have an extensive budget reserved exclusively for sponsoring academia.

In the late afternoon they took the whole group on a tour of the German history museum in Bonn, and then on an informal walking tour of the city.  We ended up on a Chinese boat-restaurant on the Rhein, where they bought us all dinner and drinks.  I really enjoyed meeting the other scholarship holders, especially the others that are in Munich.  Plus, now I have about six other cities in Germany where I can bum a bed for a night or two, which is never a bad thing.  I also ran into a PhD student from St. Louis (my hometown).  I had forgotten how nice it is to talk to someone who is familiar with your home when you are so far away from it. We excitedly chatted on the deck of the boat for over an hour about the joys of St. Louis.  In true German fashion, the meal lasted so late into the night that we were only able to sneak in about one hour at a nearby bar before the whole city shut down, and we had to call it a night.

The second day we had breakfast and a few more presentations in the morning, then a quick lunch and the conference came to a close at about two in the afternoon.  Sybil headed off to visit a friend and Chris and I decided to explore Bonn for a while.  It is a traditional little European city, complete with a large pedestrian zone in the center of town and cobblestone streets.  We took a quick tour of Beethoven’s house, where we got to see some of his original instruments and scribbles which eventually turned into symphonies.  By about four we were ready to head to Cologne (Köln in German), a much larger city which is only a 30-minute train ride away.  We paid six Euros to a ticket machine and caught the next train to Cologne.  The ease of travel is one of my favorite things about Europe.

Our train back to Munich was leaving the Cologne station around midnight, so we had a fair amount of time to wander around the city, which is exactly what we did.  When I am in a new city, I would much rather walk around in an unspecified path and see what I stumble upon than try to cram in as much sight seeing as possible.  It was a beautiful and relatively warm day and we explored the city center until dinnertime.  Cologne is an interesting place because it was nearly destroyed in WWII, making it a strange mix of new and old.  All of the shops are new and some of the shopping streets are reminiscent of New York, with thousands of people packed into narrow sidewalks.  But all of the churches are incredibly old and in some places you can see where the wall had been burned. They never covered it up.  Plus, every now and then you stumble across old cobble stone plazas and pieces of old buildings that have been left standing and built around.  One minute we were walking through a packed street lined with H&Ms, the next we were in an empty church, and the next we were sitting at a sidewalk café watching an old German man paint a picture of the view.

We spent the remainder of our day eating dinner and then hanging out in a local bar.  We weren’t completely sure when our train left, but we thought it left after midnight, so we departed from the bar at about 11:15p.m.  We made a stop in McDonald’s to use the universally free bathrooms (you have to pay for them most of the time in train stations) and, of course, pick up some chicken nuggets.  We strolled into the train station at 11:40p.m. and I looked up to see that there was a train leaving for Munich at 11:46p.m.  Chris reassured me that it couldn’t possibly be our train, but we rushed a little anyway on our way to get our bags out of a storage container.  After the painstakingly slow machine gave us our backpacks, I whipped out the ticket only to see that the 11:46p.m. train was indeed ours. Yikes! We bolted through the train station to our track, naturally the farthest away, and up an escalator to find our train.  There were no conductors in sight. We tried to open every door we could get our hands on, only to find every single one locked.  The train pulled away as Chris yelled, “No!” and two (cruel) pre-teen girls with their heads out the window laughed and waved pitifully at us.

As we walked dejectedly down the stairs towards a service counter, Chris made the comment, “Well now we have a story to tell our grandchildren.” True, but I didn’t think the Deutsche Bahn (German Railway) official would see it the same way.  Still out of breath, we walked up to the counter and told the man we needed to get on the next train to Munich and handed him our now crumpled ticket.  “Well not with this ticket,” he responded and asked  “Why did you miss your train?” I thought fast and explained that the storage machine had taken too long to give us our backpacks and that no one let us on the train even though we were on the platform (really it was probably the nuggets that did us in).  He eyed us suspiciously, picked up his stamp, looked around, stamped our ticket and told us to use it to get a train on track seven which would connect to our original train two towns later.  We thanked him profusely, shook his hand and raced down the station to track seven.

From there the train ride was uneventful and we arrived back in Munich at seven in the morning.  I spent the rest of the day sleeping and preparing for the start of classes on Monday.

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