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Hi hello

I decided I should write this now on my days off before I forget about everything. Like always, I don’t exactly remember where I left off with the last blog, but I’ll just try to hit the important things.

Last Wednesday I had a BBQ with my flat mates as most of them, and I, are leaving right away for summer holidays.  It was pretty interesting with most people coming from all over the world.  But I had to call it a night quite early as I had my talk the next day. This talk was a review of the research leading up to this study, my methods/experiments, results and further research, which I think it ended up taking up around 45 minutes.  There were around 20 people there, mostly PhD and master’s students, but the department head also came to it, which added a little pressure.  I don’t know if was my jokes about Germany and Canada, or my actual presentation, but they seemed to really enjoy it. I was grateful that the head of the physiology department really seemed to enjoy it, and offered to help find me future opportunities if I ever decided to continue in this field of research.

Anyways, later on that night, I met up with my Canadian/German friend to celebrate Canada day. He had a party out at a lake he has on his property and it was the type of fun that reminds me of Canada.

On Saturday morning, I met up with some other students in the same internship program, RISE, as me and headed off to the city of Cologne. We left before nine o’clock in the morning, but after about an hour we had to switch trains. After we got on the train, the next stop was filled with tons of soccer fans that were going to Cologne to watch Germany to play Argentina (Germ won 4-0, even though they were favored to lose). This bus turned into a quiet normal ride into a full-blown party in under a minute. Meaning everybody was crushing beers, either wearing no shirt or a Germany jersey, people had portable boom boxes and playing drinking games or singing chants. It was pretty cool to see.

Skipping to what’s of interest, after we found a hostel, we went to the church known as the DOM, which I was told is the tallest Roman Catholic cathedral in the world and tallest twin tower façade in the world. It was amazing, it’s hard to comprehend that people made such large and detailed structures hundreds of years ago with essentially no machines. Anyways, we looked around inside, which was just as impressive and even had a little musky stone basement, where many crypts are housed (I think). A note on the side is that while most of Cologne was bombed to pieces during WWII, including the train station and bridge adjacent to the church, the church itself was almost untouched.

Later on, we went to a Lindt chocolate factory/museum, which was cool and pretty much what you would expect. And later on we went to a beer hall that serves beer very typical of this area.

That night, we were planning on going to a bar/disco, but ended up just hanging out and having some drinks on the steps of the square near the church. It seemed that this is what a lot of people do as it was full of young students just hanging out. Also they have a weird tradition here that during bachelor / bachelorette parties will usually last all day/night where they walk around a big city in matching costumes/shirts and the bride/groom to be will sell little toys or drinks.  So there were a handful of these groups there and it turned out to be a pretty fun place to hang out and meet people and watch the grooms/brides do their thing.

On Sunday I split up with the other two guys I went with for part of the day because we wanted to see different things. I went to a museum, which was the old Gestapo HQ and saw a lot of crazy things. The basement was maintained as the actual cells that held the Nazi prisoners and you could still see the scratches on the walls of the prisoners. It was surreal to see, and many of the cells which were built for up to 3 people ended up holding more then 20. They had a cell with a small room attached to it which would be used to psychological torture prisoners by leaving them in their for days with no light and barely any space. The adjacent room would be used for physical torture. There were plenty more very dark themed things I saw as well.

We also saw many portions of the original towers and walls of the city of Cologne. The one tower, which was preserved very well because most of its existence was spent enclosed by another building, was approximately made 50AD by the Romans.

Later on we saw a couple more very impressive churches and a sports museum then headed back to Giessen.

I took Monday off as well and did some errand as well as went wakeboarding at a local cable park. It was a pretty cool set up, but with the rental equipment I had, I wasn’t allowed to hit any of the sliders or jumps. But I managed to figure out how to do a back flip by itself… which was quite the learning process. I went with a guy from work that couldn’t wakeboard because he had just gotten a bunch of stitches, but he had a real nice camera and took a bunch of real cool pictures. Later on we went to a rock climbing facility that was huge! Let’s just say I have a newfound respect for rock climbers. My arms were a little bit tired from wakeboarding beforehand but I still was quite a process to climb to the top of the wall that was around 4 stories high! By the end of the day I couldn’t even come close to managing a pull up and my feet took a beating as I did it barefoot. After that, I thing I ate what must’ve been my 100^th Donair here. Due to the large Turkish population, it is never difficult to find a donair shop.

Anyways, tomorrow is Germany’s semi final game against Spain and my bosses defense. Then this weekend I will be in the (supposedly) beautiful Heidelberg for the RISE conference, and then I am planning on going to take a road trip with some people to EUROPARK, which is a theme park near the intersection of Germany, France and Switzerland. After that, we’re planning on picking up my girlfriend Sarah from the airport then heading to Paris for a night…. then I’m off to Rome!

I’ll try to find a day in there to blog so I don’t forget everything, but if not…. oh well

Tchuss!