Bonn Part III - Saturday

Since we went to sleep so late the night before, we got up at 10am. We went to the grocery store and got milk, grapefruit, sausages, and bread. Fan's mom made cereal for her with granola and pine seeds. Fan added sesame and honey before adding milk. It was really good. I need to try this too. I’m learning a lot about cooking this summer. Hua-Chen and her friends like pasta so now I can prepare pasta without using pasta sauce.

After eating breakfast, we prepared some sandwiches and took them with us so we can picnic somewhere. Fan has a picnic mat. Very handy, need to get one of those too.

We walked to the bus station and took the bus to another part of the campus. The University of Bonn is very spread out. Academic buildings and dorms are all over the city. MIT has much more of a campus than they do. We went to the building that was on the postcard that Fan sent me a couple of years ago. There is a huge lawn in front of the building. Much bigger then Killian. Every first Saturday of the month, they have a bike sale.

We kept walking around the city and after a while we took the U-Bahn to the government district. Bonn was the capital of West Berlin. All the buildings now are UN buildings. Everything for German moved to Berlin after Reunification. There weren’t a lot of people there. Okay, there was practically no one there. There was, however, a cute ice cream shop build out logs. It looked just like those Lincoln log toy houses!

We went back to the U-Bahn station again to take the train to Bad Godesberg, a nearby village. The station connected to a museum and part of the museum was underground. We walked through that and saw a really old DB train that was once used by the first German chancellor. One of the good things about museums is that they always have bathrooms. And these bathrooms are usually outside of the exhibits and are free. This particular museum had a very nice bathroom.

We took the train to Bad Godesberg and walked around. We saw a fortress on a hill but realized that we were very hungry. So we walked to a nearby park, spread out the blanket, and started to eat our sandwiches. Bees and other insects attacked us but luckily they stopped once we finished. We had to trap one in our sandwich box. After eating, we relaxed on the grass. I think I fell asleep for a little while.

Fan saw a chess player that she knew and they talked for a while. I think she asked him if there’s anything to see around Bad Godesberg and Bonn and he said that they’re just villages and that we should go to Cologne to see the cathedral. But I had already been to the cathedral. We had planned to go to Cologne on Sunday anyway to visit a chocolate museum. This would be more convenient for me since the ICE to Berlin goes through Cologne.

We got back to the university building with the big lawn, found a nice spot, and ate a grapefruit. There were lots and lots of people playing soccer. There were also a couple of people in one corner juggling and a few people playing Frisbee but mostly soccer. When we sat down, a family next to us started their own soccer game. There were lots of little boys. Not all from the same family but they were all about 6-8 years old. They had a very good game going. I took a picture. Aren’t they cute? Fan and I talked about the various sports in Germany and US. This was when I realized that I hadn’t seen a single basketball hoop the whole time I’ve been here. Not a single one! Fan said that people usually go to the gym to play basketball.

Fan showed me some more academic buildings around the city and we stopped by the library for Fan to borrow a book. They don’t have to buy any textbooks. It works like Cambridge where the professor provides a long reading list. You can check out the books from the library, which has many copies of the books that you need. It’s great that they don’t have to buy any books. But Fan said that it makes it hard having all these books since you never know which one is useful.

We went back to the grocery store and looked for ice cream. They didn’t have much variety so we ended up getting chocolate pudding instead. Once we got back to Fan’s room, I showed her things about MIT on the internet. I showed her a map of the campus along with pictures of Stata and Simmons. She was very amazed at the architecture. I asked if she had facebook and she said that they have something similar for German students. When she showed me, it looked exactly the same except that it had a red theme instead of blue. They don’t have all these new applications that facebook now has but maybe they will get them soon? I showed her facebook and some pictures of my friends.

We saw people setting up for an outdoor concert in the courtyard of an academic building earlier. There is a nice lawn in front so we thought we can go back and listen outside. We weren’t the only ones trying to free load outside. We ended up sitting near the trash can and a portable toilet but it was a good concert. We cooked dinner after getting back. We ate some peaches after dinner and were too full to eat the chocolate pudding.

After I took a shower, I showed her pictures from my computer. Life at MIT, ESP, pictures of Yalu and of my family, yup. Tired from all the walking and wandering, we slept at around midnight.