Museums Galore in Germany

                                               Frankfurt Opera House

Sorry in advance if this blog is kind of long. I'm going to try to keep it short because I still have a lot of college work to do, but a lot has happened since my last post. I arrived in France last night, and although Germany was amazing, I was happy to get back to the mild winter weather in Privas. (Although Anne just told me we were supposed to get snow soon.)

On Monday evening, I went to a Rotary dinner in Weilburg. One of the German correspondents was a Rotary exchange student last year, and she invited me to come to the dinner. The German Rotary club was pretty similar to the one in Privas; the main difference being the types of drinks at the table. In the French Rotary, the table is filled with an endless array of French wine, but of course in Germany, every Rotary member sat down to a foot-tall glass of authentic German beer. If you ever need to tell the difference between countries' Rotary clubs for some strange reason, just glance at the drinks on the table, and I guarantee you will guess correctly.

Tuesday was an excursion to Frankfurt. It wasn't the prettiest looking city, and I was absolutely freezing whole day, but I still had a good time. I spent all day with two other French students, and we toured the city, went to a museum of modern art, ate at Starbucks, and I finished all my Christmas shopping. The museum of modern art was disturbing and gross and I didn't like it at all. There was this one terrible exhibit which everyone thought was so cool. They basically had a screen showing an live elephant being tortured in a small, completely white room. I think the artist wanted to show the movement of the animal, but from what I understood, the tour guide said that the artist couldn't film the elephant in its natural habitat, so they put it in this studio for for I don't know how long, and had cameras filming in every different angle. It was absolutely disgusting and I was relieved when we were finally able to leave. Maybe it's just me, but I don't see art in something like that.

 On Wednesday, we went to a mathematics museum in Gießen and it was much better than the art museum in Frankfurt. I thought a math museum would be pretty boring, but it was pretty much all hands-on activities, optical illusions, and photo-ops. As you can see, I took advantage of all the photo-ops:

Thursday was my last day in Germany, and I spent the day in Bonn, a city which used to be the capital of Germany. I liked Bonn a lot more than Frankfurt, and for the first time all week, there was a break in the rain. Our first stop was the Haribo candy store. (The Haribo company started in Bonn.) I kind of went overboard with all my purchases, but I was too excited and I hadn't really been thinking at the time. Besides that, the only other cool thing I got to see there was Beethoven's house. I didn't actually take a tour of the house because I had spent all morning boosting Haribo up to position one in the stock market, but I decided to eat my lunch in his doorway just to get the most out of my visit.

 I was in a melancholic mood by the time we left the next morning. I had a wonderful host family in Germany, and I wasn't looking forward to the 12 hour bus trip back to Privas. In addition, I decided to listen to Christmas music on my iPod, which made me cry a little because I was thinking of my family back at home in America. Although, I guess I kind of brought that one upon myself. Things are better now that I'm back and well adjusted in Privas, and I'm overly happy that it is officially winter vacation!