Dana's Deutsches Abenteuer: Final week of language camp (better late than never)!

Just over a month ago, I arrived in Germany and met my host family at the Düsseldorf Hauptbahnhof. The time has flown by so quickly, and it still feels like just yesterday that I arrived. Although I truly would love to do an update about my first couple weeks of school, I feel that it is necessary to first get this language camp post done that I've been putting off for way too long.
So, here goes'
The last week of language camp was memorable, fun, crazy, and absolutely amazing. On Tuesday August 25th, we took a class trip to Köln. This very well may have been my favorite day of camp! We divided into groups to walk all over the city and visit the famous (or not so famous) attractions of our choice. In the morning, my group and I walked around and solved some of the scavenger hunt questions that we had been given. Even though we didn't nearly finish the lengthy scavenger hunt, our efforts did prove successful the next day when we were awarded with a nice variety of kinder schokolade for answering the most questions correctly. The other groups didn't actually answer any of the questions, but I'll still consider it a fair win, haha!

Stopped for a theatrical pic during while we explored Köln.

For lunch that day we ate at a cute little Italian restaurant. The pizza was delicious, and actually reasonably priced. The sparkling water not so much. Let's just say that the water cost nearly half as much as the pizza. :P Aside from the food, Juliane and I had some quite memorable experiences at the restaurant. When we asked how big each pizza was, the waiter grabbed her hand and mine, and made giant semi-circle, saying that the pizzas were exactly that big...yeah right, they were actually pretty small. Right before we left, when we went to the bathroom (on the second floor), we noticed a door with frosted glass that obviously went outside. Curiosity got the best of us, and since there were no signs saying not to open it, we figured we'd see what was out there. It turned out that it went right out to the roof. Needless to say we didn't go outside. But honestly, what restaurant has an unlocked door directly from the bathroom to the roof? Pretty funny concept if you ask me!

Escape route??

In the afternoon, we headed back towards the Rhine in pursuit of the Imhoff Schokoladen Museum. I was kind of skeptical about what could possibly be in a chocolate museum (I had envisioned something along the lines of many bars of chocolate lined up on display shelves), but it turned out to be super interesting! We got to see the whole process of how chocolate is made, and also learned about how cocoa beans are grown. The whole thing definitely made me want to eat more yummy German chocolate. Luckily they did have a couple of samples to satisfy that craving...temporarily.

Qualitätssicherung: Quality assurance

Chocolate heading down the line for packaging.

In front of the chocolate museum!

For me, climbing the 509 steps of the Kölner Dom with Alida and Jonathan was the highlight of the day. I haven't been in many tall buildings in my life, but in my opinion, the view from the Dom was unbeatable. Luckily since we were there during the week, it wasn't even super busy. Believe me, meeting a large group coming down the narrow staircase while you're heading up is definitely not something you want to happen every 30 seconds. :P

View of the Rhine from the Dom!

The next day, Wednesday, my class walked around Düsseldorf for a couple of hours to gather information and photos to create our own wikipedia-style entry about the city. We visited the Rathaus (city hall) in the Alt Stadt, as well as the beautiful Königsallee. While waiting for a couple of people from our group to go photograph something, Alida and I got distracted by a big, orange sign down the street a bit that said "Saturn". We started guessing what it could be, and came up with a variety of possibilities ranging from a fitness club to a tv/computer store. Of course we just had to find out what it was, so we ran down the sidewalk with a couple of our other friends to check it out. Turned out it was electronics, so tv/computer was definitely on the right track! This excursion lead to us getting side tracked by a Lindt chocolate shop, which included some samples (shoutout to the nice lady working there for giving us extras). We wound up finding the clearance shelf and all bought some yummy discount chocolate. So...another successful day was had by all.

Königsallee

Düsseldorf Rathaus

Friday was our last day of camp. For this occasion, we were invited to tour the Landtag (parliament) of Nordrhein-Westfalen. We ate a small breakfast there, got to ride in a very cool doughnut shaped glass elevator, and saw the main chamber where the parliamentary sessions are held.

Entering the Landtag.

The walk across the bridge back to the youth hostel was a bit of a sad one, because we all knew that it would be the last time we'd walk across that bridge together. For some of us, Düsseldorf isn't far away, but several people from camp moved to their permanent host families and are now living in other parts of the country. Once we got back, we ate lunch in the youth hostel and then showed our German product advertisements that we had made to the rest of the group. I believe that Alida's and my ad for Kinder Bueno Schokolade was quite effective. We said our "see you laters" (definitely not goodbyes) to some of our friends in the main lobby, and everyone started thinking ahead to the next time that we'll all see each other...in February in Weimar. To celebrate a successful completion of language camp, Alida, Jonathan and I went across the street to the gelato shop and each got a final scoop of gelato.

Gelato!

Then we headed off of the train to Alida's to go on a bike ride that she had been telling us of for quite some time. It was definitely all that I had hoped for...although the hilly up and down stuff did come as quite a surprise (where I live here it's basically all flat). Favorite part? Definitely using my gorilla pod and the timer on my camera to take some cool pics and videos (see youtube video) of us biking (very carefully) down a hill. :)

That evening Alida's host family was nice enough to have a little going away bbq for her (since she was going to be moving to her permanent host family the next day). After the bike ride, we needed to pick up a few things at the store for dinner. A few of our other language camp friends were already waiting at the train station, So Alida had to go pick them up. That left me and Jonathan alone in a German town we had never been in before, to find our way back to her house with the groceries. We were quite confident that we could make it, until we realized that every street looked practically the same and we had not the slightest clue where to go. Thanks to whatsapp calling, we quickly got directions from Alida, so that problem was solved. But, another challenge was on horizon. We had four one liter bottles of soda, two bags of chips, and a long french baguette, and the only thing we had to carry those in was my not-that-big backpack. So, we ended up fitting in the sodas and baguette, but every time we started to ride, the zipper would open and stuff would start to fall out. So, thanks to Jonathan's amazing ingenuity, and my habit of collecting souvenirs on my backpack, we were able to use some of my many keychains hanging from the zipper pulls to secure the zipper in a closed position. We did make it back, and only 15 minutes after everyone else got there. Not bad, if I do say so myself! At 8 pm, we all left Alida's and headed back to the train station. Saying "bis später" to Alida at the station, and everyone else once we got to Düsseldorf hbf was way harder than I though it'd be. I never truly believed that it was possible that over the course of 3 weeks I'd become so close to a group of people I'd never met before that. I was proved wrong.

Also, I'm an official youtuber now! Check out my two videos that I've made, below!