Monday, May 23, 2016

Day 12- Thursday, May 19th

        Now that we successfully completed our projects, the rest of our time was all tourist attractions. With only two days left, I really wanted to appreciate the time we had left with making the best of every moment. We took the tram to the train station downtown in order to catch the ICE train to Ulm which was about a 55-minute train ride. I was excited to see a new city and at the same time curious to see what it would be like since every city we have seen has been different from the rest.
            Once we got to Ulm it was raining a little bit but it wasn’t too bad, and it was pretty quite as well. We got to the city center, and what do we notice the tallest church in world. It was beautiful, and then we realized that in a few hours we would have to be climbing up 768 steps to get to the top… 768 steps. We had a few hours to keep that in the back of our minds as we took a tour of the city. We started with going into the church and learning about the history, the part I thought was the coolest was that it was built from the east to west in the order that the sun rises and sets. This part became a little dry as it was dragged on for a while. The rest of the tour was truly amazing with how beautiful this city really was even in the rain. I think architectural wise this was my favorite city out of all the ones we visited.  I think the houses on the rivers were amazing and this is exactly what I pictured a perfect city in Germany to look like. We ended our tour where we were going to eat lunch which was at a restaurant known for its German pancakes. When I heard this I got so excited, my grandma always made German pancakes for us and then in grade school my dad would make them in the morning for us before school. We usually ate them with jam or butter but this time it was a little different. The menu was filled with various filled pancakes from sweet pancakes with ice-cream and bananas to pancakes filled with pork and eggs. Every option looked so good and wish I could’ve tried all of them. I was stuffed after lunch and knew the climb was coming but luckily we had a free time to go around and explore. We went to a few stores and looked around as well as went to a coffee shop and hung out and talked. Then I stopped by H&M to do some shopping as well as a few other stores, and then we made our way back to the city center. Now it was time to climb… I was a little anxious... nobody knew what to expect, basically the whole time we walked up a small tight spiral stair case, just going in circles. Even though it was draining, I didn’t really have any problems getting up besides it was a little tight at some points. It took everyone different lengths of time to get up, but there were a few balconies to stop at for some air and to walk around a little bit. Once you got to the last balcony, there was one even smaller staircase for both people going up and down from the top, this is when everything got jammed pack and there was a back-up of people. Once at the top it was so cool, you could see the entire city and and luckily it wasn’t raining and was pretty clear (pictures below). As I went back down, going down was actually harder for me then going up. Once I reached the bottom I was a little shaky and I really enjoyed it and would do it again. 
            We then went to catch our train to find out it was delayed, which was fine with me because got another hour to go out and shop and explore again! Another crazy thing is in some places you have to pay for bathrooms which is kind of crazy to think about. We finally got the train back to Augsburg, and everybody was knocked out on that bus after all of those steps.

            We then made it to the Ratskeller, which is the restaurant underneath the town hall to have a final goodbye dinner, since tomorrow was our free day. Everyone from the trip including students, professors and chaperones all gathered for one last horary. At this time, we exchanged small gifts with our presentation groups and it was a little emotional, because we have become so close with them and everyone was truly going to miss each other. All of the Pitt students gave the Germans, Pitt t-shirts and they all put them on during dinner and were so appreciative and loved them so much. Once we got back even though we were tired we only have 2 nights left in Germany, so we went and hung out with the German students downtown.









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