this morning for breakfast, stefanie and lars prepared a cornucopia of foods for our delight. the occasion was the arrival of three texas a&m, college of architecture professors to see how the program here in germany was running. the delegation included: elton abbot (now head of the college’s study abroad system), charles graham (associate dean of student affairs), and tim mclaughlin (new department head of the viz program). it was actually pretty odd to see a&m professors here in düsseldorf. they were in good spirits, as were we, and talked about how much we were enjoying our time here, what our future plans were, and how studying abroad can and will affect our professional future in the design world.  

later, i discovered a barnes & noble equivalent bookstore! after drooling a bit from not stepping foot in such a place in quite sometime, i collected myself and found the last copy of a book i had started reading during my stay with the ottings in brussels. it’s called: merde, actually by stephen clarke. its a french satire in a british perspective (obviously written in english) and is pretty hilarious. i finally have something to do on my commute everyday. 

“do you speak english?”

our long-awaited and postponed scavenger hunt through düsseldorf took up the entire afternoon today. it was a blast. rachel, geoff, and it were “team awesome” and were able to find about 98% of the requested items. they included but are not limited to: find the height and construction date of the rheinturm (the tower shown above), what is killipitsch, collect tons of shopping bags from the kö (we got 14 bags – from louis vuitton, gucci, chanel…), take a picture of a pond and with a random person (see below), year fortuna düsseldorf was founded, etc. we knew were to find most all of the items on the list, but for those we didn’t, there was a guy on the bus who obviously saw that we were americans (we were perusing over a huge city map, and talking like we didn’t know where we were – strategy right!?) and helped us out.

look, we’re from texas! bang, bang!

my new best friend

we also played in a park for a while. the daffodil’s were blooming like mad and we took some kitsch, high school glamor shots of us posing in them.

kittcha! => success.

aachen.

for our day excursion tuesday, we took an hour train to aachen, a german city southwest of düsseldorf and near the borders of the netherlands and belgium. the city boasted their fresh hot springs, used in many fountains, for physical theraphy, and for drinking – that is if you like sulfur water. we did not take part.

rachel, geoff, and kyle dumbfounded by the size of the cinnamon roll

after a walking city tour, we toured the famous cathedral and reliquary. it is the burial ground of the famous, charlemagne (flemish born and ruler of france and the holy roman empire in the late 700s and early 800s a.d.). it was therefore a very old building and architecturally different from cathedrals we have visited thus far.

one of the most famous reliquaries was a sort of gold chest that held 4 items: the swaddling clothes of jesus at his birth, mary’s cloak, jesus’s swaddling clothes, st. john the baptist’s beheading cloth and jesus’ crucifixion loincloth. an interesting collection indeed.

afterwards, we ate lunch at the RWTH university there, toured their architecture school (with a brand new modern building just for student studio work spaces) and saw some graduate level project presentations.

good news: the first signs of spring and warmer weather are here!