Tales of the Autobahn

Sorry, short post today! I spent most of the day either asleep or on the Autobahn.  But that doesn't mean nothing happened.

So we got to sleep late today!  Which meant that I got a full 8 hours of sleep for the first time in.... five days.  I'm so happy!  We ate breakfast, piled into the bus, said some sad farewells to Bjorn, and hit the road jack and we wont be coming back no more no more.

So, we drove north, passing Cologne, Düsseldorf, Münster, and a billion windmills on our way to Bremen.  Sadly, the land got less pretty and hilly as we went north.  We stopped halfway, around noon or so, at a German rest stop.  These aren't much like US rest stops, see, because while US ones have a bunch of bathrooms and maybe a vending machine, typically, German rest stops sell gas, food, souvenirs, and have TERRIFYING BATHROOMS.

I might bring this up again later, but you have to pay to use the bathroom here.  Just fifty cents, usually, and this is basically to pay the staff to keep it clean.  The result is the staff are usually a bit nicer, and the bathrooms are clean and everything's stocked and whatnot.  Except, this one had those scary toilets that clean the seats after you use them automatically, have dual flush technology... not quite Japanese standards but still more high tech than your usual toilet.

We got back on the bus and kept going north with the promise of a lunch-dinner after we arrive in Bremen.  I spent the remainder of the drive playing the license plate game, where I counted how many different countries were represented on that stretch of road.  Germany, Luxembourg, France, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Switzerland and Norway I do believe.

Then we arrived in Bremen.  We're staying in a hotel by the airport, and it's one of those old fashioned hotels where you only get one key and have to turn it in whenever you leave the building.  one of those old clunky keys, not a card.  It's great, except that I have to invariably let my roommate in after a late night of drinking since we only have one key.  I suppose I can just leave the door cracked, but still.

After we received the briefing from the school people and got passes for the tram and bus system, we hopped on a train and rode downtown.  Might I just say, Bremen is not a very big city.  It used to be extremely wealthy back in, oh, the 1600's, but it didn't just BOOM like Hamburg did, just northeast of here. You know, lets plop a map on here.  Bremen is pretty far north, right between the Netherlands and Denmark.

We walked a ways, and stopped at a Biergarten where I ordered me some Wiener Schnitzel, knowing that I haven't had any yet and I was stupid hungry at this point.  It was like four o'clock, I was cranky, I was hungry, and I wanted to try some veal by gum.  But I got chicken schnitzel, which tasted like just fried chicken.  Yum...?  It was good but not quite what I had my tasters set for.  Sadly.

Welp, after lunner (lunch+dinner=lunner) most the group sprinted off in the direction of the nearest bar (we were in a biergarten, why they didn't just stay there is beyond me...?) while I and another girl decided to stick with our professor and see the square of the city.

Bremen is known for two things.  The first is the river, which is called the Weser,  and second is the Brementown Musicians.  They're everywhere.  Every restaurant or hotel or anything has the musicians on them, but also the symbol of Bremen, which is a key.  That's because Bremen is it's own "state" in Germany, like Hamburg and Berlin.  That's a big deal, because Bremen has to be wealthy enough to be its own state, so they like to just plop the key everywhere.

Now I'm back in the hotel.  Gotta get up early tomorrow, so I need my sleep!  Auf Wiedersehen!