Saturday, March 2, 2013

Day Thirty-Six

This morning we rode a train to Essen with our professor. He took us to a coal mine/coal coking plant. We got a tour from a German man named Christian who spoke wonderful English. He showed us a lot of the machinery used for processing the coal and told us about what happens to the coal as it travels through the building. He also talked a lot about the building itself because he knew we were architecture students.

After the tour we got on a tram to go to central Essen. Our professor took us on a walking tour of different buildings. We went to a theater, but we weren't allowed to go inside and actually see it, we could only look in through the windows.

While waiting for a train back to Cologne we walked around the shopping district in Essen and Mae across a plaza that had a winter carnival type thing. They had snow tubing and ice skating as well as a temporary outdoor cafe and the whole area had a canopy of Christmas lights. It was pretty awesome.

When we got back to Cologne our professor lead us to a German restaurant he has been to a few times before. I had a plain schnitzel with some fries which was better than the schnitzel I had the night before. Some of the group went out to find something more to do after dinner, but I went back to the hostel with the rest of the group because I was pretty tired after such a large meal.

Ritter Sport stairs!

The entrance view of the coal mining/coking plant

Europe's tallest free-standing escalator

Really awesome stairs in the museum, they were meant to look like glowing, hot steel

The insides of old industrial boilers were renovated to be museum display spaces while leaving the boiler exteriors intact

Snow tubing in the middle of the city!

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