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.
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| Ritter Sport stairs! |
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| The entrance view of the coal mining/coking plant |
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| Europe's tallest free-standing escalator |
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| Really awesome stairs in the museum, they were meant to look like glowing, hot steel |
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| The insides of old industrial boilers were renovated to be museum display spaces while leaving the boiler exteriors intact |
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| Snow tubing in the middle of the city! |
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