Germany!

Hi there everybody!

I'm sitting in a hostel in Munich, Germany. That's München (mewn-chin) in German. I've been staying here with three of my friends from school for the past two nights. The hostel is very clean and has a great environment, so no worries in that department.

The past three days have been excellent. I wish I could post pictures, but the internet here in the hostel leaves something to be desired when it comes to speed, so I can't do that at the moment. For now I'll just give a day-by-day breakdown, I suppose.

24.August.2008
After a bit of spastic running around and last-minute packing, I finally got out of the house. My parents drove me to a small airport, and I boarded a plane to a larger airport, where I met up with my friend Brandon, and we flew together to...

25.August.2008
...Munich! With luggage in hand, we took a train to our hostel, where our friends Lyndon and Heath had also just arrived. We checked in, then walked around the city for the rest of the afternoon and night. Munich is lovely, with lots of beautiful architecture of different styles, all jumbled together. The four of us went to a beer garden, apparently famous, and had beer and wine, and felt like silly Americans, but it was loud and crowded and German there, and thus fun. We practically fell into bed, terrifically tired from the jet lag.

26.August.2008
Having gone to bed quite early, we awoke early and spent a good deal of time trying to procure Eurorail passes in the main train station in Munich. We finally spoke with a ticket-seller who was clearly American, and extremely sarcastic and helpful. She helped us book a train to Leipzig (lipe-zeeg) and back, and after grabbing a bite to eat, we got boarded the train for the four-hour ride to Leipzig. In Leipzig, we had an appointment for an English-speaking tour of the BMW central building and factory, and we had to take a tram and then wait a ludicrously long time for a bus to pick us up to get to the factory. We barely got there in time for our appointment. Our chipper tour guide took us around the beautiful central administration building, designed by Zaha Hadid, and into the body shop. It was so fantastic to see the way these cars come together, and I'm not even a BMW-freak, like Lyndon and Brandon. After the tour, we frantically boarded another bus, followed by another tram, to get back to the central train station. Leipzig is a very industrial city, with graffiti covering nearly every surface, but it does have some beautiful architecture. After the four hour train ride back to Munich, we all went to bed.

27.August.2008
Today we woke up late and went jaunting about the Olympic park here in Munich. It's made up mostly of swooping steel-and-plexi-glass tensile structures. It's generally very beautiful, and has held up remarkably well, considering it was built for the summer Olympics of 1972. We did an absurd amount of walking around the park, and took lots of pictures, which I'll hopefully post soon. After that we went to BMW World, a dealership/showroom/beautiful building, and then I loitered in the lobby of the BMW museum as the boys went on a 12-euro tour. Cars don't interest me quite that much, but I amused myself looking through books in the museum store and writing in my journal.

I have a bit more to write about today, but I've got to go for now.

Pictures will be up soon, hopefully!

--Rachel

I Can't Believe I'm Really Going

Hello, my name is Rachel. I'm a 20-year old American student of architecture.
Welcome to my account of my travels abroad.

Hopefully this blog will allow me to tell (and show) my friends and family what I'm doing, what I'm seeing, what I'm experiencing as I spend the next four months in Italy. Here goes nothing.

My study-abroad program is run by my school, a small private university in upstate New York. The program consists of 22 architecture students, in third and fourth years of study, and several professors. For reference, I'm a third-year, and it's a five-year program. Through school, the 22 of us are meeting up in Venice at the end of August, spending a week traveling throughout northern Italy, settling down for three weeks in Turin to participate in a seminar with students at the politecnico there, and then heading to Rome for about the next three months. At some point during the Rome stay, there's going to be a southern Italy tour in there. We've been given time before and after the program, as well as most weekends, during which we can travel to our hearts' content.

I'm starting out with three friends in Munich, Germany. We leave tomorrow. I don't speak a word of German. Well, that's a lie. I do know how to say "snail". My bags are nearly packed. This should be fun.