Bochum, Köln, and Bonn

This weekend was the second of four class trips for the German Politics and Culture class. We started off on friday (as opposed to thursday like for Berlin, but still ridiculously early in the morning) and headed first to the small town of Bochum, where we toured a giant movable structure for a steel mill, which is now a concert venue for a nation wide arts fiestival. On of the most interesting plays that it hosted depicted the story of soldiers marching off to war, a fiance left at home, and a widdower. These three stories took place on three seperate stages in the giant hall, and seven times during the performance, the audiences seats would shift (silently and unnoticably) until they were in front of another stage. Also in Bochum we took yet another bus tour, and then went to the National German Steel Mine Museum. For this museum, you took an elevator down into a series of tunnels, where there were a ton of huge machines and various set-ups that would have been used in a steel mine. It was actually most impressive how the hell they got all of that huge machinery down there. I didn't really learn much about steel mining, but the mine shafts made for an excellent giant playground for college kids...
That evening we arrived in Köln and checked into our hotel. A couple of random notes about the hotel: the bar soap was bright orange and smelled like starbursts, they had an amazing breakfast selection, and a chair that was so comfortable that I almost fell asleep every time I sat in it, I didn't need to sit in it to fall asleep though, because that bed was probably the most comfortable bed i've slept in. ever. We then went to our welcome dinner, where we got to sample Gaffel Kölsch, one of the 24 varieties of the local beer, Kölsch, in Köln. The next morning we took a bus tour of the city and saw the roman ruins in the town, as well as where the famous and ridiculously expensive eau de cologne was first made. We then took a walking tour of the city which ended at the Kölner Dom, which at one point was the highest building in the world, after it's construction which (epically failed) only took 600 years to be built. After WWII, pretty much the entire city of Köln was leveled, with the exception of the Dom, which was relatively unharmed by some stroke of extreme luck. It was a beautiful day and at this point a couple of us decided to walk through the old town and down by the Rhine river. Later that afternoon we had a choice of two museums, and I chose the Roman museum, until I realised that I had already been to it, and then went to the Olympia museum, which was a short history of sports and the olympics, and was located directly next to the chocolate museum, which we visited next. At other meals in Köln i also sampled Gilden Kölsch, Reissdorf Kölsch, and Dom Kölsch (Dom was my favorite).
The next day we left Köln and headed to Bonn, which is a small city of 30,000 which used to be the capital of Western Germany and was the birthplace and hometown of Ludwig Van Beethoven...and that's about it. We had a guided tour through a german history museum, which was very good, mostly due to the fact that our tour guide was extremely funny. We then headed back towards Bremen, attemped to stop at the american embasy (McDonalds) but missed the turn and luckily found a Burger King to raid (as we were in the middle of nowhere at this point, and pretty hungry).