Submitted by Andrew Boyd on the 2016 winter session program in Germany sponsored by the Department of Materials Science and Engineering…
I’m sure many of you have been waiting for another blog post to update you on what we’ve been doing over here and why we’ve had so little time to talk to our parents (hope that’s not just me). It’s difficult to find a place to begin to describe this past very long weekend. I’ve without a doubt never been as productive in a 5 day period as I was for this excursion to France and Switzerland, and I think that pretty much everyone else would agree. Two countries, five days, two buses, about ten train rides, countless metro rides and countless incredible sights seen…I’ll have to leave some of it for other people to describe because there’s no way I can do it all on my own.
It started off pretty rocky when we learned the night before leaving that the train we had booked to take us to Paris was experiencing a workers’ strike and wouldn’t be able to take us. As usual, it was Ismat to the rescue and we were able to scramble and find a way there anyway. A quick stop in Cologne (I think), a ride on a very nice bus that we had all to ourselves from there to Brussels and finally one more long train ride to Paris and voila, we were there! It took us about an hour after arriving for us to make a beeline for the Eiffel Tower and go up it to see the beauty of Paris by night. It’s really impossible to imagine such a beautiful sight without being there firsthand and we made sure to take plenty of pictures.
The next day, we got up early and headed off to see more of the sights. Over 12 hours and 10 miles of walking later, we had seen Notre Dame, the Church of St. Sulpice among other beautiful churches, taken a boat ride on the Seine River, seen some of the Louvre and countless palaces, walked the Tuilerie Gardens and made our way up the Champs Elysees to finally climb the Arc de Triumph and see what I would consider probably the best view of my life. It got a little freaky when there was a security threat and guys with machine guns hurried us back down after a few minutes (Don’t worry, it turned out to be nothing. They were just looking out for us).
We spent the next day in Normandy being driven around on a shuttle (shout out to Guillaume) and being shown the sights, while receiving narration from our own personal French tour guide. The beaches of D-Day and the massive graveyards were awe-inspiring and a very solemn, humbling sight to see. Definitely something, I will never forget. That night, upon returning to Paris, we had an incredible dinner of fondue and some of us proceeded to check out the Parisian night-life afterwards which was definitely worth being tired the next morning.
Finally, on Sunday, we headed out to Geneva, Switzerland and after checking into our youth hostel, had a nice day meandering around scenic Old Geneva and the huge lake in the city center (which was still beautiful even though it there was torrential rain all day). On our last day, before finally returning to Bochum, we made a pit-stop at CERN and got the low down on all of the groundbreaking research on particle physics being conducted there. Unfortunately, since most of it is deep underground, we weren’t able to get a look at too much, but it was an incredible place to visit nonetheless.
After everything was said and done, we hopped on another train and after a few transfers, finally made it back to Bochum which was welcome to many of us after such a fast paced weekend. If only I hadn’t left my duffle bag on the last train when we finally got off at the Bochum Hauptbahnhof, it would have been a perfect excursion through and through 🙂 (I can joke about it now because I was able to get it back today by the grace of God and a short trip to Dortmund and back. Thanks to Ismat for being so understanding!!).
In summary, this is truly a weekend, I’ll never forget. I learned that Paris is as insane as it’s cracked out to be, French, Ethiopian and Indian food is all fantastic (including escargot and frog legs), Geneva is super expensive and my study abroad group is a pretty awesome group of people. Thanks again to Ismat for dealing with our antics and for never failing to keep track of us and get us where we’re going (and also for all of the delicious food!!). I’ll leave some further details for the next blogger, but I hope you enjoyed what I had to say!