One Month In Germany

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October 11, 2010

It's been a stressful day, but I got a lot done. I had classes at noon so this morning I went grocery shopping since I moved into my new place. I still need to get some bowls and other silverware, but I'm ok for now. After class I went to the gym, then I took all my clothes to the laundry mat and got that done. Tomorrow I'm meeting everyone to decide which museums we're going to see on Saturday night. In case I didn't already explain, we're going to Die Lange Nacht der Münchner Museen, which is a local special deal type thing here in Munich. We pay 15 euro up front for a ticket, then from 7pm to 2am we have a bus that takes us to any of the 90 museums in Munich and the ticket lets us in any of them. It should be fun and since Mia is coming on Friday, she's going to come too. I feel more comfortable unpacking all of my stuff now. Before when I was in the host family's house I didn't want to, since I would be moving out anyway, but since I'll be here for four months, I unpacked. My classes are still going well, they're not too hard. We're almost half way through the B1 level of German. I think by the end of October I may be able to get to B2 if I work extra hard. Also, I found a chart that shows our weekend day trips on a calendar from now until Christmas! I've been trying to figure out how to find out when we go to each place and now I can. We don't have a Prague trip before Christmas but there's a trip to Neuschwanstein, Salzburg, Nuernberg, and Berlin! Before the school said that Berlin was too far away and we would have to do that trip outside of school, but they changed their minds and set one up. The trip to Vienna is also coming up on October 23rd. We also have cool nationality themed parties as some of the activities after school every once in a while. The next one is for Belgium so I'll have to convince my Belgian friends to take part and teach us about Belgium.




October 14, 2010

Today I went with the school to the Museum Mensch und Natur (the museum of mankind and nature). It was really interesting and had a lot to see. I was going to go Saturday on the Night of Museums but if I did it today I would have more time to see other museums on Saturday.

The museum is one of three that are located in a castle - Schloss Nymphenburg. There are two other museums that we'll probably see later. The first exhibit was about the Earth and the solar system. About how old the Earth is and other information about what the Earth is actually made of. Then we went through a mineral exhibit with many different chrystals (a lot of them were from the United States.) Next was "the story of life" so it was about dinosaurs, cavemen, other animals, and the theory of evolution. After that was an exhibit about world hunger, life throught the ages, and modern life. There were some interesting exhibits about how much of each type of food an average family eats in different countries -Japan, Guatamala, Mali, Kuwait, the US, Great Britain, and a few others. Then there was a big exhibit about animals and plants with different facts about animals with a lot of stuffed animals. Another exhibit I found interesting was the one about genetics and DNA. The museum was huge and all the exhibits were pretty interesting. There was also an exhibit on the brain and nerves and then the last one was another about animals.

The last one was special though because it had a huge exhibit about Bruno the bear. He was the first bear seen in Germany since 1838 and he was here in the museum stuffed. The exhibit had a lot of information about him. He was part of an Italian program to reintroduce bears into the Alps, but he crossed over them into Bavaria. The German government thought he was threat to humans because he killed many sheep, goats, hens, and other small animals along his travels. Apparently his mother showed aggressive behavior and they believed it was passed onto him, so the German government ordered him to be captured or killed. He was shot in 2006 in the Alps.

Next to the exhibit there was a board where people can write notes to Bruno and post them on the wall. I took some pictures of ours. I only had my Iphone with me for pictures 😞 I was going to take my good camera but I figured museums are always hard to take pictures in with all the glass and stuff. I didn't know it would be at a castle :P

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Photos

my letter
the board was missing a Russian letter

what Josh's would've been
(my brother)

a giant japanese crab
in the animal exhibit