POSTER EVENTS

I really like to plan and organize trips. I recently made a master list of all the cities I want to see: I have the approximate dates worked out, many of the activities planned, and the estimated expenses calculated. However, I think the best way to experience Europe is to be spontaneous. Last Saturday, my roommate and I decided to do this guided tour of a medival village called "Zons" with a bunch of other students. We simply saw the event on a poster outside our apartment and went to the train station to meet with the group. About half of the students were foreigners like us and one of them was from New Zealand, so I could take a break from German every now and then. The tour of the village was in German and difficult to understand, but the general idea was clear as long as our tour guide pointed at something while he spoke. The most interesting thing about the place was the fact that it was completely surrounded by this masonry wall. Parts of the wall were rebuilt, patched and filled, which it gave it even more character. There were traces of metal doors that have been worn off at the hinges, and wooden trellises that were long ago consumed by fire. It felt very strange to come at the end of a road and find that it dead-ends into this 800 year old wall. I did the best I could to capture these things with my camera but they will never come close to the actual experience. I also photographed the various archways and portals (which my dad is so fond of). My roommate wasn't so impressed, though, because his home city (Prague) is a lot older, and I'm sure he's already seen a lot of medival cities in his day. Afterwards, we took a shuttle boat across the mighty Rhein and walked to the Benrath Schloss. It's a wierd 200 year-old pink-colored French mansion with an English garden. We took a quick glance and worked our way to the public transit. By then, we'd probably been walking for 4 hours, but as soon as I got home, I dropped off my camera and went with a couple people to the city. This was another one of those instances where I decided to trust a poster to guide my activity. This event was called "Nacht der Museen" (Night of the Museums) which I had actually been planning to do for a while. We paid 11 Euro each to gain unlimited access to all the museums in the city, between 7pm-2am. We made it through 4 museums and 1 art gallery, and called it quits at 1am. My favorite museum was the Film museum and my least favorite was the Architecture museum. The Film museum had all sorts of cool, old gadgets, which either lead to the conception of the film industry or revolutionized it. They even had old projectors from the 1880s made by the Edison Company. The Architecture museum just had posters of local projects that had little information on them, but they at least had a live band there. Now that I think about it, it probably wasn't actually a museum... Anyway, I'll try to get more pictures posted as soon as I can.