Hey Y’all!
So it’s been officially one month since we have landed in Deutschland! I think it’s safe to say that as the days pass, we grow more and more comfortable with the language and area, and also grow more and more homesick for fuego and Chuy’s Jalepeno ranch dip. Totally open to mail options if anyone figures out how to safely send those across the world! (And if not, we love Valentine’s day candy, cards, Birthday presents (Kels is almost 21!!), bean dip, GIRL SCOUT COOKIES, mechanical pencils and other sorts of WONDERFUL AMERICAN THINGS!…. but we’re not saying to send mail or anything at all. Nope. Ok maybe, if you love us.)
This past week has been a pretty fast paced but all-together exciting one! We took a few class field trips to some adrenaline spiking places, and even ventured out this weekend for a spontaneous day trip to Koblenz. Here’s the recap!
On Tuesday, our class took a day trip to Dusseldorf to visit the K21 modern art museum. The museum is home to the Tomas Saraceno “In Orbit” Instillation, which is not only a really stinking cool design and educational, but also a hell of a time to play on! The instillation is modeled after his obsession with spider webs and the layering system he discovered in the spider’s environments. Basically he stretched out a crap ton of super thick wire 100ft above the ground, supported it with this really great glass cieling and then separated the layers with giant balloon like structures so that people could play around in it like spiders. It’s kind of relatable to a giant ropes course, because it hangs 5 stories off of the ground. Talk about freaky when you look down and there’s nothing but net underneath your feet!
View of the Instillation
Some of the spider Webs he modeled the Instillation after
Some of us girls in our super cute jump suits! We were ready to roll! Except not really cause rolling around in the instillation was totally not allowed but oh well.
Got our game faces on
Getting in touch with our spidey senses
View of the Instillation to give a sense of just exactly how high up we were! Don’t look down!
HI MOM!!!!
After returning back to Bonn, we thought we were done with our fear facing moments, but then quickly realized we would soon be heading back up off the ground for our ROOF-TOP tour of the Cologne Cathedral, in our neighboring city of Cologne, Germany.
A little history on this cathedral…. It is the TALLEST Cathedral standing in Northern Europe. (Or the World in our opinion, but that’s just according to us.) So since it’s the tallest, you can probably imagine how we must have felt when they said we would be walking across the top of the roof of it. And when said across the rooftop, they really weren’t kidding. We walked across the roof. In the rain….which really added to the drama of it all. The cathedral’s tallest point is 157 meters (that’s about 500ft for all you American friends who also can’t convert to the metric system like us). We traveled up about 2/3 of the way and the elevator let us off onto some more sketchy scaffolding. We climbed out, and though scary, the reward was worth it!!! Here are some pics of what we experienced.
Photo taken at a set of the front doors of the Cathedral before heading up the Elevator of Doom.
Front view of the Cathedral at ground level
View of Cologne from the rooftop
It was really windy up there!!
Walking on literally a 1ft wide metal pathway covered in rainwater on the edges of the rooftop. Praying for dear life! Good thing we were as close to heaven as possible!
Some of the old machinery used to lift the stone blocks up when building the cathedral. 5O men at a time would be used just for strength of lifting the building materials up to the top level.
View from the Clerestory inside the church. We took the world’s smallest staircase to get to this part of the church. Definitely don’t recommend it for any claustrophobic people. Kels had to suppress her fears! Haha
Beautiful Tile work found in the upper levels of the Cathedral
To close out of great week of adventures, we took a spontaneous day trip on Saturday to Koblenz, Germany, a small town about 45 minutes by train from Bonn. When we got to Koblenz we basically had absolutely no idea what to do there, so we wandered around a bit, and then found our way to a Gondola that takes you up and across the Rhine River to an old Fortress located in Koblenz. Once again, we were up up and away!
Koblenz was filled with small cobblestone streets and winding back ally-ways!
Church door in Koblenz
Inside of the old church
Exploring a huge monument built for one of the Emperor’s and then rebuilt after WW2. Well maybe…. the credibility of this information is questionable considering that it came from an old Irish dude from our Gondola ride, but for the sake of our blog we’ll take it as the Golden Truth.
Giant Emperor Monument
Laura at the Base of the Monument
Hasmig and Laura on the Gondola
Us Girl’s on the Gondola over the Rhine River
Some views from inside the Fortress! Which is way cooler than the photos we took of it, but it was raining and somehow we got lame coverage of this amazing place! The old Fort is called Festung Ehrenbreitstein, and was built in the 18th century. Though it was built for protection, the fort was actually never attacked.
We hope y’all are enjoying reading through our travels as much as we enjoy sharing them with you! We miss everyone back home so much and will try our best to continue to keep you updated! We have a birthday to celebrate and a school Trip to the capital of Germany coming up soon, so continue to follow us as we make our way through Europe!
With love,
Kelsey & Laura
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