Mainz, Gelsenkirchen, Bonn, Bingen, ect.

The week after Kiel was a fun one filled with random outings and, amazingly, interesting things to do at work :) The Friday before Kiel, my boss, Brigitta, mentioned something about having me start looking into the potential applications of nanotechnology on PET (the polymer they design production plants for) production/use. So on Monday, she gave me a couple huge books from nanotech. conferences and had someone show me how to access patent literature. My job for the rest of the week was then to sort through all the information available and find information applicable to my new assignment. And this is actually a little bit like my grad studies will start out, as 1. it's nanotech stuff, which is usually intruiging, and 2. when I start my grad studies, I'll probably have to delve into all the available literature on a certain nanotech. area before I can start focusing my research. So since they finally found something good for me to do, I started really getting into it and enjoying myself at work (why they didn't give this assignment to me at the beginning, I don't know)! And actually the resources available at the company were not that vast, so I was able to utilize my U of M ID to get a better application where I can look into the scientific papers available on this topic. So work that week was good.
Outside of work was really good, too! On Monday night, Mainz, a city about half an hour away from Frankfurt where Mike works, was having their main festival of the summer. Mike had found some random guy from couchsurfing.com that lived in Mainz and had been talking to him, so he offered to let us bbq at his place. Ends up he had an amazing flat that directly overlooked the festival (he was in the US army and had a significant housing stipend). So we had the best view in town and enjoyed some good food and better beer. Eventually Jan and a lot of other random people showed up, and we all had a great time. Here's a pic of the Mainz cathedral from the roof of this guy's apartment.....
And here's another pic of the festival area....The only bad part about that night was that I was giving Michelle a piggy back ride back to the train station, and out of nowhere a curb appeared and we went down and I ripped my jeans. But actually at many department stores, that added rip in the jeans would increase the value of them by maybe $15, so I guess it was alright.
The next interesting thing was on Thursday, we headed out to Mario's (Kim's boss's) place about 45 minutes north of Frankfurt close to the "mountains" for a bbq. He has an amazingly nice place, imagine that!, and he has a great garden/green area that is perfect for bbq's. So we relaxed with his friends (who are basically just an older version of us. They are all between 30 and 40, but always hang out, have bbq's, most have boyfriends and girlfriends and all seem like they're always going to be thoroughly enjoying life), and I enjoyed eating some great food for about 2 hours straight. Here's a pic from that night.....
We then had ambitious plans of heading out to a club after that, but were so satisfied and relaxed that we just watched Ferris Buler's Day Off back at Chris's (another one of the interns that started a little later than most of us) place.
Then that Friday was Germany's big game versus Argentina. We found an Irish bar and watched an amazing game. I was cheering for Argentina, and was slightly distraught as the game ended up being decided when, about halfway through the game, the Argentinian goalee was injured which meant that after the 30 minute overtime, which still found the teams tied at 1:1, the subsequent 11 meter kicks were amazingly easy for Germany as they shot against a pathetic 2nd string Argentinian goalee compared to Argentina's attempts against Germany's main goalee, Lehman, who is amazing. However, my spirits were high by the end of the night as all of Frankfurt, and probably all of Germany, was a party because of the win.
The next day, me, Maya, and Julia (two interns working in Wiesbaden that I met at the far back Steuben-Schurtz bbq and then talked to more the night at Mainz) headed up to Gelsenkirchen where the England/Portugal game was going to be played. We figured that it would be worth it to head up there for the atmosphere and were not dissappointed! It was a 4 hour journey on the slow, but extremely cheap!, regional trains, and once we got there, we didn't stop hearing singing and yelling Englishmen until we left. Right when we got out of the train station, there were signs saying English, go here, so we followed them out to the public viewing area that was a good 2 miles away. The route led us through some really pretty parts of Gelsenkirchen and it was great because there were beer stands about every 500 meters along the way so that the English would be able to make it to the viewing area in their natural state (we actually stole one of the signs for Maya that said "Beer Station: 200 meters" as she thought that was hillarious). We then watched the first half of the game under the blazing sun in the middle of hoards of Englishmen..... Unfortunately, since we were taking the cheap trains to get there, our schedule was very tight unless we wanted to spend 7 hours at some random German towns on the way back and arrive in Frankfurt around 6 in the morning, so we left the game early :(, and didn't actually watch England's eventual loss (which might have been good as I can only imagine how 30,000 English soccer hooligans would act after a loss), but headed back on our train towards Frankfurt.
We then thought that it was really sad that we had spent this entire day traveling around Germany and had only seen one of Germany's many great cities, so we looked into our travel guides and decided that we should stop at Bonn. Like I had said before, our train schedule was pretty tight unless we wanted to have 7 hours of lay-overs in random cities, but we thought we might be smarter as our travel guides said that there were trains every hour from Bonn to Frankfurt. So we hopped off our train at Bonn and quickly checked the train schedules to find that with our cheap tickets that we had, we couldn't take any of the ICE trains that headed from Bonn to Frankfurt, which were actually the only trains that went straight from Bonn to Frankfurt. Shoot. So, we figured out what our new schedule would have to be and found that we would be having about 2 hours in Bonn and then about 5 hours in some random town called Bingen, and then get back to Frankfurt around 7 in the morning.
So we decided to make the best of it and headed out into Bonn. We found out that Bonn was where Beethoven lived, and took a couple pics of stuff....
(the first pic is Beethoven, the second I think may not be)
We then hopped on our train and headed towards Bingen. We saw a cathedral and a castle once we got off the train and figured that would be a good start for things to see during our 5 hour layover.
We stopped at a Donner restaurant on our way there, and then eventually made it over to the castle. There was a little courtyard in front of the castle that was really pretty, so we took some pics that included some random guy that was twirling a flaming batton. We then talked to the flaming batton guy, and he said he was really bored and asked if we'd like a tour of the castle. We took him up on his offer and headed up the hill to the castle and had a nice tour. Ends up that this guy was a paramedic that did the graveyard shift but had the night off. He consequently couldn't sleep and was looking for things to do. He then offered us some beers and a tour of the rest of Bingen. We gratefully accepted and spent the rest of the night/morning following him around and seeing what there was to see including some club that was still going strong at 3:30 in the morning (and that we learned was the reason that this random small town had the third largest number of drug trafficking police in Germany), two rivers, and some crazies that were hanging out at the train station at 4 in the morning. We eventually hopped on our train at 5ish and headed back towards Frankfurt. We made big plans for the rest of the day as we had purchased another Schoneswochende ticket which would allow us to travel on any regional train for the day but instead ended up sleeping most of the day (Sunday) away.