Hallo! This is Grant Mougin, a soon to be senior, and I'll be your male blogger for our third day here in Germany. To start, the breakfast here is 4/4 stars, just the most superb bread rolls, toast, and apple juice that I've ever had. Being honest however, today was not what our group had planned to do at all, but as Kyle Anderson and I are always telling our entire GAPP group, "You have to risk it for the biscuit". In our original schedule we had planned to take a bike tour for the day, but rain decided that it wanted to fall down rather aggressively. Regrettably, Frau Steiner refused to ride in the rain to our dismay (or maybe just my dismay, I like to ride bikes).
Instead our group visited the Deutches Museum and I'd like to think we learned a lot. To put things in perspective, the Deutches Museum is like Germany's reply to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian, for those who don't know, is a very big and cool museum in America (check it out it has a lot of interesting exhibits). Anyways I digress, we went to a super nice museum, and I think we might have learned a lot if any of the captions and written tidbits that museums show next to an object were in English. Obviously, we are in Germany so tough look finding anything written in English. To be fair, every couple of objects did have some English (which was quite surprising because I didn't expect to see any at all), but overall it was mostly a German focused text. On top of the German text there was also the issue of traversal within the museum. You see the museum has six floors and they are all tall rooms which means you have to take very long stairs. You may think, "oh we'll take the elevators, then you won't get tired out!" and I'm sure in normal circumstances that might have worked back in the good ol' U.S.A, but in this museum they had elevators that could only hold up to five people and could only go up to the third floor. That's a major double whammy right there, lines for elevators were long and in the end you could only go so high, so in the end our group had to do a lot of walking. For example, my group that had split off from the rest, Jacob Laufenberg, Kyle Anderson,and I were on the bottom floor waiting for an elevator to take us up to the third floor so we could walk to the sixth floor. When our elevator finally arrived it was full of people, but instead of any of them getting off they looked at us, shook their heads in a sideways direction, and shut the door. A little frustrating seeing as we had been waiting for about ten minutes, and now we were force to take stairs all the way up to the upper levels. It probably sounds like a rough time from the way I'm describing the experience, but it was a great time! My favorite exhibit was their mining exhibit. You had to go to the museum's basement level and the walls and scenery resembled that of a real mines that Germans use or have used. It was a very immersive experience and a fun way to get people more invested in learning about history.
After our escapades at the museum, we had some free time to go explore the city a little and find ourselves some lunch. We were divided into groups of five (mine being Kyle, Jacob, Riley, Erin, and I) and were given a 50€ to split equally among us. Searching for about half an hour my group stumbled upon a dürner stand, and let me assure you if you haven't tried a dürner then do it. If you've ever had a gyro then that's probably the closest thing to describe a dürner as. All in all, lunch was fantastic and we spent the next couple of hours exploring Münich, Frau Steiner even bought everyone ice cream, and free things (most especially ice cream) are great. This led to us taking a subway train back to our hostel (which could be a story all on its own but I realize how long my blog post is getting). Basically, there was laughing, there was crying, and half of our group missed the train to get back to the hostel. Now I don't mean to alarm any parents who may or may not be reading this post because we all made it back in the end safe and sound. Wrapping things up, we had a lovely dinner and everyone is today their own random things. For example, Me and a group of guys are playing pool, girls are doing something (idk what girls do, maybe something such as the following: pillow fights, social media, crap talking about other people on the trip, doing eachother's hair, makeup, etc.), and I heard rumors of a small band of GAPP kids going to a nearby zoo (I would have attended but this blog was not going to write itself). In summary, we have had a fun start to our first day of exploring Germany despite setback by the weather. And with that I shall leave you with a jubilant "auf wiedersehen
Instead our group visited the Deutches Museum and I'd like to think we learned a lot. To put things in perspective, the Deutches Museum is like Germany's reply to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian, for those who don't know, is a very big and cool museum in America (check it out it has a lot of interesting exhibits). Anyways I digress, we went to a super nice museum, and I think we might have learned a lot if any of the captions and written tidbits that museums show next to an object were in English. Obviously, we are in Germany so tough look finding anything written in English. To be fair, every couple of objects did have some English (which was quite surprising because I didn't expect to see any at all), but overall it was mostly a German focused text. On top of the German text there was also the issue of traversal within the museum. You see the museum has six floors and they are all tall rooms which means you have to take very long stairs. You may think, "oh we'll take the elevators, then you won't get tired out!" and I'm sure in normal circumstances that might have worked back in the good ol' U.S.A, but in this museum they had elevators that could only hold up to five people and could only go up to the third floor. That's a major double whammy right there, lines for elevators were long and in the end you could only go so high, so in the end our group had to do a lot of walking. For example, my group that had split off from the rest, Jacob Laufenberg, Kyle Anderson,and I were on the bottom floor waiting for an elevator to take us up to the third floor so we could walk to the sixth floor. When our elevator finally arrived it was full of people, but instead of any of them getting off they looked at us, shook their heads in a sideways direction, and shut the door. A little frustrating seeing as we had been waiting for about ten minutes, and now we were force to take stairs all the way up to the upper levels. It probably sounds like a rough time from the way I'm describing the experience, but it was a great time! My favorite exhibit was their mining exhibit. You had to go to the museum's basement level and the walls and scenery resembled that of a real mines that Germans use or have used. It was a very immersive experience and a fun way to get people more invested in learning about history.
After our escapades at the museum, we had some free time to go explore the city a little and find ourselves some lunch. We were divided into groups of five (mine being Kyle, Jacob, Riley, Erin, and I) and were given a 50€ to split equally among us. Searching for about half an hour my group stumbled upon a dürner stand, and let me assure you if you haven't tried a dürner then do it. If you've ever had a gyro then that's probably the closest thing to describe a dürner as. All in all, lunch was fantastic and we spent the next couple of hours exploring Münich, Frau Steiner even bought everyone ice cream, and free things (most especially ice cream) are great. This led to us taking a subway train back to our hostel (which could be a story all on its own but I realize how long my blog post is getting). Basically, there was laughing, there was crying, and half of our group missed the train to get back to the hostel. Now I don't mean to alarm any parents who may or may not be reading this post because we all made it back in the end safe and sound. Wrapping things up, we had a lovely dinner and everyone is today their own random things. For example, Me and a group of guys are playing pool, girls are doing something (idk what girls do, maybe something such as the following: pillow fights, social media, crap talking about other people on the trip, doing eachother's hair, makeup, etc.), and I heard rumors of a small band of GAPP kids going to a nearby zoo (I would have attended but this blog was not going to write itself). In summary, we have had a fun start to our first day of exploring Germany despite setback by the weather. And with that I shall leave you with a jubilant "auf wiedersehen
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