Well, a week has passed with me here on foreign soil, so I decided it was about time to give everyone an update. Aachen is a great town. There’s quite a lot of history here, and you can see it as you stroll through the city. (Though I suppose technically a lot of it was rebuilt after World War II, it was rebuilt according to the same street plan as before, so it feels old in that sense).
Overall, Aachen’s not really all that different from anywhere else in the world, but it does have it’s differences from towns in the US, and I’m not just talking the language difference. One of the first things I noticed from the moment of getting onto the train was a different attitude toward alcohol. Some soccer fans got onto the train carrying beers and being generally rowdy as sport fans are. Later that day, I saw people having beers during lunch, and people walking down the street with beers. There’s no open container law here in Germany, and the attitude toward alcohol is generally relaxed.
But I sort of expected that difference coming into it, if by nothing other than stereotypes of typical Germans. There’s some other little differences that I didn’t really expect… door handles, for instance. I’ve taken a lot of notice in the way door handles are designed since my UI class. Nerdy, I know, but something as ubiquitous as a door handle needs to be designed well enough that anyone coming across it instantly knows how to interact with the door. The way door handles work in a lot of these buildings is backwards to my understanding. I often find myself coming to a door and pushing when I should pull or pulling when I should push. This isn’t helped by the fact that many doors open in where American convention would have them opening out.
Door handles aren’t the only difference in Aachen though, there’s also the great public transportation system. There’s 4 different bus routes I can use from my dorm room to get to various places in the city, and they all come about every 15 minutes. Then there’s the recycling–Germans are crazy about recycling. They have machines that will give you refunds for bottles, and they have 4 different separation bins for recyclables. On top of that, they also try to avoid creating trash in the first place, you can’t get plastic bags at the super market, for instance. You can get a reusable tote bag though.
The way these dorms are run is a bit different from what I’d consider the norm as well. There’s no toilet paper or hand soap kept in the bathrooms. You’ve got to bring your own. And the internet connection in the dorms is run by student volunteers, so you have to get a hold of those students whenever they decide to set their office hours.
Well, time to get ready for the day. I’ll be making another post again sometime soon. And hopefully this week I can find a USB cable to post some pictures.
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