Tuesday there was a football game on, so I decided to meet up with a few other people at the Ocean and have a few beers. Of the people who joined me, one turned out to be from Georgia Tech. There was also someone celebrating his 23rd birthday. After the game we went inside and played some pool and had a few more drinks. It was pretty fun.

The best part was as we were leaving though. We ran into a German who was plastered and had been kicked out of the bar. He stopped us to talk with us and started rambling on about how awesome Scotland is, and how he’d just gotten back from a trip there. He probably could have gone on for hours, but luckily my bus came, so I was able to make an escape.

Wednesday was supposed to be laundry day. The first task was to get a laundry card. The laundry system runs completely off of smart cards that have a balance, so I had to go to the janitor to get one. I decided to take a nap after that and found myself waking up around 8 PM. At that point I decided I’d just leave the laundry until the next day.

Thursday didn’t end up seeing much laundry getting done either. I meant to do laundry, directly after my required “Fit for UROP” seminar, but a bunch of people in the program decided to go and have some wine and cheese at a local cheese shop. It turned out to be surprisingly good and affordable, so we’ve decided to make it a weekly thing. Afterwards, a few people decided it’d be fun to get some more wine and play some card games. I decided to switch to beer, since I’m not a huge wine fan. I learned several new drinking games while sitting in our dorm’s quad. German laws regarding alcohol in public places are pretty awesome.

Friday I decided I really did need to get to doing laundry, since I had no clean clothes left. That required a quick trip to the store to buy laundry detergent, and food, while I was there. I got some peanut butter, which is actually pretty hard to find in Germany, to go with my giant jar of Nutella. (It’s as if peanut butter and Nutella reverse roles here in Germany. In America, it’s a little hard to find Nutella and you usually don’t see gigantic jars, while the peanut butter is plentiful.)

After getting my laundry detergent, I took my clothes down to the laundry room, only to find the computer system down, leaving me to walk to the other laundry room across the way in the other dorm building. That left 3 washers and 3 dryers (one of which is broken) for all of the students in the area, but luckily there was an open washer. I had to bring my German dictionary to figure out the settings, but otherwise, it was just like any other washing machine, only with half the load size. After laundry I went to bed early in anticipation of Saturdays activities.

Saturday was a trip to Castle Eltz. It started at 7 in the morning from the main train station, meaning I had to be up by 6. After 3 hours in the train, we arrived in a small town called Karden. Lucky for us, it had begun to rain. The rain continued unabated for the duration of the hike, both to the Castle and on the hike to the next town. The first part of the hike was fairly difficult, but tolerable. The scenery was great, and if it hadn’t have been for the rain, the walk would have been quite pleasant. On the journey I talked to a few people, notably an HCI student from Pakistan named Alif. He was pretty cool.

Castle Eltz was interesting. We were joking later on that our tour guide for the castle tour sounded very robotic, it sounded as if she memorized the English part of the tour word for word without actually trying to understand it. The castle was a lot smaller than you might think when you hear the word castle, but I imagine that’s the case with most castles.

After the tour we walked to another town on an easier route, but it was still raining and very muddy. At that town we caught a nice boat that goes down the Mosel river. It was pretty relaxing for a while to just be dry and sit for a while. They even had food, though it was over-priced. Unfortunately, the boat trip started to drag on, and there weren’t a whole lot of interesting things to see. We were glad to get out when we arrived at our next destination.

The town was apparently holding a marathon that day, so their main tourist square was occupied with the finish line. We milled our way through the crowd, looking for something to eat. Unfortunately, we ended up cutting ourselves short on time, and had to run to catch our train. It was like our own mini-marathon. Okay, it was only about a mile, but after 4 hours of hiking, a mile seems pretty exhausting. And I’m not exactly in the best shape. It being the last train out of town was a slight motivator though.

So, the day turned out to be extremely exhausting, I barely managed to stay awake on the 3 hours of train ride back home. I didn’t dare sleep for fear of staying asleep past my connection stops. After getting in at 2:30 in the morning, I collapsed in my bed and slept. For 14 hours. It was wonderful.