Bad Godesberg

I know that I have been telling everyone that I am going to be in Bonn for the first month that I am in Germany. But that is not entirely true. I am actually residing in the city of Bad Godesburg.

It is a suburb of Bonn, but it is still its own distinct entity. Bonn used to be the capitol of Germany, and capitols attract lots of politicians and diplomats. Most of these important people lived in Bad Godesberg. Today we took a walking tour with one of the Zivis around Bad Godesberg.

(Zivi stands for Zivildienst. Every male in Germany must either serve in the army or become a civil servant for a certain amount of time. The Zivis are the guys who have chosen not to serve in the army.)

We saw the house where Beethoven gave his first concert. We also saw the Algerian consulate. There are some absolutely incredible houses as you get close to the Rhine.

But not everyone in Bad Godesberg is like that. The street that the Goethe Institute is on is sort of a dividing line. As you go toward the Rhine the houses are extravagent and there are lots of very wealthy people living there. As you get farther away from the Rhine you tend to find more and more immigrants and people that do not have much money at all. The weather was pretty crummy today so I didn't take my camera on our Spaziergang (walkingtour) , but hopefully I will soon be able to get some pictures of these incredible houses.

After the walking tour the other three Americans and I headed over to the Cantina to eat. It is a cafeteria in the basement of an office building, and it's cheap. I had pork with red cabbage and potato dumplings, very German.

In class today we looked at the different languages that everyone speaks. In my class of ten there were people who reported in Persian, Arabic, English, Portugese, Spanish and Catalina. It was pretty nifty to look at the similarities and differences of all the languages, and to discuss what is the most important aspect of each language. (German is the grammar, English is the vocabulary)