Exploring and the like.

Having now been in Germany for over a week having been settled in my dorm room for an entire week, I feel as though I am able to give an accurate presentation of my life at the moment. Here goes (don't worry, it won't all be boring. There will be more pictures (Hooray!)):

Things will definitely be different once classes start after Easter, but I have got loads of free time until then. My life basically consists of waking up whenever I feel like it (usually about 930 or 10), walking around the city for awhile exploring, doing whatever shopping or meeting with people that I need to do, and then putting around on the internet for awhile. Not terribly different from previous incarnations of my life.

More importantly, this new life of mine is in a different country, where things are done differently, making nearly everything terribly exciting. Case in point, there is a streetcar stop right outside my door and there are another three within ten-minutes walk. These things do not exist in Minnesota (Ok, light rail exists, but that is only one train that only goes through a few stops.) There are ten different routes here that go all over everywhere, making it very easy to get where I need to, despite the fact that I only have a vague idea of where things are and don't have a car or a bike (I really wish I had a bike). Other exciting things that don't really exist in Minnesota are specialty shops. Today I bought cheese from a cheese shop in the mall. I also bought a hand of bananas in the Old Market where vendors gather everyday (or maybe just nearly everyday.) Buying fruit from a fruit seller in a market that has existed for hundreds of years is definitely different than going to a Cub foods that was built ten years ago.

This city seems to have an infinite number of churches. Life would have been very odd here during the late Middle Ages/Renaissance. It seems as though there were about 5 or 6 hundred years in a row in which a giant church was being constructed. (Incidentally, there is a road that goes in a figure 8 around Sachsen-Anhalt that has all of the churches in the Romanesque style on it. Not surprisingly, the road is called the Romanesque Road, which doesn't quite have the ring of the German Straße der Romanik.)

Other interesting things about the city: There are two parks within 15 minute's walk of here. One of them is beside a barracks that was built during the middle of the 19th Century. There is also a huge park on an island in the middle of the Elbe. I spent a huge chunk of this gorgeous afternoon walking around this park. It was 22° out, and it needed to be enjoyed, so I spent as much time of it as I could enjoying it. These parks will all be more interesting in a couple of weeks when the trees have actual leaves, and not just the beginnings of buds that they have now. Still, parks are exciting.

Here are some of the pictures that I have taken so far.
This is my bed. When I got here, these were the sheets that I was given, and I decided not to fight the point. On the left you can see my hallway. I have my own hallway!
This is the St. Johanniskirche, the oldest church in the city. Construction on it began in 941. Also, it has the coolest door I have ever seen on a building.
The scroll under the face has lots of writing on it, but I didn't take a picture of that. I should probably do that in the future.
This is the old city hall, built in the 13th century. The church in the background is Johanniskirche. The tents and huts at the bottom are from the market, which is located right next to the old city hall.
The big church on the left is the Magdeburg Cathedral. I took a close-up picture of the Cathedral, but I prefer this one. One of the towers is undergoing some sort of construction right now, so there is lots of scaffolding all over the place. The one in the middle is Johanniskirche. I have no idea what the one on the right is. This picture was taken from the bridge to the park earlier today. Immediately behind the Cathedral, but not visible in this picture are the Hundertwasser Haus which is about a block and a half away and the Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen which is about the same distance away, but next to the Cathedral, not in front of it like the Hundertwasser Haus is.
The Elbe from the bank in the park. Not as interesting in a picture as it was in person, but it was cool at the time, so I took a picture. Maybe I can follow it up with a picture from the late spring, when there are leaves on the trees and vegetation that is more green than brown.

I feel as though this should be long enough for me to have covered everything, but that seems doubtful. Let me know if you want me to cover something specifically that wouldn't necessarily require 18 pages.