At 6:20 am, I was up, well sort of up, and ready to take on the day. I ate a quick breakfast of Brötchen (breakfast bread) with jam and fruit. I then headed off to the train station with my exchange student, waiting a little under 10 minutes until the train arrived. It was a quick ride to Oberursel, where we hopped off and departed from our exchange students as we waited at the train station for the other American students to arrive. After a few minutes, we were on our way to Mainz, a small city about 40 minutes south of Frankfurt. However, our journey was not this simple, as it seemed like everyone was trying to board onto the one train all at once. Surprisingly, we all managed to squeeze onto the small train; I was going to take a picture, but there was no space around me to reach for my phone.
Anyway, when we arrived in Mainz we first went to the Johannes Gutenberg Museum. If you don’t know, Johannes Gutenberg was a German man who invented the printing press in 1439. In this museum, we were able to see all of the different books that were printed with his press, all under a special light to protect the pages, and we got to see some of the printing presses as well. At the very end of the tour, Constantin and Hunter were actually able to use a printing press to make a replica of one of his pages, which was very neat to see. We then went to the Mainz Cathedral, dedicated to St. Martin of Tours, and it was very pretty inside with all of the stain glass windows and paintings and I was very surprised how big it was.
We then walked through the Kirschgarten which had many pretty, old German styled buildings and flowers to get to the Main Street, where we ate lunch. A group of us went to a restaurant called Aposto, and I got pesto linguini with beets and chickpeas and it was amazing. The waitresses at Aposto were very nice and very surprised that we were able to speak German. We then headed back to the Mainz train station to head back to Oberursel. After spending a little bit of time back at my exchange student’s house, in Steinbach, we headed off to her Taekwondo practice for a bit, and then I went to practice with MTV Kronberg, a German field hockey club. This was my second day of playing with this club and it is so much fun, even though it is hard to understand the drills and communicate with the players on the field. I am starting to pick up on all of the different German field hockey terms, and it’s cool to actually use them in a game.
After both of our practices, we headed back to the house and enjoyed Turkish meatballs, potato salad, mozzarella and tomatoes, finished with a chocolate pudding. We ended the day by making some progress on our North Carolina puzzle. Overall, today was a very warm, busy, and fun-filled day! ~Dorrit E.