The remained part of
Berlin Wall.
The first time I went to Europe was in summer 1994. I took 2 German summer courses in Bremen and Stuttgart in mid June and in July respectively. Before the course, I went to Berlin with my U mates and after the 2 courses we went to Paris, Nice, Venice, Florence and Rome.
The remained part of
Berlin Wall.
When we first arrived at Berlin, the weather was unexpectedly "cold". It was only 6 degrees celsius in one morning.
The first German course took place in Bremen where is north to Berlin. It is an old city near Bremen Haven (Bremen harbour). It has such a long history that I just remember it has been there since 12th century.
Roland, the protector of
Bremen.
This is the market
place of Bremen.
I needed to go through this market place every morning for my German
class.
The 4 main characters of a famous German tale - Die Musikaner (the
Musicians).
From the top: a rooster, a cat, a dog and a donkey. They stand in this
way to scare the robbers in a house. It brings you good luck if you touch
the feet of the donkey.
In the 2-week course, my U mates and I rushed to Hamburg to watch "The Phantom of the Opera" in German. It took us 2 hours from Bremen to Hamburg by train. We were all very delighted to see the special effects and listen to the songs.
After the course, five of us went south to Stuttgart to attend another German course. It was an international German course. People around the world took part in this course to enhance their proficiency in German. We met many friends there.
A park in Stuttgart.
I still remember everything happened during the course. Whenever I look at the pictures again, I remember what interesting things happened to us.
As Stuttgart is the midway of the south Germany, it is
very convenient to have some weekend trips to nearby cities like Heidelberg,
and Bodensee (the lake area) and even Zurich in Switzerland.
After the course, we all did not want to leave our friends, but we needed to leave for our holiday.
We took a train to Paris. We did some sightseeing by ourselves and Delphine, the French personal tourist guide who actually is one of our "classmates" in Stuttgart took us to the suburb, Versaille. It is the greatest palace in Europe in term of size. 5 days later, we took a night train to Nice where we saw the coast line of the Mediterranean Sea early in the morning.
We swam at one of the beaches
there.
Even the sand is coarse, the water is very clean and clear.
It was the 50th anniversary of the death of the writer of Little Prince.
I spotted an exhibition take place in a small town near Nice as St. Exupery
has lived there before. It was not a big scale exhibition.
We went to Italy on a night train again after that. We went to tourists' spots and met an Italian classmate in Florence where he took some German tourists near a Cathedral.
Aftermath
It's always my good memories
to have learnt German with my dear friends who come from different corners
of the world. I hope you also have such a chance.