Halle!

Sorry I've been a bit late in getting all of these up--it's been a combination of being busy and being lazy, unfortunately. We went to Halle last Thursday, and boy was it cold! Minus 14 degrees Celsius, which is about 7 degrees Fahrenheit, and it was rather windy. So the hour and a half long city tour was interesting in part because we were trying to beat the weather, but also generally interesting.

Halle is the largest city in Sachsen-Anhalt, the state where Wittenberg is, and it is also the main center for the Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. We walked around and saw some of the old buildings that have been bought out by the school (the Francke school) and are now housing different departments. The architecture in the old city is very old and very German-esque, but it was interesting to be able to see how the DDR era effected Halle as well. I just thought it was fascinating to see the different architecture and how it's come together to make Halle today, and how the history lives on in the buildings, so to speak. In the new city (which was built in the 1960s) there is a lot of Soviet mass-produced apartment high-rises. Every apartment is exactly the same, they're relatively small, and very cheap. Though they're not pretty to look at, these apartments have been integrated into everyday life now--they serve as student housing for the university students.

Unlike American universities, German universities don't have much in the way of university-owned housing, and if they do there aren't enough places for all the students. So you have a surplus of students who then must go rent rooms, share an apartment with friends, or what have you so they can be close enough they can attend university. It's very different from American universities, that's for sure! Halle is definitely a university city too--I believe there's 20,000 students that live in the city. It was a nice change of pace from Wittenberg, where things tend to go a bit slower, and the city trams were awesome! Public transport is not a problem in Halle, that's for sure.

After the tour we met with university students and had a Stammtisch with them, which is like a study table. We had English and German designated tables, and the students brought in cakes and cookies for us to snack on while we did mixer activities. It was really fun, and once again, it was nice to get to know other people outside of the group. After the Stammtisch, we had free time. I went with Metta and some of the other students to the Halloren Chocolate Museum, and it was fascinating! I was very surprised to see that the captions for the exhibits were in English and in German--the museum must be a tourist destination in the summer. After this we had just enough time to go through the Beatles Museum before we had to catch the train back. I've never seen so much Beatles paraphernalia in one small area! Posters, autographed things, collector's items--even Ringo's uniform from the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Band times. It was very neat, but I didn't get any pictures because I wasn't sure you could take pictures in there. I wish I had because it was really great, but it's a memory I'll have forever and that's good enough, I guess.