Day 164: First Day in Westphalia

I’m already in Bielefeld, a university city in the region of Westphalia, in western Germany. Bielefeld was the meeting point for all of us friends from the faculty who are heading to the Cologne Carnival. I arrived yesterday afternoon, just in time to eat at the university canteen—much better than the one in Dresden, since it offered more food for less money and was decorated with paintings like this one:

My friends coming from Spain arrived at two in the morning (even though their flight landed in Cologne at 10 p.m.—they simply couldn’t find the rental car in the airport parking lot). We didn’t get bored waiting for them; we had a Cocktail Fou in a bar downtown:

When they finally arrived, even though we were all exhausted, we didn’t go to bed until 5 a.m., catching up on old anecdotes and all the stories we had to share, like the things I’ve been missing back in Spain.

Today we went shopping downtown to get ready for Carnival, buying some really tacky pants. And since we’re also going to some thermal baths to relax a bit, I had to buy myself a swimsuit—a truly hideous one, which I promise I will not post pictures of.

After that, we returned the rental car (that’s the picture above of the four of us with the car). On the way, we acted like fools—sticking the pants out the window and waving at passersby.

What we didn’t know was that the drop-off point for the car was miles away from the city center, so we had to walk quite a long stretch to reach the first bus stop. Then we had to wait half an hour for the first (regional) bus to arrive.

Meeting up with my friends has been great for me—I really needed to raise some hell with them again to ease the homesickness that had been growing stronger every day in Dresden.

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