HsKA-NYP Germany Overseas Internship Blog

Une longue randonnée jusqu'au sommet (Week 6, 8th April - 14th April)

So it's been a while since we been anywhere after the summer school concluded. Not counting the palace gardens and Kaiserstr that we literally pass by every time we go to the university, we haven't really been anywhere new. Well, we found another student cafeteria that was near our apartment but that doesn't really count...

Oops, I should have warned you about the food porn earlier 😅. The food may not be glamorous but it tastes good, cheap and there is a huge variety of choices to choose from! All of our cafeteria meals cost at most 5€! To give an example, a meal at MacDonalds (burger + fries + drink) here costs about 8€! Eating at the Cafeteria is so worth it that we may actually end up eating there for the rest of our internship once it opens for dinner service 😂

Enough about food, let's move on... Oh, so it turns out in Karlsruhe there are 7 universities that are run by the state but the most well-established university is the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (In case you can't infer 😒: Karlsruhe Institute of Technology or KIT for short). Turns out KIT is the reason Karlsruhe is known as a university city and we can see why. KIT literally has locations everywhere.

That's a lot of places for KIT

Okay, this is not what this blog post is supposed to be about 🤦‍♂️ Why am I discussing food and universities in the first place? So after working on our internship assignments continuously for about 3 weeks, I proposed to Winston that we should revisit 1 of the locations that we went together with the summer school students. We turned our eyes on Turmberg. But we also realised that we actually never actually explored around Durlach because...... (Error 404: Excuse not found 🙇) Since our student card entitles us to free travel after 5 pm on the KVV network on weekdays (Think of it like our public transport system but instead of trains, there are trams and they are more prevalent than buses), we decided on a exploration of Durlach and Turmberg and then a sunset picnic dinner at Turmberg itself.

So, the day finally came and within Durlach we went to Karlsberg Castle (Not the beer brand Carlsberg 🍺) and Schlossgarten. As Karlsruhe is approaching summertime, the scenery became greener as flowers started to bloom. The scenery now is definitely better than it was during the first 2 weeks and something that the summer school students missed out.

So, to get up to Turmberg there were 2 options: Hike up or take the tram. Unfortunately, on the first time, the tram service was not running so naturally, we had to hike up. It took us quite a while but eventually, we made it. The view was amazing 🤩 You can literally see the whole of Karlsruhe from here.

The hike up to Turmberg (FYI: This was taken at the begining of the hike)

Look at dat view! And also an extra winston 😒

So this time, the tram service was running but we chose to hike because we want to healthy...OF COURSE WE TOOK THE TRAM UP, for the small price of 5.50€😅 Although I had taken the tram once while I was in Hong Kong, I never actually been able to see how the whole system runs.

So we took more pictures and we even explored further beyond Turmberg. Did you know that the streets at Turmberg are named after people that made significant contributions to society? One example is Jean-Ritzert-Str, and his name "Jean Ritzert" is below the name of the street and he was the mayor of Durlach. I definitely didn't know about this the first time we were up here 🧐

A wonderful view

After our sunset picnic dinner, we took the tram down and it was time to head back to our cosy apartment. Next week will be a special one for me, celebrating my birthday overseas alone for the first time (Technically I have Winston so 🤷‍♂️) Until then, au revoir!

What a great week!