First Weekend

I've had my first weekend in Germany. For the record I plan on utilizing each and every one of my weekends to its fullest potential. This weekend was a Paderborn weekend.

Saturday David and I met up at the HNF computer museum. According to the brochures, it is the world's largest computer museum. Personally, I'm inclined to think it is probably also the world's only computer museum, but you never know. I fully intended to take pictures, but then completely forgot except for one picture of a Jacquard loom. My apologies.

Jacquard loom: it actually worked and everything!

It (the museum) really was huge though. It took the two of us three hours to get through the whole thing, and we couldn't even read any of the descriptions. If you know German, you could easily spend the whole day there. There was a lot of neat stuff. Remember when I took that History of Science and Technology class? Well, this was kind of like taking a walk through that text book. They also had an impressive collection of old cell phones, calculators, and computers. (Remember the original Macintosh?) They had a lot of cool newer technology in there as well that you could play around with. There was this one were you sat down and it scanned your face and then you picked a famous portrait and background for it to put your face on. Not that cool? Try doing it only using your eyes. It was really hard to control so I know have pictures of myself as Lara Croft on a beach and Napoleon Bonaparte on the startrek set. I would share but they're just print outs so you'll have to wait until I have a scanner again.

After lunch, we went to Schloss Neuhaus, the castle in Paderborn. It's not terribly big, but then neither is Paderborn. It's in very good condition overall. There's a small, free-entrance museum, but you can't go into the rest of the building. The gardens were nice though.

Schloss Neuhaus, as seen from the back, with garden

Yesterday, David found a cineplex that was showing the new pirates movie in english, so we went to go see it.  We had to see it in 3D, which ordinarily would have meant more money, but we had accidently stumbled upon their monthly Ladies Night. We got funny looks for paying seperately, but we only had to pay 8 euros instead of 9. Woohoo. The movie itself? Not bad. I rank it above the 2nd and 3rd pirates movies but it's not as good as the original.