Thursday, July 23

We began the day at the Deutsche Bank and heard two presentations. The first presentation was on the history of the Deutsche Bank and how it categorizes its investors. The second presentation was given by the department that is responsible for funding part of the TOP program. We then saw a few of the art works that the Deutsche Bank purchases and displays.

Lunch was on our own, so I bravely decided I would take the tube to an Earth Cache. This was the second time in two weeks that I was taking the subway by myself without guides or friends pointing the way. At first I got on the wrong one. This became evident when I noticed that I was two stops further away from my destination than I wanted to be. So I waited for a subway going the other way and boarded that one. Within a few minutes I was at my destination and I got off.
I quickly found the museum and embarked on a language translation exercise. The questions had been translated into English on the website, but all the plaques were in German.
So, I tried to make out the scientific information that was necessary to answer the questions. Then, I quickly made my way back to the subway to get back to the hotel for our next event.

We went to the centre of Frankfurt where an accordion player was asked to play “Happy Birthday” for two of our group members who are having birthdays.

We met Hanz who gave us a most interesting tour of the centre area.

He showed us the one wooden building that survived the bombings of World War II. He explained how the buildings were rebuilt after the war to represent the history of Frankfurt.

We also sat in the church where the legislature of Germany decided that Bonn was going to be the capital city instead of Frankfurt. An interesting anecdote was that the mayor of Frankfurt was so confident that Frankfurt would be named the capital that he had pre-taped his official reply to that decision before the government had made its decision.

We also had a look at Goethe’s home. It was very interesting to see the appliances and furniture of the house of an obviously wealthy family. The water pump and the heatting system were very unique. For example, the wood stove was completely closed in on the room side. It took us a while to figure out how one would get wood into the stove. Then we noticed doors on the outside of the wall. We realized that it was set up so servants could stoke the fire without disturbing the people in the rooms.



We traveled to Ökologischer Obsthof am Steinberg, which is an organic fruit farm. We learned that the owner of the orchard has 60 different varieties of apples that are used to make apple wine, apple cider, etc. We had planned to eat outside in the orchard, but a thunderstorm drove us inside.