Saturn and German University

I went into a Saturn store today. It's the German equivalent of Best Buy.
I really liked their video games section because of two things I saw.
First a sign that read:
"Erst Schule,
Dann spielen.
Unsere Konsolen sind bis 14.00 ausgeschaltet."
First School, then Play. Our consoles are off until 2pm. They are either helping to prevent children from playing hooky, or they are just using school as an excuse to save power. Either way, I'm a big fan.

FIFA 2008 was displayed across 2 large screens with 1. FC Koeln against Alemannia Aachen. Awesome!! I have spent time in each of those cities and the German pride in their city's "Football Club" cannot be matched. You know when it's a game day. I was excited to see the German league teams playing against each other in the video on the demo. 1. FC Köln (read "erste eff-say cooln"), stands for "first football club in Cologne" and is the team from that region. Alemannia is the name of the soccer team in Aachen. Seeing that really brightened my day.

I went to class at RWTH Aachen today. That's Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, the theory-based engineering school here, most equivalent to UC's College of Engineering. My supervisor wants me to gain academic progress as well as professional experience on this co-op. It was all in German and, therefore, difficult to glean a lot from. There's too many new technical words flying by too quickly. It's not nearly so nice or electronically advanced as schools in the US, as is typical in Germany. The most surprising difference I noted was that they really pack students in. There's no aisle, so if you want to sit in the middle, everyone between you and your seat must get up and fold up their desks and seats to let you through. For those of you familiar with the size of classrooms at UC, the 160 seats in the class I went to today fit in a room smaller than 755 Baldwin. UC's website says that room should hold no more than 72 people.