Herne

[May 8-9]

Many people asked us why we would choose to go to Herne, since it isn't exactly the tourist destination, but we were excited to meet our Servas host, Monika. We choose this location since it was in the area of the Dortmund airport and was supposed to be an interesting industrial region. Indeed it was, and we spent Sunday touring the area. I demonstrate that a jackhammer is very heavy, here in the depths of the mine shafts at the world's largest mining museum! Here, we could use a classic Zoolander quote: "I think I'm getting the Black Lung, Pop."



The Bergbau museum was created to show the main activity of the region for hundreds of years. However, the region is quite depressed since the mines closed up decades ago because the coal was becoming to deep and expensive to mine.



I must admit that I was nervous to go down into the mines, even though they were a recreation 17 meters underground. Monika fed me lots of Swiss chocolate before we headed down and I think it helped. The mines had an amazing amount of technical equipment. Somehow, I was picturing that we would see replicas of donkeys and wooden carts. We strolled around the area and learned fun facts, such as every 100 meters down, the temperature increases three degrees Celsius. Where we were, it was a chilly 12 degrees C.



Before our adventures at the mining museum, we visited Schloss Strünkede, a small castle in Herne. Because our visit coincided with International museum Day, we visited many places for free and rode the U35 metro for free all day. Great timing!

We also went out to the Bochum university and walked down to the lake area (technically a dammed river). It started to rain again and we tried to wait it out before giving up and taking a wet hike through a nice forested area. Out of the forest, we saw lovely fields of yellow flowers. Thanks to a Google search, I think those are fields of rape seed (Brassica napus).

We saw a small photography exhibit before heading home to make a tasty dinner with Monika's new recipe. This potato-cheese-apple-onion dish was really great; so great that we made it again the next week in Prague! Then we went out to a local bar that used to be a drill bit making factory and now is a really cool place to hang out. We had nice conversations about all of Monika's adventures -- she is a big traveller too and has been to places from Siberia to Senegal.



The next morning Monika went into work late to spend breakfast with us and take us to the station. Thanks again for everything!