On Sunday, March 9, I departed by bus for Germany. Along with about 40 other architecture students, my studio professor Suzanne Anderson, and Justin Shea, the behind-the-scenes intern, we begun our week long adventure that would take us places such as Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Cologne, Essen, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Utrecht.

A buffet of architecture sorts, our first stop was in Hamburg, Germany. We got to eat a warm lunch there and take in all the bridges and warehouse scattered alongside the water's edge.

It was a much older city than I imagined. One of my friends back home, Alex Pisha, spent some of his childhood memories there. It was interesting to compare his descriptions to what I got to see. I'll have to share that with him once we are all back at UT.

That night our bus stopped in Dusseldorf's City Hostel where we would be calling 'home' for the next three nights.

Monday began with an architecture dream come true! If you have ever heard of the architect Tadao Ando (and especially his work with concrete) then you might understand what I mean.

We visited a museum by him called the Langen Foundation. The last four years of my education I have flipped through thousands of pages of his designs. Imagining what it would be like to actually touch one of his buildings.

This might sound a little "riskay" for some audiences, but this guy is simply an amazing architect. Trust me. And my fellow travelers felt the same.

Afterwards we visited yet another museum complex located out-in-the-middle-of-some-kind-of-field. Seriously speaking. This museum had several 'art' pavilions placed randomly through this natural landscape.

At times, the girls (Christie, Katie, and I) joked that we were off to see the Wizard in Wizard of Oz--which of course would be fitting since both of them are actually from Kansas.

Our last stop for the day before we were back in Dusseldorf was in Cologne to see Peter Zumthor's Kolumbia Museum. This project was especially exciting for Christie and me since we had spent the first three weeks of our time in Copenhagen building a model of this building.

We did such a good job at building it that at the museum our professor came up to me and told me, "our model looked better than the actual thing." I still appreciated the museum, but wow, that was a nice compliment.

Tuesday we headed towards Essen, Germany to see Zeche Zollverein. This was an old, huge coal producing plant from the 1920s.

Some very influential architects (Koolhaus and Foster) did some renovation work within this plant.

Our last stop was to see the Zollverein School of Management and Design. This project, designed by the Japanese firm SANAA, was designed based on a cube. You can see that by the cutouts in the facade. The roof garden was pretty sweet because it was opened to the sky. Very cool.