I had a rather fitfull sleep, Mark says that happens when you try to handle the 7 hour time difference for the first couple of nights. Needless to say, I was a bit tired in the morning and happily tackled the long breakfast arrangement offered by the hotel. Walking down the line, there was two types of coffee, a whole table full of herbal and cafininated teas, a small round table of sweet breads and what looked like pound cakes. In the second room, the buffet continued with a tray of sliced meats and cheeses, tomatoes, plums, apples, bananas, 4 kinds of jellies, hard rolls, nutella (looks like chocolate peanut butter), cereal, milk, juices, ... Needless to say I was amazed. Mark happily made a ham and cheese sandwich with tomato slices with blueberry yogurt, and I tackled two hardrolls with jelly and butter, a banana and some milk. The odd thing about the butter and milk is that they both had a rather sour taste- like a light buttermilk. I also learned that hard rolls are aptly named- I hacked mine apart with a knife and chewed steadily to get it down- rather a workout for breakfast!

After breakfast, Mark went to conference and I headed out to the laundrymat. To get to the closest laundrymat, I just walked straight out of our hotel, across the street, past the butcher, a grocer and turned left at the recycling bins- large bins that locals put their recycling goods- plastic, paper and glass. Now past the Post, a bakery, corner store on my left and a line of straight trunks with a flattened canapy of green leaves just over my head- perhaps a mini sitting park. Across the street and I am there. There was a father with his two girls and a lady dressed rather riske talking with an older man all there doing their laundry. I took up an empty chair in the back corner and looked around. Unfortunately all of the instructions on the back wall were in German- but I can understand numbers- even if Celsius is a bit foreign- the higher the number the hotter right! Well being as old as I am, I understand the premise of a washing machine and started loading 2 nearby washers with my dirty clothes- they were side loaders and I packed them as full as possible. Then I added just a bit of concentrated detergent that Cookie sent us before we left and closed the doors. Now I waited. Everyone else was working on drying their clothes. After a bit I realized that you put your money in a back wall panel and press the button for your machine number to apply the credit. So for Wasche it is 2 euros, and press my number- not much happened at first- then slowly everything started getting wet- I figured these machines must be saving water with the way they work- no gushing streams of water to soak my clothes here. After 15 minutes, everything seemed to be going well and I watched two guys do their laundry- so I started my second load. The temp- I picked the average- around 40C, and all the clothes turned out okay, so it must have been fine. Well drying went much smoother, because I had watched the scantily dressed lady next to me do all of her drying first (the only real difference is that the driers are alphabetic where the washers are numericly labeled). In this case, actions speak louder than words, and the quiet watcher can easily glean what to do! Have no fear non-german speakers in Germany!

(Enter Mark)
While Laura was washing our clothes, the first of many times we'll be refreshing our clothes on this trip, I headed out for the last day of the ILP conference. There was a good talk by Ashwin about the future of Aleph development and his vision of a WEKA-like engine for ILP applications, as well as the best paper talks. Also, Hector gave his talk about databases and ILP inverse entailment operations that received a few interesting questions. Overall, I enjoy ILP, and hope to continue to attend this conference in the future, the people involved are tackling what I think are very interesting algorithmic problems as opposed to mathematical tweaks that I see in some other divisions of Machine Learning. When things wrapped up, I hiked back to the hotel to find Laura and head out for some sight-seeing.

First, we stopped by a Model Train Store on the way back into town. The detail of their models is extraordinary, they had bridges, tall and short buildings, houses on fire, churches, everything you could think of that you might want to put next to your miniature train. We thought they were amazing, and picked up a model of a small German house, which we'll attempt to glue together when we're back in the states. We didn't pick up any of the people to populate the house, there were so many versions displayed, from traditional german garb, to police, to tennis players, to average household, to radioactive suits, and so many sizes, we wern't sure which ones to get. I can't imagine a hobby better suited to being in Germany, as we plan to ride the train everywhere.

We found a small Bakerie for lunch (at first, I thought Bakerie was the brand name, but I quickly realized it stood for Bakery) and picked up some sandwiches. The owner was very helpful and since he was going to close soon, he gave us some free cream puffs for dessert; too bad we're not here any longer or we'd definitely be back for more. Walking back towards town, we passed once again Beethoven's house, a rather unassuming location, and the large farmer's market, where we could buy any kind of cheese imaginable, fruits and vegetables, fresh cuts of meat hacked right before your eyes, and the ever-present stinky olives. It was all very tempting, we hope we see more in the other big cities we visit. We ate our lunch at the Hofgarten, a huge open lawn behind the university building where the conference was held, and then hiked down the street to the Aritmeum, a museum all about math and calculation, a computer scientist's dream!

There were so many ancient machines to play with, and many you could touch and manipulate. We used Napier's Rods to multiply numbers and a few other to add and subtract, what a chore it used to be, but extreemely facinating to see it all being done with gears and wheels. Each floor led us through another layer of computing history, until we reached the calculators on the ground floor, and the first inklings of electronic computers. There was a microscope where you could look at the fine details of a microchip and a wall of adding machines from the early 20th century. It makes you wonder if there will be a museum 100 years from now with palm pilots and laptop computers with lcd screens, with kids saying "Wow, that's so complicated and archaic!" I'm sure there will be.

With our math appreciation rejuvinated, we headed to the town Munster Cathedral, adjacent to a downtown square which housed the two game stores I visited all week. The cathedral seemed much smaller inside than I'd expected, and it was even more cramped as people were setting up lights and stages for the upcoming visit from the Pope. We visited a very small crypt underground where we believe relics were kept, and then returned above to admire the painted ceilings and stained glass. Maybe the others will be bigger, the walls seemed very thick.

Our last tourist stop was the PuppenKoenig Toy and Game store. This was about like your "Toys 'R' Us" in the US, but the game section was drasticly different, with all the classic euro games of Settlers, Carcassonne, almost every recent Spiel des Jahre winner, and oodles of rare (to me) card games and board games. I'd already picked up a few small Adlung card games, and a copy of Arbos for half price, and as we were heading out, I couldn't pass up the chance to pick up Razzia! and 6 nimmt!, two games which have English rules posted at BoardGameGeek.com. The third floor of the store also featured more trains and model houses, though not as extensive as the specialty store, and the first floor had a beautifully carved nativity and Noah's ark set of animals, all in a very fluid style. If only they wern't 15 euro's a piece, we would have brought a set home.

As it was now around 5pm, we settled on dinner at the Bonner Brasserie, a favorite of the conference attendees; I'd eaten here twice before and wanted Laura to have some of the same experience. We ordered a Pizza Funghi (with mushrooms) and an Ice Cream sunday smothered in raspberries. The ice cream came first, with a purple frilly toothpick, and really cooled us down, while the pizza really hit the spot of dinner after all our walking around town. Ordering food is much easier that I thought, most people speak English if you are polite about it, but we still ended up with fizzy water with bubbles. Our full day of touring Bonn was complete, so it was back to the hotel for packing all our clothes and finding a way to transport all of my newly purchased board games. We played a game of Arbos, building a wooden tree incrementally, with the boughs swinging as gravity took hold, and look forward to playing this one with more people as a Jenga substitute when we get home. Tomorrow, off to Koln for a quick tour of the Dom and a museum, then down to Koblenz for the evening.