Weekend Trip to Germany
For work, I finished updating our internal research documents on climate assemblies (on the assemblies in Spain, Austria, Poland, and Ireland). For my next assignment, I started working on the “Women as Constitution Makers” project. This is an annual conference that brings together women who have worked as constitution builders from around the world to share information and learn together. I’m preparing research for the conference and this year’s topic is about managing natural resources. My sub-topic is how institutions can facilitate this management and how indigenous groups and women are represented within these institutions. For the background reading from my coworker, I learned about how constitutions affect the way natural resources are shared, allocated, and controlled in four different regions of Africa (including Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, and South Sudan). I also looked into case studies of who controls these resources in Sudan, Indonesia, and Iraq to compare unitary and federal systems.
On Wednesday, my boss took Anna and me with him to a Dutch law school, Tilburg University, since he was a speaker for a panel on global law. The panel covered topics from constitution building to theoretical framing and how consumer protection plays a role in the field. The seminar ended with a student presentation of university students who collaborated from Tilburg with a university in Columbia.
On Friday, Anna and I “worked from home” by doing research at the cafe part of the World Trade Center of The Hague that happens to be down the street from our Airbnb. Then, Saturday morning Anna and I started our weekend trip to Cologne, Germany. After a few hours of trains, we arrived right outside the Cologne Cathedral which was stunning and so large it’s difficult to capture in a photo. The stained glass within was especially grand in its intricacy.
Around Cologne over the weekend, we went to a beer hall to try the schnitzel and walked across the Rein Bridge of love locks. That night, we went to the Belgian quarter which was fun to hear German music playing everywhere. We stayed at a “Koncept” which digitized everything so there was no hotel staff anywhere which was strange at first but a great place to stay overall.
The next day we went to the Ludwig art museum which opened with a full exhibit of Ursula Schultze-Bluhm’s striking paintings that allowed the viewers to walk through different aspects of the artist’s life and mind. The gallery also had an exhibit of Picasso’s artwork that I was excited to see. Afterward, we wandered the old town area and enjoyed a stop at a local chocolate shop. Before our train back home, we sat by the Rhein to enjoy a final German meal (including an apple strudel).