After giving the international students a few days to settle into their environment and experience the city of Bremen on their own, the international department at Hochschule Bremen organized a tour of the city.

The students met at noon on March 29 at the center of the city, called Domsheide, at a famous statue named Roland.

There the students split into two groups of 20, one group for the students that spoke German and the other for the students that didn’t, so the guide spoke English.

Andreas Calic, the guide who spoke English, started by correcting a few wrong ideas of the statue of Roland.

He said Roland was not built to face the church and watch over the actions of the bishop. But instead he is facing the road, which comes in from Hamburg, to greet the traders who use the road for commerce.

The group then moved on to a road named Bottcherstrasse, a road with a lot of history starting with Ludwig Roselius, an early 20th Century coffee merchant, who bought the entire road and designed one side traditionally and the other side using Expressionism.

At the end of the road the group got to go inside the House Atlantis, designed around 1930.

The tour also included a walk by the river Weisse, and an explanation of the courthouse and a monument dedicated to people who were wrongly killed or jailed in the courthouse.

Then Calic told the students the story of the Bremen Town Musicians and ended the tour by meeting back up at a coffee house inside a windmill.

Many of the students enjoyed the tour but not just because of the information given.

Barry McElwee, a third-year international business and economics major, from Glasgow Caledonian University in Glasgow, Scotland, said while the information on the tour was good for the five euros he paid for it, he thought it was more fun just meeting other international students and hanging out with them for the afternoon.

“He showed us places we wouldn’t have looked at otherwise, and I found bars and restaurants I didn’t know about,” McElwee said. “But mainly I just enjoyed hanging out with other students.

“After we had coffee and cake at the end of the tour I went with some Polish and Chinese students I probably wouldn’t have hung out with had I not went on the tour with them.”

Andrew MacDonald, a third-year international business and economics major from Glasgow Caledonian University in Glasgow, Scotland, had a lot of similar things to say about the tour.

“The Atlantis House, the smallest hotel in Bremen, and the wall dedicated to the injustices done to Bremen citizens in WWII were all pretty interesting,” MacDonald said. “But mostly it was just a good way to meet other international students. And I liked at the end how both groups met back up to have coffee and hang out.”

However the tour information wasn’t completely lost on the two Scottish students.

“Every city has its story, and it was definitely good to hear the stories of Bremen told from the German side,” McElwee said. “We also saw a lot of good scenery, and I got a lot of good pictures I might have not gotten otherwise.”