Wo?

So a lot of people ask me, "Where in Germany are you going to live?"

Turns out Minden isn't exactly one of the most familiar places to Americans. Neither is German geography on the whole. So there is a map on the right hand of this blog that shows you where Minden is located with respects to the entire country. North western quadrant. It was in the West German side of the wall, yes. That's the big picture.

Now, there are many more interesting things about this city aside from the fact that it is roughly 8 hours away from Berlin. It has about 83,000 residents and a lot of history. It's heyday was in the 18th and 19th centuries during the era of the Prussian monarchy. Being on a river, it was also extremely consequential during the Middle Ages. Fun fact that I learned while researching it: It was one of the few cities granted a special type of permit that required all ships on the river to stop in Minden to offer its good for sale at the market before it could continue. The permit/law allowed Minden to grow into a Medieval market town and brought quite a bit of wealth. In fact, there is a special type of architecture known as the Weser Renaissance, which came about due to the wealth of merchants and townsman in the region.

Anyhow, back to geography. This picture highlights the German state (Bundesland) of North Rhine - Westphalia (Nord Rhein-Westfalen) in which Minden is located. It is the most populated state of the country, having approximately 1/4th of all Germans living within its borders. Naturally, most of the CBYX participants (through CIEE anyways) are placed in NRW. I have a friend from school in the area around Dortmund and another somewhere in between Münster and Dortmund.

For a sense of scale, the city of Hannover is the nearest large one to Minden and it is an hour away by car. However, there is a direct train line that connects Hannover to Essen/Hamm and Minden gets a stop. It takes about 30 or 45 minutes (depending on the type of train/train line) to get to Hannover.

So that is where Minden is.