Filling in the week

Sorry about the weeklong hiatus, folks. In fairness, I tried to write a post yesterday but I was writing it online (instead of in Word) and my computer shut itself down for no good reason, losing everything. So, let’s see…

Monday, I went to my classes and then went to Marienplatz. I stopped in at Saturn (another A&B-type store) and bought a few CDs. They are: Death Cab for Cutie: Plans (which I should have bought in Canada, but didn’t, and I figured that if I was about to buy tickets to their concert, I’d better have the new CD); Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: self-titled (was also going to buy this concert ticket); and, on the advice of Nick, Spoon: Gimme Fiction. I am really pleased with all of these purchases, by the way.

Then I headed over to the ticket place to buy my two concert tickets. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah was no problem, but Death Cab was sold out. I couldn’t believe it. I just kind of stood there, then stammered for a few seconds and was like, “O-okay, danke.” I was heart-broken. So I headed home and looked online to see where else they were playing. Turns out that they are playing Dresden on February 16, before heading to Munich for February 18. My plan for the week prior to the Munich concert was to visit Hannah in Dresden with Katie and Nicole. I was actually planning on coming home early to see the concert. So, I spoke to Hannah and she said that she and some friends were planning on going to the Dresden show anyways, so now she will just get us all tickets, and I can see Death Cab, and I don’t have to cut the trip short, and I’m just about as happy as a pig in shit!

Tuesday was also a pretty good day. I spent most of the day doing laundry and bumming around my room, then I had my first tandem with the boy down the hall. It was pretty good; we almost exclusively spoke English, but I learned a couple of German things and, besides, I had such an English-full day ahead of me that it would have been a waste to speak too much German; I wouldn’t have retained any of it. I finished up there and headed to the speech lab. It was also a really full day there. With the semester coming to an end, people are finishing up the lessons, and there is recently lots of correcting to be done. It was almost like really working… except that it’s really just correcting people’s English and it’s only for two hours. Ha! I love my job.

After “work” I headed out to a local Irish pub called Günther Murphey’s to have some drinks with Noirin for her birthday. Her birthday was technically on Friday but she and her boyfriend were headed out to sleep in an igloo in the mountains, so we had to celebrate early. When I got there, Noirin was there with her Irish friend Brona, and Katie and Nicole were there as well. I can’t remember exactly who came next, but Oliver showed up as well as 2 other Irish girls: Nicola and Louise. It was a good night, and I really like hanging out with Irish girls; wanna know why? Here’s why: Have you ever seen so many redheads at one table?! Three of the four Irish girls are redheads, and then add me to the mix! Wow! Oh, and, going from left to right: Brona, Nicola, Louise, Noirin, Olivier and yours truly. Okay, the other funny part of the night came pretty close to the end. These two ugly, creepy, greasy guys (yes, in that order) came up and started talking to Nicola and Louise shortly after they got there. Since the two girls didn’t tell them to leave, I figured they wanted the boys there, although I couldn’t figure out why! Well, after these boys had been around for a very long time, I heard the girls telling them that they wanted to leave soon, so the boys should probably leave, etc. It was the whole leaving “soon” thing that tipped me off to the fact that they really didn’t want the boys around any more, so I look at Noirin and Brona and I’m like, “They want the guys to leave?” “Yes!” “Well, why didn’t they just say so? Gentlemen! The time has come for you two to leave! These girls are trying to tell you to go away – so go away… now!” It was hilarious, because as soon as I laid it out like that, Nicola and Louise were like, “It’s true; we want you to leave now so that we can talk to our friends.” The boys tried to argue for a while, but we were all like, “No, really, leave.” Well, except for Olivier, who just sat there with his mouth hanging open. I think he couldn’t believe that I was so direct. It was funny. The boys tried to come back later, but Noirin stepped up to the plate and straight up told them to eff right off.

We stayed at the bar until they told us to leave, which was, surprisingly, at about 1:30. Noirin and Brona were able to catch the last train back to where they live, but Olivier and I needed different trains and it turns out that we had both missed our last trains. The U-Bahn police had to kick us out of the train station. The problem is that I thought it was only about 12:45, when it was really 1:45. I have real problems with this, as you’ll see later. Anyways, we hit the street and tried to find the bus stop for the night bus, when the bus drove right by us, and they only run every hour during the week. So, Olivier said he was going to walk to his connection stop (which was south of where we were) and I decided to take a cab back to Studentenstadt (north) because I knew it wouldn’t be too much from where we were and I had no desire to sit around for that long to wait for the bus.

Wednesday was a very normal day: class, Übung, work, language class. Then I headed home and sent some emails to the U of A. Yes, folks! I have officially informed the linguistics department that I’m here! Thank you, I’m proud of me, too. I decided to download my unofficial transcripts and list of required courses to find out how much more school I have to do. I won’t give exact numbers, but let’s just say that it made me so depressed that I just want lay in bed for several days, listening to Simon & Garfunkel or Hayden, getting up only to eat fattening foods or to use the facilities. It’s that bad.

Fortunately, I’m stronger than these urges and I got up on Thursday to go to my class. Thursday afternoon, however, was spent giving into said urges. There was a lot of TV watching, showering, and falling asleep. In fairness, though, I had nothing else to do, so it was acceptable, if you ask me. I ended up taking a nap from about 5:00pm till 9:30pm, so sleeping regular hours that night was out of the question. Katie came over and we worked on a project we are doing that we were having a meeting for at 1:30 Friday afternoon. She stayed over until like, 1:30 or 2:00, something like that, and when she left I, of course, wasn’t tired yet. So I chatted with Olivier online until, like 5:00am. (He was staying up all night because he had to give a presentation at 10:00 and, while it was finished, he says he feels more nervous when he sleeps the night before. I know… I’m confused, too.)

Friday I was still feeling depressed, but managed to get out of bed in time to make lunch and go to the meeting with Katie. It was actually a great meeting. We are reworking the school’s information brochure for foreign students (hey Mom, remember that 32 page document that you read?); they are going to base all other versions off of the English one, and it’s a pretty big deal. In all honesty, Katie and I were supposed to work on it over Christmas, but we both put it off until, like, a week ago; we still had lots of ideas for things that need to be added and changed, though. It’s not really the sort of thing that you need to read over and over to realize what parts are crap and what parts aren’t, besides, I’d read it before I came and knew what parts were confusing then, and we just went through all the steps that the book details, so it was good.

Then on Friday night my floor had a Brazilian evening. We have two Brazilians living on the floor, Octavio and Alex, and Octavio (for sure) is leaving in a week or two to go back to Brazil, so the two of them cooked us dinner. There were about 10 or 12 of us there all together; that number includes Katie and Nicole, who I invited as my guests. After eating and chit-chatting for a while, the three of us headed off to Olivier’s. The plan was that there was no plan, but one of his roommates was having a birthday party and they were all supposed to be heading out to a disco soon, leaving us with a ton of goodies! So we got there and everyone was still there. And they stayed for a really long time. Finally, about 1:00am, Nicole and Katie had decided that they’d had enough of all the noise and people, and decided to catch a train home before they stopped running. I, however, love noise and people, and knew that they would leave soon, leaving me and Olivier to munch on the goodies and play crib, which is my favourite pastime!

Well, everybody headed for the Tram within a half hour or so, but Olivier and I had gotten into a conversation with one of his other roommates, Max (there are 6 altogether), as well, two of the other roomies kind of came and went throughout the conversation. We chatted for quite some time before Max headed for bed and Olivier and I decided to break out the crib board. By this time it was about 2:30 or 3:00 and we were really tired. We normally bring a table from the main room into Olivier’s bedroom, but all the tables were full of food and crap and we were too lazy to clean them off, so we sat on his bed and played a game; it was hilarious, though, because we both kept nodding off into our cards. After only one game, I decided that I was really tired and that I wouldn’t be able to safely take a bus home, so I curled up into a ball at the foot of the bed, Olivier curled up into a ball at the head of the bed, and we fell asleep… well, I fell asleep, I have no idea if Olivier actually did or not! I slept there until 7:00am when Olivier’s roommate came back from the disco and he got up to say hello. I realized that I had dreamed the entire time and I was exhausted, it felt like I hadn’t slept at all! Anyways, the reason that’s an important point is because I got up and headed out to the tram and as I walked I thought about what I had dreamed, and I realized that it was all in German!! That’s the first time since I’ve been here that I’ve dreamed in German, and it’s a really major point in language learning. I’m very pleased with it!