Holiday hiatus

I haven’t posted recently because I’m in Berlin, celebrating the holidays with Cihan and his awesome family. Last time I was with him, he inquired as to what I’d be doing over winter break (what we have of a winter break, that is), and when he heard that I wasn’t visiting the States and didn’t have enough cash on hand to travel around Europe, he mandated that I make an appearance at his table this year.

Since I’m already here in time for Christmas, and since New Year’s Eve is practically right around the corner, I’m going to stay into early January, so I can experience the famous fireworks above Brandenburger Tor.

The first few days here (Sunday through Tuesday, at the least) will be spent primarily with Cihan’s family, so I won’t often have the chance to post. After that, though, I’ll be at his place and geeking out regularly. I have the chance now to post because there are a lot of young guys here, and they’re laptopping, so I deemed it socially acceptable to whip mine out, as well.

Funny story: Cihan’s grandmother just espied the case for the game Warcraft III: Frozen Throne on the coffee table—one of the guys had set it there while we discussed which games we should all play together—and she turned it over several times, trying to figure out what it was. She lost interest after a minute or two, and laid it back down without even having opened it.

Last night, Cihan drove me and the boys to an internet cafe, where we gamed for 5 hours straight, and could order beers the whole time we were there. We played Counterstrike pretty mu ch the whole time, one of the guys griped when we switched to Battlefield 2. Blast. But 9pm to 2am in an internet cafe in Berlin evidently costs only 4 bucks, which is pretty phenomenal.

But seriously, the rest of my time here will be spent with his family, in a proper holiday family setting.