Isn’t that beautiful? Grumble.

Although, I have a nagging suspicion that Carl’s actually still chilling in his room downstairs, and just Google Image Searched this, then Photoshopped it a bit to make it even prettier.

He can’t fool me.

Pictured above is Will’s battlecruiser assault on the enemy base, with the last scattered remnants of my tank battalion on the left hand side. If you look closely at the text in the bottom left corner, you can see Will’s trash talk of “ready for the storm?” just fading out. (Click on image to see it big.)

After much pwnage, Will suggested we switch over to Counter-Strike, as he knows a bunch of the people living with me are all about that game. I said I wasn’t sure, as it was pretty early in the day over here to be gaming, but I would do lap around the dorm to see what was up.

I’m greeted in the hallway by streams of my friends shuffling underneath stuffed backpacks. I ask what’s up, and they say “ISTANBUL!” Riiiiiight, this weekend was the trip to Istanbul. So pretty much everybody I know says “see ya Tuesday” and I head back to game with Will. (I, of course, didn’t tag along because my trip to Italy pretty much broke the bank, and now I’m trying to make rent next month.)

Now Will’s gone for the weekend, visiting Philly for Ace’s birthday party tonight, and the Amon Amarth concert on Sunday. He’ll be back home sometime Monday.

Till then, I’ve got a pretty easy going weekend. I’m staying in tonight, even though Jukka and Ke already asked me to hit up a Christmas market on the Wiesen (where Oktoberfest is). I told them I had some money to save, so I’d b better off spending the evening in chill mode.

This should make it very easy this weekend to get in a lot of studying, perhaps a few posts, and maybe even some more gaming—although, sadly, none of my friends will be able to join me.

Although I must be honest and say that once again my game was off when we played dense urban maps, where sniping was all but impossible.

What a shame. We didn’t play too long, because we weren’t too many, and we all have classes on the morrow. But several people made the rounds through our rooms and watched the match, and signed up for a much larger game on Saturday afternoon, when nobody has to worry about sleeping reasonable amounts.

For the moment, I’m off to finish a bit of reading before retiring. I don’t have anything due tomorrow, but I do have to prepare for a rather neat guest speaker in my e-society class. I’ll post more about that after the fact.

I don’t feel wired at all, it’s just that sleeping isn’t an option. But I have class tomorrow and a lot of important things to take care of, so I’m going to rest for a bit. Thank god my buddy Jim was looking out for me.

04:13:52 Jim: why don’t you sleep
04:13:58 Jim: honestly
04:14:02 I: yeah jesus
04:14:04 I: what am I doing
04:14:06 I: I gotta get in bed
04:14:08 Jim: haha, ok
04:14:10 I: thanks for looking out
04:14:12 Jim: anytime
04:14:13 I: I’m not tired AT ALL
04:14:17 Jim: from across the ocean
04:14:18 Jim: with love
04:14:33 I: my bed’s got shit on it though, I can’t sleep like that
04:14:42 I: I seriously have internet addiction
04:15:11 I: there, I’ve admitted the problem. I think that buys me another couple weeks of generating an action plan to change it, which I can maybe revise for another couple weeks after that
04:15:22 Jim: true
04:15:36 I: my trick for getting up in the morning is to drink two liters of water before going to sleep
04:15:50 Jim: nice
04:16:01 Jim: like if you had the next watch for the enemy
04:16:31 I: I like the way you think, buddy.

And with that I head to bed.

Sometime in the late afternoon, my good man Christoph dropped by to bid me partake in another game of Call of Duty with the other dudes in the building. He knew he caught me at a good time, because I was right in the middle of a skirmish in C&C 3, and I was actually getting stomped by a “medium” difficulty computer. (I’d spent too much time and money fortifying my base, playing like it was SimCity, and I ran out of resources early on.) I said of course I was in.

This night we had 8 people! I think at some points it was up to 9 or maybe even 10, but it was solidly 8 for most of the evening. To be sure, 4 on 4 is worlds different than 3 on 3 play, so we had a blast. I, of course, cleaned up, as usual.

It should also be obvious that Philip the German was cleaning house in his own special way. He and I consistently had sniper duels across the map, but the others quickly voted that sniper rifles be disabled, because they wanted to be able to walk outside sometimes. We then had to make due with scopeless bolt-action rifles, and sniping with those was actually pretty exhilarating, as sometimes the person in the distance would be obscured by the iron sights of the gun, and you just had to pull the trigger and hope he didn’t live to see the muzzle flash, or you’d dead before you had a chance to ready another bullet.

I should also state that my affinity for sniping is definitely a weakness in my playing style. With sniper rifles disabled, I had to act much more like a solider, and my performance suffered for it. It should be obvious that the above map had plenty of Enemy At The Gates-style sniping opportunities, but not every map was like that. Take for example this French village, which almost entirely close-quarters house fighting. There were a few sniping corridors down long stretches of road, but there was no cover to be had, so it wasn’t worth it to set up shop and wait for someone to goosestep around the corner.

Check out the end-game shot from that map where I couldn’t snipe people.

I still helped, but my good ol’ American bro, lumbering around the streets with biceps bulging from his 50-pound machine gun, definitely carried the day. You’ll notice Philip was in second place, too, as he was also out of his element.

After the game, a different American asked me whether I had Counter-Strike, because he’s better at that game. I just nodded and said we’d have to give it a shot.

I hope we do this every freaking night.

The best part about the whole damn night? Since it was a Finnish party, the Finns picked the music.

Not only that, but the Finns also like to get wasted and air guitar themselves into oblivion.

I think that pic was from when we were playing Behind Space. Yes, that’s right. We listened to tons of In Flames, all night long. They even asked me to go get my MP3 player, so we could hook it up to the sound system there, as Joonas’s aging laptop kept crapping out on us. It’s sure never happened to me that at a party I had people asking me to put my music on. “Turn that the fuck off,” yes, I’ve heard that, but this was different somehow.

Then we duct taped Joonas into a shopping cart.

This next picture I can’t figure out for the life of me, so I’m going to assume they were doing the wall of death while we were listening to Lamb of God.

Not too many other anecdotes to relate. I mean, the evening wasn’t exactly complicated. Jukka cheers’d Jesse so hard he shattered Jesse’s bottle and cut his own hand, which I thought was pretty badass.

\m/

All pics here.

Cheers to Joonas.

And let’s make that cheers with Finlandia!

From “Asfågelns Död” by Finntroll:

Svart blod nu månen dränker
Svart totem ur djupet stiger
Krigsmålning på trynen stänker
Från grottans dunkel, kom döden diger

OK, so they sing in Swedish, kill me. I gotta get out the door already!

\m/

Around 11pm I had a false alarm for social activity, as Sascha called me and asked whether I was still at home. “Yup!” I said. “Great, dude. Can you let me in? I’m locked out.” Laughter and sighing. So I buzz the outer door to let him in, and he drops by my room on the way to his. I inquire about his plans for the evening, and he explains his girlfriend is still in town.

“She’s here till Tuesday, actually.”

“Oh. See you Wednesday, then.”

“Exactly.”

So I spin back around to my computer, where I have LEO open so I can wade through an Erich Fromm book a German friend here lent me. I’m learning mad words from it! My favorite so far is entsprechend, a word I already knew, but that I’ve only recently realize boosts my vocabulary greatly. Check out how many English equivalents that sucker has! I love German.

A bit later, maybe around 1am, Jukka the awesome Finn comes stumbling in, back from a night at the bar with his Finnish crew. I offer him a beer, he politely declines in too-calculated English, and then we listen to some metal together. Ten minutes go by, and I offer him a beer. He accepts. It was all down hill from there.

We stayed up till about 5am, ended up in the kitchen with several Americans who were inexplicably awake as well. I presume that everyone slept late on Friday due to the holiday festivities the night before, and so no one was tired in a timely fashion. There was still some gluhwine left over, which we polished off, and Jesse for some reason baked many things as the sky lightened. Crazy.

Before retiring, Jukka promised me a cup of his trademark coffee in the morning, if we’re up together. Deal was who’s ever up first, wake the other at 1pm. We saw each other at 2pm. But then we had coffee! And man was it good. Coffee and buttered toast are the world on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

I myself made only Stove Top, because it was there and I can’t cook anything else. But it sure is nice to know a ton of people who can make awesome Thanksgiving food. I’m thinking maybe we should do this every Thursday.

The above shot is just one of the three tables we’d set up. There was a fourth, too, but it never filled up, so I don’t think it should count. We had the tables set up around intersections in the hallway, broken up despite my frantic requests for a single Viking long table. Apparently a single table would have blocked access to the bathrooms and such. Suffice to say, these people know nothing of priorities.

After most of the food was plowed through, a few of the Germans herded people out of the kitchen and back to the tables, then rendered a touching thank-you speech in their adorable English. They were quite taken aback by how awesome “Team America” (yes, they really call us that) was to go to these lengths, and they expressed their gratitude at being able to live with us for the year. Then it was onto dessert.

I give thanks for Germans, German beer, stuffing, and all the people back in the States whom I love. You know who you are.

All pictures here.

We played for an hour or two, only six of us, three Germans and three Americans. Needless to say, the Germans consistently played as Germans, the Americans alternately between the U.S. and Russia, depending on the location of the map we were playing on.

Also needless to say, the Americans absolutely rocked house. The Germans had one very excellent sniper, but he could not compete with the likes of me. Playing with him was really interesting, because he was going all Enemy at the Gates on my ass, hunting me down across the map. This worked wonders on humiliating me, but unfortunately it meant that he was passing up shots on my teammates in order to get close to me, whereas I was pithing every German I could find, whether sprinting across a field in Brecourt or crawling amongst piles of rubble somewhere along the road to Moscow.

I didn’t think to take any screenshots of the scoreboard as I was tearing it up, but just trust me when I tell you it was brutal. Instead enjoy this pic I found on the internet of Call of Duty 2, because I love snowy sniper maps.

And this next one’s great, too. I can’t tell you how many times tonight I made that exact shot, through that same window. Silly Germans.

We’re taking a break from the carnage now, so I hope to bang out a post on Thanksgiving and then scoop back up my Springfield M1903 to shatter some more German skulls.

Sigh.

But seriously, it was a fantastic time, as I’m sure the pictures indicate. The photoset is yet another tortuous series of drunk laughter pictures, but sometimes looking at those are just what one needs. And what can I say? I love to spread joy. I hereby infect you with the effusive gladness that is my existence.

Carl rocks socks, as I think is obvious. Also, for the record, his expression is always that of, “My, is that a camera you have there? And are you planning on photographing yours truly?” That expression has absolutely nothing to do with the presence of a camera in his immediate vicinity. Believe me.

Man, if you think my eyes are haunting in that picture, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Here’s one of the crew of jerks I typically run with. And don’t comment on the perspective, because I don’t understand it either. We were in an M. C. Escher club or something.

But probably my favorite picture of the whole night is the one that follows, just because it so perfectly conveys everyone’s personality in it. It’s a masterpiece. Dave has a freaking library of party photo faces, and he manages, even while drunk, to tailor them to the situation at hand.

And that’s that, I’m afraid. As ever, there’s a full album up for perusal.

For example, after coming back from the bar on Friday night, Cihan was wrangled into brotherly combat with one of his bros, who must have been losing, because he decided to bite Cihan.

Life is never dull when you hang with Turks, I’ll tell ya what.

Then, on Sunday, after sleeping marvellously late (obviously Cihan and I will remain friends for a long time, as he understands how to squander a day by lounging around in bed too long), we decided to cruise around and see some Berlin sights, so we hit up the famous TV tower that the Soviets built to spy on people. Now, of course, it’s got a rotating cafe and an observation deck up there.

While waiting in line to purchase our tickets to be allowed into the tower, I experienced the awesome German work ethic. The teller at the window simply said to Cihan, “I can’t help you right now” and proceeded to sit in his glass booth, staring off into oblivion. We waited over five minutes, asking several times what was up and how long this delay was going to take, as I had to catch my ride back to Munich in an hour or so.

It turns out the dude was on mini-strike, waiting for his relief to come. After about five minutes, a coworker came, apologize for being late, took another five minutes to get situated, then asked how she could help us. “Um, we’d like tickets, please,” Cihan said.

After that wonderful excursion, we booked across town to get to Potsdamer Platz, by far my favorite area of Berlin, because it has pimp buildings that look like spaceships or something.

Potsdamer Platz was the place to be, because I was leaving Munich with a carpool of chaps also headed thither. Over the weekend, I’d run out of minutes on my cell phone, meaning I couldn’t reply to the cascades of texts my Munich homies and honeys were sending me. I wasn’t about to get into a car with some dude and barrel down the autobahn only to have him ditch me in Leipzig and me not be able to call my hero Cihan to come rescue me.

So before hitting up the designated meeting place at Potsdamer Platz, we cruised by a gas station and scooped up a prepaid card for my phone, only 10€ or so. While there I noticed what I was pretty freaking sure was an ATM, and thought I could use some bucks for food, so I stick in my card. Cihan turns out and has a “Noooo you fool!” moment, but too late, card is in. Apparently the contraption was a ticket-paying machine, so it was demanding to know how much to deduct from my card.

We couldn’t get it to spit my card back out. We hit “Cancel” ten thousand times, but it kept asking us to pick a language. Time was running out on when I needed to meet my ride, so I was feeling like a real tool. Cihan tries for a while to hack the machine and make it cough up my card, then has the brains to ask, “Dude, are you sure you don’t have your card still?” I look in my wallet, and sure enough, my card’s chilling in there. The machine must have spit it back out immediately and lobbed it directly into my still exposed wallet.

“Americans,” Cihan said. “You see a slot for a bank card and immediately you cram yours in, without bothering to read a damn thing.”

“You’re right,” I replied. “I guess I should have figured that in Germany, the machines are trying to steal my money, instead of spew it out at me. Hey, isn’t where we are right now technically in East Berlin?”

Cihan then repeated his favorite English phrase over and over: “You’re such a dick.”

I cannot wait to visit this guy again. We’ve already made plans that I’ll be spending Christmas with his family, plus perhaps travelling to Norway while up there (tickets would definitely be cheaper out of Berlin than out of Munich, that’s for sure).

We shall see.

Congratulations, Matt, because this is truly badass.

Contrary to my assurance in the previous post, I did not keep my camera with me, and missed capturing an excellent day of antics that afternoon and evening. I’m too tired to give a full rundown of what we did, but here’s a brief list:

1. Visited his family and ate his mother’s delicious Turkish cooking
2. Watched the Turkey versus Norway game in a Turkish bar, me looking completely like a Norwegian and wetting myself thoroughly the entire time
3. Saw Beowulf in 3D, which was holy shit awesome
4. Drove around the city a lot, listening to loud rock in Cihan’s Mercedes (well, actually his father’s, because his was in the shop), and Turkish pop when appropriate
5. Visited Berlin sites, like the TV tower, newest holocaust memorial, Brandenburger Tor, Potsdamer Platz (definitely my favorite), etc.

Sounds pretty freaking rocking, doesn’t it? I haven’t bothered to offload pictures yet, let alone upload them, but I’ll do that in the morning and post at length, relaying tons of spectacular anecdotes. Because that’s just my style.

Pictures and tales, as ever, remain on the horizon.

I of course have my camera with me, as I always do, and of course I took pictures last night. Give me some time before I post them, preferably till early next week, when I’m back home amongst my hosts of hard drives.

A brief anecdote to tide you over until I post at length: Cihan already shouted down his friends, saying, “He’s an anthropologist! Don’t tell him shit! Every word you say he analyzes a thousand times and then makes a post on his blog about it! So be careful, dudes. I know him. It’s what he’s gonna do.”

To bolster Cihan’s credibility among his friends (based on preliminary analysis I’ve determined he could use it), I quickly informed everyone present that the current happenings would indeed make it into a post.

So here it is.

Till Monday, probably.

I wish I could say my CIRN 2007 conference was this rocking.

J’s on vocals, for those of you who don’t know him.

Nonetheless, college doesn’t work without beer pong. So when it was discovered that the Germans had no idea what beer pong was, Team America undertook to give them a free lesson. We went to the cornerstore and picked up three cases of the absolutely bottom rung beer, Oettinger. This stuff goes for 5€ for a case of twenty half-liter bottles. It’s disgusting. And yet, oddly, it’s worlds better than most beers in the U.S.!

So, properly armed—we’d gotten cups, too, and there’s already a ping pong table in the basement of our building—we set up shop and started schooling the silly Germans. Unfortunately, they were pretty good, and it wasn’t nearly as funny as “Team America versus Germany” in American football that one time.

All the same, though, it was 1337, and late in the evening Sascha and his boys showed up to join us. Since we’d pretty much blown through all the beer by that point, I left with them to spend an hour or two in a beer up the street, and played some pool.

I think my favorite moment of the night was when Gregor the German scolded me for pouring the beers badly. He snatched the bottle out of my hand and began to painstakingly distribute the beer in clear plastic cups, taking care to meter out the head appropriately. The Americans roared with laughter.

More pics.

But I did get to make a lot of deals during the game, and I freaking love making deals. It has nothing to do with economic prowess, either, because I let myself get screwed all the time. I just love trading stuff, and getting stuff. Like I started a wheat empire, and hoarded all the wheat resources on the board, and bade the other players lay themselves prostrate before my throne of scythes. Really all they did was just keep mining metal and tending sheep and went on to kick my ass, but I bet the whole time they were at least moderately hungry. Suckers.

Speaking of hungry, that game lasted so long, I haven’t made dinner yet. It’s not even 8pm here, which is messing with my head, because it’s been dark for a very long time. I know this because buildings in Germany are constructed in such a manner that during the day, one need never use artificial lighting. We had to click on overhead lights rather early in our game, and so I was estimating that now it was about 10pm or maybe a little later.

As it stands, I should be going out. But I probably won’t. A bunch of us are still deliberating over a trip to Istanbul in the beginning of December. Roundtrip plane tickets and three nights in a three star hotel costs 160€. That’s pretty sweet. The price jumped to 200€, due to room availability, and I backed out, but now someone’s telling me there’s a plane ticket for around 100€. I could bring a tent, or find a hostel at 10€ a night or something.

I’d actually like to save the money on that and not go, because I’m going to be up in Berlin next weekend, visiting my dearest bro Cihan. And I should think he could get me to Turkey pretty cheaply, and also show me a better time than these Bavarians.

I’m off to bed so I can get up at 5am or so in order to catch my plane to Florence. I only have 2GB for the better half of a week in Italy, but I’ll do what I can to make sure everybody’s happy with the pictures.

To bed with me! Enjoy the pics from tonight.

I then decided that it’d been awhile since I’d had a breath of fresh air, so I went for a stroll. When I came back, I discovered pumpkins in the kitchen, evidently to be gutted and cooked. And one turned into a jack-o-lantern, of course. (The Germans didn’t know what a jack-o-latern was, so one of the German-speaking Americans explained it as essentially “a pumpkin with a face.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. No, really: I would have spent five minutes trying to figure out the best word for “carve.”)

So I stick around in the kitchen for a while and cook dinner, enjoying the spectacle of pumpkin preparation. Wine and beer flowed heavily, and yet no one chopped off a finger. Excellent!

Eventually I noticed commotion coming from Team Finland, so I walked down the hall to see what was going on. Evidently Jukka had invited over some gorgeous Finnish and Italian friends, who of course wanted to go clubbing that night. Jukka and his friend Joonas were busy entertaining the pretty girls as best they could, which basically meant they sat around while the girls put Halloween makeup on them. Obviously I didn’t want to miss out.

You know what’s great about Finns? They drink vodka. Like, a bottle each. It’s absolutely absurd.

So we get all tricked out, looking like the suave zombies we are, and decide to head on out. We’d heard that the International Club at our university was going to meet at a bar, so we figured we’d go there first and see whether we couldn’t appropriate any additional members for our entourage.

Found the bar, found the foreigners, grabbed some fun ones. Basically we are the most fun international students, but whatever. It doesn’t hurt to spread around the love, I suppose. We then hopped on a tram to Nachtgalerie, which is allegedly the club in Munich for students. It was very pricey to get in at 10€ cover (9€ for students), but thereafter beers were only 1€ or so, so essentially you pay the same price you would for a night elsewhere.

We stayed there from about midnight till 4am, then finally decided to come home, have some sandwiches and tea, and then crash. I slept until 2:30pm today. It was awesome.

I took way more pictures than anyone will ever care to look at, but hey, Flickr gives me unlimited storage and bandwidth, so you’re damn right I’m gonna use it. Deleting is a thing of the past!

View the other 128 pics from that night here.

1. We all got really drunk.
2. The ticket we used to get in on Saturday was valid for Sunday as well.
3. There were phenomenally beautiful girls pouring the wine (I’m pretty sure they were beautiful before the wine).
4. We stayed until the end of the event, at which point asking to taste a wine got you a full glass and the bottle handed to you to take home.
5. We walked home with about 12 bottles of wine.
6. On the walk home, I guess I was jostling around a bit too much because I was maybe sort of tipsy, and a cork blasted off one of the bottles I was carrying against my chest and almost took my head off.

Yup, that’s pretty much it. Here’s me with my battle wound:

And for good measure, here’s a picture of Matt wasted out of his mind:

Full album here.

On Saturday, I left the winetasting early in order to meet up with my pal Sascha and go scope out some guitars with him. (I didn’t buy one, so don’t skip to the end to find out!)

We were able to catch each other with enough time to hop on a train and head out to the closest thing Munich has to a mall, which was really just several stores in close proximity to one another. It’s called Olympiaeinkaufzentrum (Olympic Shopping Center). There is a McDonalds there.

The only dedicated guitar store there closed at 7pm instead of 8pm, so we didn’t have a chance to check that out. Fortunately, though, there was a decent electronics store that also sold low-end guitars and amps, and I definitely found an axe I fell in love with. Cheap as all hell, too. More about that later.

After shredding for about 45 minutes or so, it became clear that we should head out, as the store was getting ready to close. Where we were was actually north of home, even though we had had to travel to the central train station in Munich’s centercity in order to get up there. Since we had to overshoot home anyway to get back to the central station, we figured that once there, we would take a different train and head out west to a neighborhood called Pasing, where Sascha’s old apartment is.

He still has his old drumset out there, locked up in a cellar room, and he knows people in the neighborhood from whom we could borrow a guitar and an amp. So we did just that, and had a fantastic jam session together, drinking copious amounts of beer and riffing ourselves stupid. Sascha says he likes my lead runs, and he’s a much better drummer than I, so we’ve made a deal to teach each other what we know. He already had my up to snuff on several hard rock beats on the drums, for when he had to show off some rhythm guitar riffs he’d written.

After about an hour or two of that, we were sweaty and pretty drunk and hungering for a metal concert, though we didn’t know of any in Munich that night. So instead, on a recommendation from a friend of Sascha’s who’d come with us to attend the jam session, we decided to hit up a Munich club called Rockstudio, which I see posters for freaking everywhere.

It was great. For nine bucks, you get three beers and three shots of Jäger or tequila or vodka. Unfortunately the beer was Becks, but you can’t complain about the price. So in turn, each of us threw a ten euro bill at the bartender and treated the others. Oh man, what a blast.

Come see all the pics.

The crew who went along was Team America, all but one of the Americans who live in the dorm, he who decided it would make more sense to stay in Munich over the weekend and attend an early Halloween party Saturday night. Yeah, he must’ve met a girl or something, I dunno.

We only had three Germans in tow, but they’re pretty much the coolest of the bunch. We had some very last minute cancellations, which snowballed into more, because the tickets we were traveling on required 5 people per ticket. We ended up going with 15 instead of the 18 or 19 we had wanted. Damn, but still fun!

I have no idea where to start with the stories. There are so, so many. I don’t have sufficient bandwidth to upload the photos from this connection, but I’ll start early in the morning, once I hit campus.

I am totally going back to Prague. Jesse’s birthday was yesterday and we’ve decided that pretty much every birthday should be spent in Prague, or at the very least not in the city where one lives.

Till tomorrow.

I shall begin with the winetasting.

I forget who heard about this event first, but by sometime last week it was pretty well decided that we would push back our weekend in Prague until the last week of October, so that we could make sure to hit up the supposedly-very-cheap winetasting. And man am I glad we did.

Tickets for the winetasting were 15€, but if you came as a group, the were only 10€, plus it was valid for both Saturday and Sunday. Not too shabby a start. We then proceeded to make our way around the indoor running track where the event was set up, hitting up some dark wines and moving on down toward rosés and white wines. I don’t know whether it makes sense to do things in that order, but the dark wines were next to the stairs where we entered, and I assume the layout was planned with the location of the stairs kept firmly in mind.

I can’t believe how much I learned about wine. I guess it’s easy to learn a lot about something when you have absolutely no previous knowledge, but I’m still all psyched about this. The staff at every single table was extremely willing to discuss the nuances of the wines, as well as select one to match my preferences. Armed with a few marketing phrases, Alex (my doppelganger) and I very quickly began to review the wines in cryptically oblique snippets of wannabe-connoisseurism. For example:

“This wine is particularly friendly.”
“A wonderfully tall wine, to be sure.”
“Deeply rich corners bolster this wine’s fittingness across the board.”
“The aftertaste is more or less orthogonal to that of most red wines.”

There was another particularly choice conversation which cropped up after yet more wine was consumed. The lot of us had gotten onto the subject of who was older, as we’re not all in the same year of study. Matt is seems is the youngest, with me a month or two older, and Carl then a month or two older than I. Somebody starts ripping on Matt for being a baby, and he turns to Carl and says, “You’re headed for oblivion before me, buddy.” Which I must say was rather antithetical to the atmosphere of gaiety we’d been trying to culture all afternoon.

But this jab made me realize that I had a real leg-up on Carl here. I began to fantasize about the cyborgial augmentations and accoutrements which the future holds in store for me.

“Yeah, man! Matt and I are gonna live long enough to take advantage of the technological and medical affordances which will come into being merely days after your death. Then I’ll be ramping over your grave in my racecar of life, speeding ever onward into greater virility and power.”

A few of us debated the plausibility of this for a while, until Alex interrupted to ask:

“Dude, where did you get this ‘racecar of life’? I feel like I’m stuck over here with rollerskates of life. They have sweet bearings, though.”

Oh, humor. You slay me every time. I really did find that so hilarious that I had to make sure to reproduce it here. I’m sorry if it falls flat on its face without twelve glasses of wine. Although if you’re reading this blog without having first had twelve glasses of wine, joke’s on you.

That was pretty much the thing. Half of us cut out early for different reasons, I to go hang with Sascha and possibly find a guitar.

View all photos here.

He wasn’t joking about that breakfast. It was phenomenal! Schnitzel, egg noodles (I don’t know how else to translate what they are), a kind of omelette, some toast, and a 1.5L bottle of Mezzo Mix, which is a very popular drink here, a mix of orange soda and cola. Nice.

So we talk about music, concerts—we’ve both decided not to go to the überexpensive Dream Theater and Symphony X concert, despite the throngs of girls that’d surely be there—and what we had planned for the day. I’m working on my laptop in the kitchen, with music playing softly while we breakfast and converse. An acoustic Opeth song comes on, and he immediately interrupts me, says, “You played that. You played that song on my guitar, didn’t you?” He was right, I did, several weeks ago when we were drunk and hanging out in his room. I couldn’t believe he recognized the song so quickly, especially given that he didn’t know it when I played it in his room the first time.

He compliments my acoustic prowess, saying most metalheads are all about heavy distortion and compression and can’t do shit without an amp. I agree that most are that way, at least the n00bz. We begin talking about how we should play more together, and how I need to pick up a guitar and all that, and how badly we each want to get good at drums.

Sascha offered to spend the day guitar shopping, so I can scope out how much it might cost to pick up an axe and amp. He said we could sometime soon pick up his drumset from his friend’s house and install it in the basement of our dorm building, so we could play with each other.

This is shaping up to be the greatest year in history.