For the coming weekend my university here has organized a trip to Taipei for all the international students. I should get to meet a fair number of people. I hear there are some Dutch and French people, as well as lots from various Southeast Asian countries, so it should be a pleasant time.

I’ve saved many Taipei activities for this trip, as at least some of it will be on the school’s tab. That said, here are a few things I was lucky enough to see on my last trip.

Upon arriving to the city, I was able to bear witness to a gorgeous sunset.

I love the motion of the bicyclist in this picture.

The plan was originally to make it to Taipei 101 in time to photograph the mountains in sunset, but it took a while to get to that part of town. By the time I did get to it, it was fully dark, so I just took pictures of the outside of the building, rather than paying to go all the way to the time.

There was a splendid foot court in the basement complex, though. I wasn’t as adventuresome as I usually am in terms of food, because I saw fried rice and noodles and went wild, and everything was about US$1 a plate. Hell, yeah!

Nighttime is a great time to wander around and snap pics of things and places I can’t identify, but are pretty.

Sorry I’ve been tossing together only photo posts with very little narrative or speculative content. Things are fun here and there is much beauty of all kinds. Still sorting through all of that.

]]> http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/02/a-small-taste-of-taipei/feed/ 4 http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/12/metalsucksnet-is-the-greatest-publication-humanity-has-to-offer/ http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/12/metalsucksnet-is-the-greatest-publication-humanity-has-to-offer/#comments Wed, 13 Aug 2008 03:49:24 +0000 Conor http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/?p=601 The metal blog world is a dark and lame place. I won’t even link to Blabbermouth; the commenters there bested only by YouTubers in terms of heart-wrenching hebetude. Sure, Invisible Oranges has the best title imaginable—and I do believe that 90% of having a decent website is the URL (yes, I fail that test)—but it’s an MP3 blog and doesn’t talk too much about the culture of the metal world.

Enter MetalSucks, by far the wittiest and most censorious metal publication around. Why do I love them so much? First, they turned me onto Metal Inquisition. I discovered Protest The Hero through MetalSucks. And finally, they give me free shit.

We asked you to come up with BBQ-related puns of metal bands, albums or songs, and you delivered. So much so that we had a damn hard time choosing just 1 winner! I wish I could hug all of you, but this is not little league and only one of you can win the following prize pack:

Graveyard BBQ – Greatest Hits Vol. II
Filter – Anthems For the Damned
Kataklysm – Prevail
Sepultura – The Best of Sepultura
Early Man – Closing In
The Sword – Gods Of The Earth

Yeah, I totally won that shit. They’ve already e-mailed me and said the loot is in the mail. The winning entry?

Conor: “Protest The Gyro”

I’m proud. Bite me.

I’ll certainly post again once it’s arrived, but in the mean time, click through and give these guys some hard-earned traffic.

MetalSucks ATE MY BALLS!!~!!!1!!
(click here)

I ended up staying at the bar with the tour group until 7pm. I met up with my boss, gave him the money from the tour, received my cut, then kept drinking. People on the tour bought me many drinks, and even kept tipping me at the bar—long after the tour, and long after they had already tipped me.

After leaving the bar, on the walk home I passed an electronics store, one that I know has a pretty decent selection of metal CDs. Because of the extra pay, I figured today was the day, and I bought the new Arsis CD.

/

I was quite drunk upon arriving home, and there, many friends gifted me beer. This means my buzz is still going, even as I write this. I’m afraid I won’t be able to give this CD a fair listen while so intoxicated, and tomorrow I work a double shift. That means it’ll probably be Friday night before I give this album the focused listen it deserves, and probably several days (or 10 minutes) after that before I craft a post about it.

The bros in the building are grilling outside tonight, and I’m going to join them. Beer is plentiful, and bratwurst also.

It is a good day to be alive.

We have a little saying around these parts. It started among the Americans, actually, but it’s since spread to the Germans. The saying is, as you can guess, “six Maßes later.”

If you don’t know what a Maß is, here’s a little help.

The Maß (“measure”) is an old Austro-Bavarian unit of volume, now typically used for measuring beer. Originally it measured 1.069 litres, equivalent to 2.259 US pints, or 1.881 UK pints. Nowadays, a Maß is defined as exactly 1 litre.

OK, so now we’re clear on that much, I hope.

This little ditty of a saying cropped up around the time of Oktoberfest, and has remained in the vernacular due to our would-be-alcoholic-in-any-part-of-the-world-except-Bavaria lifestyle. “Six Maßes later” pretty much means “fucked up beyond all belief,” that the world is in a completely different state, and the laws of the universe now longer necessarily hold true.

If you’ve somehow made a grave mistake, you can invoke this face-saving adage and all is well. I’ve relied upon it several times myself.

Theory in practice

As can be expected, there are some epic tales associated with this expression.

Tale the First: Craig astray

There was a night a while back, let’s say a Friday, when we decided to go drinking. Because a Maß at any beer hall will usually run you about €7, the standard protocol has become to buy a case at a beer store and pregame with that. (A case will be €15-20, for 10L. Hella cheaper.)

We had pregamed. Then, since there were a bunch of visitors in town that weekend, we decided it was an appropriate night for Hofbräuhaus. More Maßes were consumed, and although I didn’t make it to six myself, good ol’ Craig did.

Craig is a rugby player. Big guy. We didn’t realize how drunk he was until he tried to tell us a story on the tram on the way to Hofbräuhaus. Then, once there, he dumped in two more, and that made for six.

As we were all sitting around the table, laughing stupidly, clomping our glasses around and punching one another if any spilled, someone noticed that Craig was missing. We checked the bathrooms and everything, but he was nowhere to be found. We concluded that he’d had enough and had decided to go home, which was reasonable. It wasn’t until late in the afternoon on the following day that we heard the true story.

Poor, muscular, wasted Craig did indeed decide it was time to go home. He was able, even six Maßes later, to compute that in order to get home, he had to take public transportation. Unfortunately he selected the subway instead of the tram, which didn’t make a lot of sense for where we were in the city. He even got on the wrong subway line, one that didn’t lead in the direction of home at all.

As he explained to us, his reasoning went like this: He noticed that the stops on the subway weren’t ones he wanted. So he decided to stick it out until the train went somewhere he needed to be. This wasn’t such a good idea. He ends up at the end of the line, somewhere in south Munich, and has to get off. He starts walking around that area of town, looking for something he recognizes. Craig wasn’t wearing a coat, and as this happened in February, he gradually (once again, Craig is a big guy) grew cold. He decided to start jogging in order to keep warm.

While jogging, he of course covered ground more quickly. This only led to exasperation, as he realized that he had no idea where the hell he was, and couldn’t find a way back home. So he began to run. (See what I mean? This decision doesn’t make too much sense without the six Maßes.) He was drunk, so ended up slipping on wet cobblestone, fell hard, and cut up his hand.

He was still freezing at this point, and now a little sore, so he went up to an apartment building and pressed every single button until someone buzzed him in. He lumbered into the lobby and slept underneath the stairs there.

When he woke up, he was sober enough to find his way back home and relate his adventures to us.

Tale the Second: Conor goes whoomp

OK, so this one time I got utterly plastered and kinda sorta fell asleep in a weird section of a bar and woke up way past closing time and the bar was locked so I couldn’t leave so I just kinda went back to sleep and then when the owner came in at 6am to open up I scared the hell out of him and asked if I could go and he said yeah so I left.

I didn’t think anyone would believe this story so I took a picture of myself shortly after coming to.

Let us never speak of this again.

There is no escape

The motivation to write this post was last night’s shift at the pizza place. The shop owner is a great guy, OK? Just awesome. I really enjoy working for him, because he’s a total bro.

Last night my shift started at 6pm. When I got there, he seemed happy. He seemed like three Maßes worth of happy, and that’s exactly what he was. He called me over to the part of the kitchen where he prepares the pizzas, and he lifts up a tin foil container that had been resting on something. He wanted to show me the six empty beer bottles he’d been concealing.

Everyone in the kitchen knew Ben was buzzed, so we started egging him on. I told my story about the phrase “six Maßes later,” and after much disbelief (“You fucking American, you probably didn’t even taste beer until you were 14, and you’re telling us you can drink six Maßes?”), it was unanimously agreed that Ben had to go for 12 beers. (Bottles are 0.5L.)

Well, let it be known that before closing time, Ben made it to six. And he was gone. The deadline for employee orders is 10:30pm, a half hour before the shop is closed down, so I made sure to ask him to make me a pizza around that time. I had to repeat my order several times, even though it was the same pizza I order every freaking night (Odin Pizza). He said he would try.

I got stuck doing the last run, and when I was back at 11:15pm, the guys in the kitchen were dying with laughter, and asked me to try my pizza. That gustatory-archaeological expedition yielded the following pizza makeup, from bottom layer to top: dough, tomato sauce, cheese, potatoes au gratin, peanut butter, bacon, red onions, broccoli, and peppers.

And you know what? It was fucking great.

Only in Bavaria can one hope to see their boss six liters deep, tripping over invisible things, yet still pressing onward with work. God I love this place.

]]> http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/10/six-mases-later/feed/ 6 http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/02/hard-work-is-no-problem-if-your-boss-is-an-ok-dude/ http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/02/hard-work-is-no-problem-if-your-boss-is-an-ok-dude/#comments Thu, 01 May 2008 23:56:02 +0000 Conor http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/?p=542 Holiday my ass

I didn’t get home until after midnight tonight. Today (yesterday) was maypole day, which is a federal holiday, so not a damn thing was open. But Joey’s was. That means we had a lot of orders. Dude. We had a lot of orders.

On any given evening, we’ll usually have two drivers on mopeds and two with cars. This is the most effective way to deal with orders at varying distances from the shop: if it’s five or more kilometers away, a car driver usually takes it, unless it’s especially busy. Using this system, we can usually keep the que of orders below five. This means that whenever I’m heading out on a delivery, I punch in on the computer that the address has been taken by me, and I see at most five deliveries qued up for when I get back. (Generally there’s maybe one left by the time I’m back, because the other drivers snap them up.)

Tonight, we had at least seven drivers for the entire evening. There were times when eight and nine people were driving. Even with that many drivers, I never saw the que dip below 20 orders. It was absolutely insane.

The guys in the kitchen kept remarkably cool, despite how hectic the day felt, but I find that very typically German. Racing in and out of the kitchen to scoop up a new order or two to deliver, I had to yell to the chefs just a meter or two away from me, because there were so many pans and things banging around.

More deliveries != more tips

I guess I let the business get to me, because I certainly seemed flustered on at least one delivery I did. It was quite away for a moped delivery, but it was ready and I was the first one back to the shop that time, so I took it. The place was nested in a maze of one-way streets, making getting to it an absolute bitch. It was also around 7pm, near the university district, meaning the sidewalks were packed and I couldn’t hop up onto them and cruise around ignoring traffic laws.

When I finally did find the building, which I’d passed back and forth several times while walking on the sidewalk, because the street address plaque was completely obscured by construction scaffolding, I rang the dude on the top floor and then took a quick nap in the elevator on the way up.

The guy answers the door, speaks very competent German, but with an American accent I can hear clear as day. I ask him, in English, “So, where are you from?” And he smiles and says, “New York.” When I tell him I’m from Philly, he’s practically ecstatic in disbelief, and we chat for awhile about what he’s doing in Germany. Not wanting to overstay my welcome, and not wanting to let that que of orders back at the shop get any longer, I bid him adieu and head out.

Back at the shop, I scoop up a new order, but get stopped by the boss.

“Were you just at [such-and-such an address]“?
“Yup, that was me.”
“The guy just called and says you didn’t give him any change back.”
“I didn’t?”
“He says he gave you a 50.”
“He did? I don’t really remember that.”
“He also says you forgot the cigarettes.”

At this point I tap my coat pocket and, feeling that they’re gone, declare that I definitely gave them to the guy, because I’d totally put them in that pocket before leaving. So if I don’t have them anymore… that means I gave them to him. Right? Right??

So now I have to drive back there, obviously, and give this guy €25. What a jerk, right? This only sucks because if he really doesn’t have the cigarettes, that means I’m out €4, which is like 10 deliveries’ worth of tips. Damn!

On the drive back, see the pack of cigarettes lying in the road, hopelessly flattened by the wheels of many passing BMWs. I circled around and scooped up the pack in a lull in the traffic. (I parked the moped at the curb and walked over to get them, so don’t picture me rocketing down Türkenstrasse and snatching them up off the ground while moving, all Legolas style or something.

So I did lose €4 on that delivery, but the dude was kind enough to tip me €2 for coming the whole way back. Still, €2 seems a little stingy for an American.

Greatest boss in the world

The night was long and arduous. By the time we closed at 11pm, we hadn’t even begun the after-hours work, which basically consists of scrubbing down every surface in the place. But fortunately with so many drivers on, we were able to split up the load and knock everything out in a very short amount of time. Then the fun began.

There is a 10:30pm deadline for employee orders. Usually each driver will take a pizza home with them after the shift, as we get 75% off. Tonight, as I was running between deliveries, I noticed the clock at 10:32pm and shouted an order before running out the door. The guys in the kitchen heard me fine, and yelled back, approximately, “No. No fucking way.” I was starving by this point and argued right away. I said, again approximately, “Dude, I don’t care if you’re busy. Just make me a damn pizza, because I am not going home without having eaten.”

One of the kitchen guys calls me over, tells me to set down the pizzas I’m carrying and take off my helmet (it was so busy, I didn’t even take my helmet off coming in and out of the place). He then leads me over to the back wall, and points to a sheet of paper taped up there. At the top of the sheet, it says “McD List.” He tells me that they in the kitchen are so freaking sick of pizza today, that there won’t be any employee orders. So I should write down what I want from McDonalds, and they’ll send someone over to pick it up for me.

I really wanted an Odin Pizza, but I understood the situation and wrote something down. I did my last run, came back and helped clean up, and by the time it was all over, the food had arrived.

The lot of us sat out in the restaurant area and pigged out. I’d just gotten my tips settled, so I pulled out my cash and asked how we were going to settle everything. I’d come a bit late to the table, so I wasn’t sure what was up, whether we had separate receipts for each order, or what. The guys at the table just yelled over to Ben, the boss, “Thanks, boss!”

I look over at Ben. He looks at me steadily, hoping I’ll understand. I kind of do, but the American and Catholic parts of me are screaming to pay someone. He waves me off, and says, “Fuck that. Just eat up.” I laugh and sit down with everyone else, take a huge bite out of my Big Mac, and shout “Thanks, boss!” Everyone laughs and echos the sentiment, yet again.

Ben laughs, too, still at the computer settling the records for the day, then says, “Go grab a beer, you bastard. On the house. Everything’s on the house tonight.”

So I did.

It is amazing how much a free burger and a beer does for employee gratitude. I want to work for these people now.

The other day, Alex came in during the daytime shift to check his hours for the week, and Ben asked whether he could fill in for someone in the evening. Alex had been looking forward to having the night off, but money is money, and favors are favors, so he said that he would. That night, at about 9pm, when things were starting to calm down, Ben sent him home, made him a pizza himself, and didn’t charge him for it.

It’s all about the little things in life. (Although I hestitate to dub anything as epic as an Odin Pizza “little.”)

Hooboy.

Turns out that when I’m not working, I can still order pizzas for delivery at 50% off. That’s nice. But now while on shift, instead of a free pizza, it’s 75% off. So I had to pay €1.60 for my pizza tonight, and I was pissed. At the rates Germans tip, that’s like 4 tips piled up together and deducted from my earnings for the evening.

It worked out OK, I guess, because they let me off a half hour early, which meant I got to drive the entire shift—Sundays are by far our busiest days—and then jump ship as soon as the mops and buckets were deployed.

But still, without that free pizza every night, I’m going to be in a bad mood coming off of work.

I just walked home in a cold spring rain with freshly baked bread warming my hands, crossed glistening cobblestone streets as the tram clattered by, the church bells splashing down the quiet corridors of shops, trying to remind me why people bake bread at all.

I don’t have any pictures of this, I didn’t record the smells. I failed to capture the warmth of that bakery, made real to me by a few locks of wet hair sticking to my face. My glasses fogged up when I entered. I mumbled something about the weather to the kind lady on the other side of the counter, and she handed me bread.

Everything is more than OK. I don’t mean in my life, I mean in the world. It’s all going to be fine.

Don’t try to save the world, because it doesn’t need it. Save the bakeries. Because once we lose them, all is darkness.

It’s still a really good time for me. But while googling for it, I found another very interesting take on this kind of copy moxy.

Dude, that’s fucking funny.

Will you just look at that? That’s a freaking feast right there. Turkey, cheese, lettuce, black pepper, bacon, toasted bread… then some juice and milk for good measure.

I remember one time, walking back from a beer hall with some friends, my good brother Carl said, “Man, you guys are great. But not as great as sandwiches.”

Indeed, Carl. Indeed.

I got up and read for a bit, browsed my feeds, made myself an edible omelette, lacking cheese and pepper, as I’m out of both of those. Around 11am or so, one of the Germans from upstairs knocks on my door, invites me upstairs for breakfast.

“Oh, thanks, I’ve actually already eaten.”
“But you should eat with us.”
“Um, yeah. Well, what are you guys having?”
“Weißwurst.”
“I’m there.”

So I hustle upstairs and indeed there’s a full Bavarian breakfast laid out, a pot of weißwurst on the table, two still floating in the cloudy water with my name on them. Everybody had a glass of wheat beer, and there was a tray of hot pretzels fresh out of the oven. Man, what a thing to wake up to.

I’d just started transferring my pictures from last night when Benny knocked on my door, so unfortunately I wasn’t able to photograph the spread. But it was nice.

After eating, there was a lot of mumbling and staring at the walls, everybody dealing with his own various aches and pains from an all-too-long Saturday night. Eventually someone proposed we just go back to bed for two or three hours and see each other later on, perhaps at 6pm for bowling.

Bowling in Germany? I told them I’d sleep on it.

Well, as I’m coming back to stock my room with yet another case of beer, I bump into Carl, who has to go grocery shopping. Blast. I get one-man peer-pressured into tagging along, and do indeed scoop up some healthy comestibles and shove them in my bag before hustling off to class.

This Monday evening class is on a different campus, about twenty minutes distant by foot. Since I was at the grocery store, I had to hustle to keep that at twenty minutes. It was a delightfully frigid autumn night.

I get there about four minutes late and plop down in the lecture hall, stripping my coat off and dealing with my hoodie by rolling up the sleeves. The room is warm. The prof is lecturing about different elements and their radioactive properties, and it’s all pretty badass. Then his assistant wheels out a cart of contraptions, and the professor bids him turn off the lights.

They use a magic lightning gun and zap cool glass tubes and bright colors flash and breakdance within. It’s like I’m tripping. The room is warm, the lights are still out.

Zonk.

The lights come back on eventually and I kind of wake up, happily snug in my hoodie. Then the professor remembers a certain glass doohickey that he forgot to zap and clicks the lights back out.

Zonk.

Man, I felt like a bird. For the rest of the lecture I was totally narcoleptic, and it sucked, because the material was fairly interesting. I mean, radioactivity is thumbs up, right?

Came home and was lazy about dinner, just made some store-bought tortellini. Tomorrow morning I’m going to dump a little bit of everything I bought into a scrumptious and massive omelette.

Life is good.

Zonk.

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.

Other errands today include shopping for boring stuff like groceries and soap (scrubbed myself silly in the shower today) and exciting stuff like possibly a router. Being away for a week, I kind of forgot that I don’t really get internet in my room. Oddly enough, this problem wasn’t solved in my absence. I do remember reading before I went away, though, that there was to be a meeting on this past Monday with staff from the student housing who were supposed to explain why the dorm doesn’t yet have internet, which I presume means they laid themselves prostrate and begged in seven different languages not to be scalped.

The pictures aren’t too special. I think there are some dazzling ones of a sunset on the river in Florence, then–surprise, surprise–pictures of Saturday night drinking. There are hardly any pictures from the conference, merely because it was so freaking classy, I didn’t want to be snapping pics every two seconds. I did make sure to capture some priceless PowerPoint slides, though.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned, because I’m sure I’ll eventually feel like telling some funny stories. I just have to decide which ones are funny and are suitable to be blogged about. (Oh, dear!) And I’m pretty tired for the moment, considering everybody in my building already asked me about the weekend. I’m through playing skald for the time being.

Boy, never thought I’d say that.

Friday afternoon we head out to the train station, hop on a train that depart around 5:45pm, if I remember correctly. It’s straight from Munich to Prague, but we don’t arrive until 11:30pm. Since we got in so late, we didn’t feel it would be worthwhile, so we spent the whole night partying, and found a hostel around 8am on Saturday morning.

There were those among us who decided to go without sleep at all between Friday and Saturday, and so once at the hostel, just washed and headed right back out, taking no nap to recuperate and sleep off the booze. That sounds like a blast and all, but it meant that by 8pm or so on Saturday, they were so dead tired they slept through Saturday night and on into Sunday. Mistake!

The cool people (myself included) played it right by sleeping from around 9am till 1pm on Saturday. The rest of Saturday consisted of cruising around the city, trying to be as touristy as possible, so we could party again at night. It worked well.

I’d say my favorite part of the entire weekend was dinner on Saturday night. We (I) found this gorgeous little open air restaurant set up literally beneath the Charles Bridge. There were open fires strewn about the few tables, and the heat warmed the stones of the bridge and made it feel like you were dining in a comfortably toasty oven.

I had the best filet mignon of my life. Alex, my doppelganger, got the duck and loved it, so I think it’s fair to say that I’d've enjoyed it, too. Everything was spectacular, and the best part is we got to pay in Czech crowns. (About 30 crowns to 1 euro, man!)

Then after dinner we sought out some nice bars, and had a slower evening than on Friday. Then suddenly it was midnight, which meant it was Jesse’s birthday, and that changed all the rules. Matt and Alex and I bought drinks for everyone all night long. Matt and I opened with a volley of B-52s and lit them on fire and made everyone drink them together, then Alex started pouring absinthe down Jesse’s gullet by the shotful. We got him to submit before the night was over, the punk.

Also, I cannot possibly why, but when completely hammered, Jesse has an insatiable urge to tell tales. Fortunately there was a camera involved (unfortunately not mine, so I can’t show at the moment), so we have video of him recounting a thoroughly nonsensical epic about our night’s antics, all done in his trademark impeccable German. I’m told the video will wind up on YouTube soon enough, so just hang in there.

So, since I don’t feel like relating any of the better anecdotes right now (like how we accidentally stumbled into a strip club and didn’t notice because we were so tired and drunk, then Andreas noticed and went down to the runway, sat down as close as possible to it as he could, then promptly fell asleep, only to be awoken by a stiletto heel to the chest from a very attractive, very angry naked girl), I’ll just leave you with the pictures and let you piece together our exploits. It’ll be like a Choose Your Own Adventure book.

1. Prague (Friday into Saturday)
2. Prague (Saturday)
3. Prague (Sunday)

Mad props to Will on this one.

Oh, and anyone not currently listening to DJ Nite – Durance of Hate on Uberguilds Radio, TUNE IN IMMEDIATELY.

The party was 7€ admission, which is a bit ridiculous, and the beers were 2€. Well, I’m pretty sure the Augustiners in my room cost me 50 cents each, so that doesn’t really work. And plus I saw an awesome RPG at the electronics store the other day for only 5€, and it promised 9 hours of spoken German. The C&C3 game I bought? Tons of spoken German in HD video. It’s awesome.

But really the story is that the DAAD/SIP crew cooked chili for dinner and pigged out, had a couple beers, and I have an 8am lecture tomorrow morning, which I really shouldn’t miss. So 11pm raves on the other side of town are not a wise move at the moment.

Oh, and tomorrow is a late night out for me, the Dark Tranquillity, Soilwork, Sonic Syndicate, Caliban show! After that I have to rush home to catch what I can of DJ Nite madness.

At the moment I’m out on my balcony, enjoying what has proven to be an unusually warm night. It’s raining softly, the huge trees are swaying lazily in hope of a storm, their silhouettes impressive against the dull orange overcast city sky.

Even without an acoustic guitar, this is pretty perfect.

The Chinese class was spectacular and I’ll dedicate another post just to that. In the meantime I’ll mention that I was able to take a trip to Saturn, which is kind of like a Best Buy, I guess, and scoop up some vitals:

• a set of headphones, Sony MDR-V150s (way too bassy, oh my god)
• a mouse! didn’t want to spring for the Logitech G5 (I have some restraint!) so I instead got a knockoff copy that feels absolutely great in my hand. I’ll test it later on, of course, and know for sure whether its performance is up to par.
• Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. This has me really, really excited. The game itself should be a blast, and quite nostalgic at that, as this iteration returns to the old storyline about Tiberium and global conflict between GDI and Nod. But it only occurred to me after I bought the game that the entire game will be in German. How cool is that? Even all the cinematic live-action cutscenes will be dubbed! Incredible. I’ll try to post some nice audio clips over the coming weeks.
• a winter coat! It was 20€. It looks freaking sharp, and it fits great. Pictures later. (This was purchased not at the Best Buyish store, of course)

So that was great. I was not able to decide on a set of speakers, which I achingly crave, and which cost only 30-50€. I didn’t have the balls to spring for the 50€, so I deferred the purchase till a time when I’m hopefully operating on slightly less impulse.

This electronics store also happens to be in the famous part of town, with the huge city hall with the Gothic façade and the Munich Cathedral and all that. This means it’s pretty much the beer capital of the world. So all the DAAD/SIP scholars decided to convene there tonight and have dinner together, which was an excellent time. At my behest, we went to an Augustiner house, and the beer was just as wonderful as expected.

Everybody got their usual (it’s funny how regular we are already), and the food was fantastic, too. I got a wurst platter because I thought it would be socially untenable (if rather convenient in terms of funds purgation) to order several different plates of various wursts. I chose right, all though I was still hungry afterwards and got yelled at for being cranky.

That’s about it. I just got yelled at for not being social, so I’m going to head down to the kitchen and have a beer with everyone, then come on back here and enjoy the ridiculous bass in these headphones. I actually had to open my equalizer and reduce all the lowend frequencies, ugh.

\m/

Oh, and I tried to buy a cell phone but failed miserably. Maybe that’ll get its own post someday, too, if I ever feel like talking about it.

I had some scouting around to do, like hunting down a classroom building in a different part of town. On my way around, I thought, what the hell, and checked at a Deutsche Bank ATM. It worked. There are 3,301€ just chilling in my account right now, aching to be spent on beer. I withdrew only 200€, because, you know, I didn’t want to go crazy or anything.

Sad thing is, the Radioactivity class went till 7:45pm, and all stores in the city close at 8pm. So I didn’t get to do my spending spree to trick out my life tonight, which is probably a good thing, as hopefully I’ll be a little more in control tomorrow. But before I went to the class I was able to pop into the upscale grocery store across the street from our dorm to pick up the necessities, like a loaf of bread, a carton of eggs, and a case of Augustiner. I splurged and got Augustiner Edelstof, because, well, I could.

Tonight I live like a king.

Oh, AND MY SISTER WROTE ME A LETTER. I checked my mail when I came home tonight, because I wanted to laugh at overdraft notices from my bank, as the student housing department in Munich has been trying to withdraw our rent for September and October, as well as our housing deposit, but instead all I found was a letter. To me. From my sister.

THANK YOU!

On this lazy Sunday, on which so many of our crew are away traveling, a select few of us staked out the kitchen and made French toast. It was glorious. During the preparation of the eggy batter, I realized that we didn’t have maple syrup, and consequently had to dance carefully along boundary to madness. Turns out, however, that slathering things with butter makes them utterly edible, even delightful.

The rest of the day will be spent reading German newspapers and studying for all the classes I have tomorrow. But the present moment will be spent grokking this wonderful existence, sated to plumpness with eggy goodness gustatorily complemented by hints of cinnamon, vanilla, and about four and a half pounds of butter.

I wish this sensation upon everyone in the world.

But I suppose there are other opportunities, as well. So far a bunch of us (Americans, Germans, more) have planned a trip to Prague for the last weekend in October, which should be pretty killer. Unbelievably, we can get train tickets for six bucks each way. That’s 12€ for transportation, maybe another 10 for a night in a hostel, and the rest for über cheap, glorious Pragueorian beers. I’m looking forward to that.

But that leaves next weekend wide open. Sitting around the dinner table tonight, Jesse and I decided that next weekend was going to be spent in Vienna. It will be more expensive to get there by train than to get to Prague, most likely, but we’ll have stipends. And probably buckets of sauerkraut which could be traded for goods and/or services, so the train tickets won’t be a problem.

After this I think I’m going to try to get to France in November, as I mentioned earlier. I still owe my buddy Cihan up in Berlin a trip northward, and I’d like to take some extra time off to make that happen, so I could maybe swing around to Hamburg, maybe hit up Lübeck on the way or something. I haven’t decided yet. I could just save that for a separate trip, then poke out through Denmark and hit up the land of the Vikings that way. Maybe by then Jukka’ll’ve offered me a place on his couch in Finland. Maybe the couch will be a Nokia brand. That’d be sweet.

I could give him sauerkraut in exchange for letting me crash at his place.

Jukka, the resident Finn, was there, just finishing up preparing his breakfast. I set about to throwing together a quick omelette, and we chatted whilst readying our comestibles. I asked whether it’d be OK if I put on some music, knowing full well it would be, because he’s from Finland and listens to metal. Well, somehow this poor bastard hadn’t heard of Mors Principium Est, which blew my mind, but he knew all the other requisite names. We ate and talked over the following playlist:

1. Mors Principium Est – Parasites Of Paradise
2. Panic! At The Disco – The Only Difference Between Martyrdom And Suicide Is Press Coverage
3. Into Eternity – Beginning Of The End
4. Turisas – As Torches Rise
5. Novembers Doom – The Pale Haunt Departure
6. Insomnium – The Day It All Came Down

How fantastic is that? If you answered “very,” you are correct.

As usual, Jukka had made a small pot of coffee for the morning, and offered me the final cup. I gladly accepted, number one because I haven’t had coffee in ages, and number because I knew he was being especially gracious by offering. The other day he saw me in the hall and bade me enter his room, where he rummaged through the exposed entrails of a carepackage from back home to find a tiny green box, from which he extracted a tinier piece of chocolate-covered candy. “Finnish candy is the best,” he said. And indeed it was. He couldn’t have had many pieces in that box, so I was touched that he wanted to share it rather than hoard it.

So I try Jukka’s coffee, and it was just awesome. Before I could compliment him, though, he excused himself for the poor quality and explained that German coffee just isn’t as good as Finnish coffee I told him that the coffee I was tasting seemed much better than what I’m used to in America, and he raised his eyebrows. It’s at least nice when people are surprised when I tell them tales of inferior products and standard of living in America. That or they’re well mannered enough to feign surprise.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the people I meet here are very proud of what they’re used to back home, whether home for them is a town just outside of Munich or at the other end of the continent. I don’t often see this level of product patriotism from the Americans here, probably because they’re genuinely convinced that stuff over here is just better

I’ll have to try to pick up some Finnish coffee, if it beats the stuff I had this morning.

Oh, and Jukka also assured me it was cheaper in Finland than here in Germany, which doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Maybe they’re growing their own up there under the ice or something.

One of my favorite things about Munich is that buying a bottle of beer is always cheaper than buying a Coke. How cool is that? I’ll have to get a pic of the two of them side by side in a drink case, prices displayed.

I am fed–gorged, in fact–and could not be happier. I’ll probably stay in tonight, as the stipend isn’t due till next Wednesday, and I don’t have too many bux to throw around just yet. (Dollar to Euro conversion is painful!)

I have much work to do. A little for Simone, some reading for my classes, and innumerably many other projects to work on. I might go out for another stroll, soak in the crisp autumn air, then get cracking.

Who cares what I do? I have food and plenty of it!

I had heard tell that Germans love to socialize while preparing dinner. That’s already been proven quite a sound insight in the short time I’ve been here. Very few people in our building actually have TVs, as we’re students, and most of us are too poor to go out to bars often, as we’re students. But every so often, there’s a soccer game on, and Germans don’t miss German teams playing soccer. For this reason, TV tuners and antennas were procured for laptops, and on gamenights the largest laptop we can find is plunked down in the kitchen for all to behold.

Cooking ensues, as a kind of pre-game activity. Our floor of this building is somewhat limited in cooking resources, such as skillets and pots, but we only have two stoves for sixteen people, so there’s always a line anyway. Usually the top chefs will begin the off-the-stove preparations, such as chopping vegetables and coordinating spices. During this period the cooking n00bz will whip up some pasta and butter, or perhaps some sausage, but rarely anything more complex or toothsome.

When the top chefs take over, the n00bz retreat to seated positions and make sure the laptop is tuned to the right channel. They dine, their meal flavored with the aroma and laughter both so inherent to quality cooking. After eating, the table is cleared in preparation of the deployment of the real meals, and it is the top chefs’ turn to dine.

I don’t quite have my mind around the joy of cooking, but I know that it’s more complex than just the cooking. It might be greater than the joy of witnessing cooking, much as the artist undergoes a thrill unlike that of any who merely observe his work. But I think what’s really important is the witnessing of the witnessing, the feedback, the sharing, the community and the culture of indulgence. Stated in electrical engineering or anthropological terms, it means the same thing: Chefs love feeding people.

So in exchange for cooking classes and exceptional meals, I often wash dishes and help people configure their VPN clients. “No, you see, you’ve set it up only to receive e-mail, but to send you also need to configure SMTP. Is that honey I taste in this spaghetti sauce? Yes, a little wine next time would be a great idea!”

Yes, I took it specifically for my sister. Em, this thing was five bucks. No, I did not devour the whole thing myself. I needed many, many reinforcements.

All is well in Deutschland. And Switzerland evidently knows what’s up, too.

More pics here.

You go to the Aldi with your friends, and you scope around for some dece food. You’ve already been to Penny Markt this week, naturally—just yesterday, in fact—and so you’re pretty well provisioned already. For example, you have these badass balls of meat that you just plop into boiling butter you smeared around on the bottom of your skillet, they’re like a buck fifty for 500g of them, I mean, that’s street price, so, you’re good to go, if you’re so inclined. It’s hard to say. But then at Aldis, like, maybe there’s better junk, for less, because there’s a party in the kitchen tonight that you’re hosting and your friends don’t speak German too well, so it’s on you.

Then Carl spots the Sangria 1,5L bottles for a buck fifteen. Here’s the best part: we already live at the Haus der Blinden. So we’re good to go.

I mean, I’m game.

Then when your buds come back from the bar where they’re watching the Bavaria rape Cologne in the soccer match you roll over to the cornershop where you scoop up a couple cases of beer. It’s a party and we’re hosting, so we buy cheap, like Löwenbräu or something. None of that “I’m a classy erudite student, check me out, I don’t understand wine but that’s for pussies anyway so whatev” Augustiner stuff, not for tonight.

Actually, today Nico explained to us the above sentiment in his charming Irish accent:

Nico: “So, like, we’s heffing dis partee, right? Boot like, we just buy da cheap beers, it’s OK. When you drunk, it’s just beer, you know? So it’s OK, we buy da cheap stoof, an’ people, dey drink dat. Cool?”
Carl: “Actually, we picked up some Sangria at Aldis today. A buck fifteen for one and a half liters.”
Nico: “You guys uh ugly.”

So tonight should be pretty badass. We’ve invited pretty much everyone we’ve bumped into on the street while drunk, which, you can imagine, is a lot of people already. I can remember inviting the dude who worked at the McDonalds at 2am on Thursday night. He knew I was American because of my accent, and said maybe he’d show up at the party, I mean, as long as there were Americans to meet. (We are so cool over here, it’s great. Like n00b cool. But that’s still a kind of cool, you have to agree, although it is hard to say.) And Nico has mad, mad connections, beyond ours, which extend to the reaches of this dorm building, meaning that we’ve invited approximately four German people. But they’ll come, at least!

Maybe some pictures tonight. After we pick up the cases I want to come home and get some work done—hard drive maintenance chores, nothing exciting—and thereafter there should be a nice levee for those new to the dorm building. (Please try to understand that this category doesn’t really include me or the other Americans I’ve been talking about.) As always, I’ll try for pictures. I know that I’m behind on posting them.

Prost!