The night was long since then. It’s 7:17am and I am finally in my room in peace. I’m going to sleep for a while.

The best part? A friend called and informed me that all my classes for tomorrow are cancelled.

Now I manufacture Zs.

Final exams are drawing nigh. This is the last weekend for fooling around before I have to hit the books.

For the record, I really enjoy the fact that final exams are worth 100% of my grades. It at least motivates me to study for them, and it also means I can do fun stuff like travel and game during the semester, while studying only occasionally.

Here’s to procrastination. What can go wrong?

Tonight we make party. Updates in the future.

Two windows were intentionally smashed by some douchebag. That happens, I guess.

Our appointed student representative for the building has apparently already drafted a letter to the housing administration to have them bill this kid for the damage. A couple people at the party say they know people who know this kid, and so we’ll get his contact info eventually.

Been very social this weekend, and so haven’t posted too much, obviously. I have some projects to take care of on Sunday, like fixing a friend’s computer (read: reformatting the drive and installing Linux because Windows sucks hard), as well as rebuilding my own partition scheme, as I inadvertently wiped my partitions this week while trying to restructure the filesystems so I could listen to metal while gaming in Windows. Oh well.

So, tomorrow I should spend a lot of time sitting at my computer, meaning should be able to post more copiously.

A lot of people weren’t in on the party, because the first-year Germans (who fortunately all live on the highest floor of the building, meaning the party shouldn’t disturb them) have a huge pass/fail test tomorrow. But all the Germans who are in the middle of their careers at university say it’s a great idea, so we drink.

I’m on the fence because I have to get up early to go down to the municipal building in order to start the ball rolling on acquiring a working permit. I have my residency permit already, but I need to start aiming for a job so I can make myself so moneys. (A serious job, not like before.)

So, until tomorrow afternoon. Many things to catch up with here about. Here’s hoping I don’t kill the brain cells where those memories are stored.

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/

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.

After I sort my life out and make myself a bomb omelette, I’ll come back here and sift through the pictures of last night’s Thanksgiving bash to upload. All the Americans cooked for the whole building. I made Stove Top stuffing, because I suck at cooking (and because Jesse’s mom had mailed him some from the States).

Yesterday was a celebrated holiday, so I don’t think it’s any surprise I didn’t post. But for the record, I refrained from posting several times yesterday, just because the welcome page of the blog looked so damn good with the two posts When bored, party and Death walked the earth today side by side. It was freaking gorgeous, man.

Hereby I wreck that order, like a tankard full of gluhwein will dash your coherence asunder amid heaps of stuffing and rivulets of gravy.

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.

Bad news is, I’m on my last beer, and it’s 8pm, so the stores just closed. Every store in the whole freaking city is closed by 8pm. Sigh to that.

Problem is, the no cover charge is at the tremendously huge club Nachtgalerie (remember Halloween?), which none of the cool Germans wants to visit, because apparently it’s for lamers and little kids. Now, I don’t quite understand how these Germans think it a viable avenue of persuasion to tell a bunch of drunk college kids that a place sucks because it has lots of underage girls, but hey, we call that cultural differences in the biz.

In other news, if anyone has massive amounts of bits they need shoved around in cyberspace, please let me know, because I’m aching to use this ridiculous bandwidth at my disposal. Bonus points if the proposed use wouldn’t result in breaking international laws.

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.

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.

My friend Mark, whom I met at Drexel years ago in German classes, did come and visit me, and even brought a friend. He and the friend arrived in Munich on Friday afternoon, and I didn’t meet up with them until 8pm on Saturday night, because I hadn’t received Mark’s e-mails about where and when to meet him. He sent them alright, but I didn’t read them. So heads up to anyone planning to visit me: I suck.

Mark and his friend are both on the DAAD/SIP scholarship that I’m on, except they study in Berlin instead of Munich. (We also have another Drexelian in Cologne. At the moment, though, I believe he’s in Thailand with his girlfriend. Way to go, Nik.) This means that they can actually speak German! So my German friends chided me for bringing more Americans to our dorm, then became ecstatic when they learned that these Amis could speak German. Mark’s conversational German is even better than mine, which is saying a lot, if I do say so myself. It was a grand time.

Here the photographic proof of fun.

Tomorrow’s the first day of classes. I should get some sleep.

I’m sitting outside now with about six other people (mostly Americans), all of whom are taking advantage of this hotspot. So, understandably, the pictures are taking a long time to upload! I’ll do them in batches and link one by one as soon as they’re up. At this rate, I’ll have to go back inside and recharge my battery before getting more up.

*****

OK, I wrote all that six hours ago. Sucks. But it’s really hard to stay focused on your computer when there are a billion people (guessimation) around you. So I ran out of battery.

But I finally got the pics up!

• Oktoberfest – Day One
• Oktoberfest – Day Two
• Oktoberfest – Day Three
• Video of inside a tent at Oktoberfest

So, sorry that took me so long to get up, but hopefully it’s worthwhile. Later on I’ll reminisce and share some particularly risible anecdotes.

Also, I should mention that I’ve replaced the videos on Eisbach, one more time with ones that have sound. My bad on posting ones without.

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!