I just heard back regarding the scholarship this week, and the news was good.

May 30, 2008

Dear Conor,

Congratulations! On behalf of the Freeman Foundation and the Institute of International Education (IIE), we are delighted to inform you that you have been nominated to receive the Freeman-ASIA Fall 2008 Award for your proposed study in Taiwan.

Not too shabby, eh?

In communicating with my advisor at the university in Taiwan, I’d gotten a little overzealous and gone over the credit limit. Apparently there are 15-20 credits of language and culture courses which I must take, but I’m exploring the possibilities of just attending other classes and then not testing in them. Even that would still be killer.

So, here’s to learning languages, to meeting people, and to trying all kinds of alcohol on the face of the earth.

Enter my sister. My sister is studying for her doctorate in Large Animal Veterinary at one of the nation’s leading universities for that field. This past week, as part of her coursework (she claims), she got to collect semen from a stallion.

If you’re anything like me, the phrase “collect semen from a stallion” can conjure up a variety of images, from black-and-white microscope slides to frantically dashing down the aisle of a barn in search of a ladder to the hayloft to escape your eager-to-be-collected-from equine pal. Perhaps this retelling of the epic tale, in my sister’s own words, will help you along.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun! They let us do pretty much everything, from making
the artificial vagina, to wrapping the stallions knees (they get to do this so
much that they can get sores on the insides of their knees from the leather
dummy, lol), to washing him off, to leading him up to the dummy, and actually
collecting the semen.

Guess what I got to do??

Put the vag on the penis. WOOOOHOOOOO!! Here’s a picture, taken by someone who
has obviously never worked a digicam before (most of the other pics are even
blurrier). To be honest, I was intimidated. I’ve never worked with stallions,
and marching right up to and GRABBING his tool didn’t seem like the best first
encounter. It went pretty well though… they’re training stallions, so I guess
they’re used to it. heh. And I didn’t spill it back on him like someone else
did, lol.

Well that about explains it. And I suppose it would be teasing to withhold the picture, so here that is, too, you sick fuck.

The story is enriched by the fact that the guy in the hat in the background is my sister’s boyfriend, the luckiest/most miserable man alive.

More explicit pictures will be available once my acquisition of the domain everjackoffahorse.com finishes. Membership subscriptions available.

The best thing about this job is that every single night I work, I leave with a little bit of cash in my hand, from the tips I made that night. I go home and make three neat little piles: savings, bakery, beer store. I won’t get into percentages, the point is that I’m technically saving some of what I make (so I can pay for rent).

Another sweet aspect of the job is my slick pod racer.

Doesn’t that look absolutely pimp? By the way, mine is the red one in the foreground that says “Joey’s” on the side, not the motorcycle behind it under the blue cover. Just want to be clear on that.

Already I’ve gotten to know the city way better, poking around in neighborhoods I’d never have visited otherwise. I also get to cruise by famous places like the Nymphenburg Castle, which evidently is all lit up at night. In general, I’d say any city looks different at night than it does at the day, and different from the streets than it does from the sidewalks. (I’ve also had the pleasure of delivering to lawyers working late at night in an office building, the view from which definitely offered a perspective on the city I hadn’t before seen.)

I know I shouldn’t have been snapping pictures while still on the moped, but go to hell, it was fun. Plus the camera wasn’t mine, I’d borrowed Jesse’s, and so dropping it while at a stoplight and leaning over on the moped only to have it tip over and crush both my leg and the camera didn’t seem all that horrifying a prospect. Or something. (No jokes about the moped not being heavy enough to crush my legs. I have very slender, brittle legs. Any girl would love to have these legs.)

Last, I like my biker getup.

So if you weren’t jealous of the free beer, food, and cocktails at my other job, please be jealous of this. I thrive on it.

Zoom.

So one day while working in the O2 store, it’s pretty busy, and a coworker comes up to me and asks whether I can help her customer, whom she just sold a phone card to, load that credit onto his phone. She asked if I knew how to do it, and I smiled, because I of course have a prepaid phone, too, whereas all the other people at O2 make sweet cash and only have contracts, so they’re a little lost when it comes to the nuances of the prepaid life.

I take the phone and the card from her, and start talking to the customer, asking if maybe he has a coin I can bum to scratch off the code on the card. He fumbles in his pocket for a minute, then his buddy whips out a 1-cent piece and hands it to me. I liked this, because sometimes scratching off that lottery-paint crap with a clunkier €2 piece can result in damage, whether to the card or my hand, or even any bystanders. As we’re chatting, he interrupts me and asks if we could maybe do this in English. That, of all things, is not difficult for me. I said of course, and kept going.

He interrupts me again and asks where I studied in the U.S., because my American English was perfect. I explain my situation as an American student living in Munich, how I lost my internship, just need some sidejobs to pay the bills, and we laugh for a while. Then he’s quiet for a moment, and says, “You know… I’m hiring right now, actually.” I hand the penny back to his friend, who greets the gesture with a beaming smile.

Turns out this guy is an American who’s lived in Munich for the past six years, and he runs a bike tour company. He markets it exclusively to English speakers, and he likes to hire college-age native English speakers to give the tours. “I need someone who knows how to swear with young people, you know? Like really fuck with them. This isn’t really your typical tour, you see.”

We chat a bit more, and I take his card, promising to get in touch. Before he leaves, he turns and asks his friend what he thinks of me. The friend has been a tour guide for the past five years, apparently, so his initial reaction on my character is important. The friend smiles this crazily happy smile again, and says in the thickest of Irish accents, while looking at my nametag, “Conor. That’s a right good Irish name ya got yourself there, boy.”

They hired me.

As of yet, I haven’t made any money from this job, because I’m still in training. Understandably, there is a ton of reading and researching about the city to do before I’ll be able to give my own tours. So far I’ve tagged along on several tours to watch how they do it, and it’s done me well. I have their route through the city memorized, and now I just need to fill in the gaps in my knowledge for each stop we make. Was the Neues Rathaus completed in 1908 or 1909? Did Duke Wilhelm the V order the construction of the Hofbräuhaus before or after issuing his famous edict of the Beer Purity Law? It’s this kind of crap that I can really get into, especially as my knowledge of European medieval history was rather abysmal. (I’m much stronger in Scandinavian history!) Now I finally have stories about Barbarossa that weren’t written by Umberto Eco.

In that vein, by far my favorite aspect of this kind of research is there are several conflicting historical accounts for every building, sculpture, and historical event in this city. I’m reading books, scholarly papers, reading plaques, everything I can to get a decent understand of what happened when and who was there, or at least who said they were when writing about it.

But enough talk. Meet the boss, Lenny of Lenny’s Bike Tours.

Looks like a champ, eh? And those are the sweet bikes we cruise around on. Overall, I’m sure this job sounds pretty sweet, but there are yet more perks to it. One of the stops on the tour is the Chinese Tower, the second-largest beer garden in Munich, and there I get beer and food for free. Not bad, eh? And after the tour, people are encouraged to come with us over to Sausalito’s, by far the best cocktail bar in town, where I got two knock-you-on-your-ass cocktails, free. A related perk is that I meet people like Monk, who then invite me out for yet more drinking on someone else’s tab. God damn those Scots were fun guys!

OK, and now the downside. The tours are canceled during bad weather. Lenny claims this is only in the spring, as it’s still cold, and that during the summer people will be wearing ponchos and riding around in the rain and having a blast. We’ll see. But for now, it’s not a reliable job, because if I say, for example, “OK, I’ll see you on Tuesday” and then it ends up raining on Tuesday, I’m out a day’s work. Not cool.

Still, this financial instability may yet be made worthwhile by the shot at free cocktails with the right crowd.

These girls dug me even more than they dug Daniel the Irishman and his adorable accent, and that’s saying a lot. I suppose I’ll just have to play it by ear.

I was fortunately able to find two professors to fill out a checkbox-based online recommendation for me, which really seemed to be an exercise in generating multiple-choice variations on the theme of “Will this applicant spend all his time eating mescaline, or will he attend classes?” I didn’t want to influence the professors too much, but I’m hoping—at least, for the sake of the application—that they said I tend to be of the latter category.

The deadline is tomorrow, so I should get back to work.

The work is handing out flyers on the street. Yes, I’m that guy, now. But I honestly love the job. I get to walk around the beautiful square near the store, listen to happy people playing acoustic guitar and accordion, watch bratwursts be cooked, served, and gobbled up, and best of all, I get to start conversations with Germans.

I worked again this morning, another three hour shift (11am-2pm), bringing me up to six hours’ worth of experience. In this time, I’ve learned a ton about how to approach people. I’m now comfortable with five or six ways of saying hello, terms and expressions which I must dole out carefully according to the general demographic factors, most important of which would by far be age, although gender is critical, too.

I’ve also gotten to spend a lot of time learning the signs of approachability, which are in my opinion quite different from those I’m used to seeing in the US. (For those interested, Firefox does not red-underline “approachability.” Cool.) I’ve already mentioned before the weird eye contact rules round these parts, and I certainly had to deal with that quite a bit, handing out flyers. For instance, I knew that if I girl looked me in the eye, boom, I could walk right up to her and shove anything into her hands. In stark contrast, guys would often snipe me from my blind side and just outright take a flyer from my hands, without making any eye contact.

It was of course just as important to maintain approachability myself as to learn to notice it in others. I’d fan out these sexy looking cell phone sheets, printed on thick, glossy paper, the text oriented so that passersby could read it, but that wasn’t enough. There were two easily visible cell phones with prices, one of which was really freaking expensive. So I rummaged through my shoulder bag of supplies and fished out some cool toys. Among the baubles allotted me as prebend for my fealty to the O2 network, especially their very attractive Oktoberfest celebration sale prices, were little blinking plastic hearts with the O2 logo on them. (Blinky bling is hot at Oktoberfest, so it’s actually pretty intelligent marketing.) With these trinkets I gracefully obscured the price of the expensive phone, leaving only two phones and one low price visible to those walking by. I wish I had taken measurements before and after this decision, because my acceptance rate went through the roof.

Once I discovered the success of the blinky hearts (my manager called them something, and I’m still not sure whether he said “Blinker” or “Blinge,” the latter of which of course would be the most badass), I began to target anyone who looked like they were on the way to the Wiese. (That’s what people call the field for Oktoberfest: Theresienwiese.) It was exactly hard, as almost half the people walking by were tricked out in Lederhosen or Dirndl. So I used this to my advantage, and reminded them that nobody walks around the Wiese without a blinky on. If it was girls, I reminded them they had to look hot. If it was guys, I reminded them they had to look hot. If both guys and girls were together, I threatened to give all my blinkies to the girls unless the guys took some and gave them out as gifts. Then I loaded them up with O2 fliers and bade them farewell.

So all in all, this is a really good time for me. The whole day, though, I was thinking of the Mitch Hedberg standup line where he says, “I hate it when people hand me fliers on the street. You know what they’re really saying? ‘Here, you throw this away.’” But I had an awesome time and if I keep this up, I know I’ll be able to cull away my American accent, or at least steep it so deeply in Bavarian slang that no one will care to notice I still can’t roll my Rs.