Out of Sabbatical

Welcome

Welcome to my faithful and unfaithful readers alike! It has been a while since my last post, and I can assure you that this is for a very good reason. When your schedule is packed full with exciting activities such as falling asleep in the library and park, getting drunk in Neustadt, and watching episodes of Salute Your Shorts via the internet, it's kind of hard to keep up! Where does the time go? Really, though, my life in Dresden will meet its carefully planned premature death in about a week, so this is most likely going to be the last entry with any sense of normalcy. Will there be a special end-of-summer entry? Some kind of epilogue? Well, it's going to be hard to write an epilogue for what essentially amounts to personal memoirs, that is, unless I can somehow predict the future. Better yet, I'll just make things up. Really, though, between the last entry and the present, we have had several weekend trips, made some new friends, lost an old friend, and had a wonderful time throughout it all. So sit back, grab a cup of fresh-ground, fresh-brewed coffee, and listen to the exciting tales of our hero in Dresden.

Attack of the Giant Buses

It would be a shame to associate oneself with only a single subculture. Life is more exciting when your interests lack any discernible pattern, leading your friends, loved ones, and voice inside your head to wonder just who the hell you are. In other words, it can never hurt to, among other things, be a complete and total dork. This is why I was so eagerly awaiting the day of 21 July. For now, I know how it all ends. He dies. Dumbledore comes back to life as a three-headed unicorn, and Snape takes advantage of Hermoine in his dungeon one day after potions class. Ron and Neville turn out to be gay, and join a group of wizards who are on a quest to secure equal rights. Hogwarts gets bulldozed to make room for a Muggle shopping mall.

Okay, so if you had been keeping up with the blog, you would know that I went to London on the weekend of 21 July, with the primary goal of securing a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in the center of all the action, and the secondary goal of seeing some of London. I got the book. I have since read it. I am a more enlightened person because of it. I had the same problem with the London trip as I did with the Berlin trip. Two nights is not enough time to experience a city. As usual, my friends were happy with their game show style super-intense digital camera scavenger hunt. For me, one of the highlight was when I ditched my friends, and roamed the city on my own. I decided that the best way to do this was to get on the Underground, and get off at whichever station I deemed to have the funniest name. Long story short, I ended up in a place called Elephant and Castle. I believe I found what I was looking for here. It felt like a more authentic part of the city, far far away from the digital camera carnival that is the touristy area. The people were more racially diverse, and acted completely differently than the people in the city center. I also used some of my alone time to do some high-quality people watching in Hyde Park. Once again, time well spent. I suppose people watching is a decent way to get a feel for a city when on a limited time and money budget.

Yes, I'm sure some of you want to complain that, once again, I have no pictures to share with you. Try this. Go to www.images.google.com and type in "London." That should get you more pictures of Big Ben and the London Bridge than you can handle.

Realizing My Previously-Conceived Images of Germany

Given my limited knowledge of contemporary German culture, before I moved here, I had two images that I always associated with Germany. With a one-liter mug of beer in one hand, an unnecessarily large sausage in the other, and a lederhosen-clad brass band playing nearby, I was finally able to turn one of my stereotypical images into a reality. Regarding the second image of the two, I have been checking event calendars all summer, but alas I don't think Hitler is scheduled to shout from a podium any time soon.

I am referring of course to a trip to Munich. We didn't get to do anything too terribly exciting in the city itself. On the first night, we went to this place that was essentially an amusement park for night life. Of course, this really didn't do it for me, and had that main-stream superficial feel that makes me crave the grungy underground scene that is Dresden Neustadt. For example, the main thoroughfare of the area was called "Coca Cola Road." Okay, now you see there is no reason for me to continue explaining how this wasn't my type of place. In a sea of homogeneous establishments catering to everybody and nobody at the same time, there was one beacon of hope. I found a very small bar with no cover charge that had live music. Not just any live music: Stereotypical German metal. Awesome. I enjoyed this as long as it would last, but after the bands stopped playing I had no choice but to leave the area altogether.

One of the planned highlights of the Munich trip was to take a train about two hours out to some castle. Apparently it is very famous, and was the inspiration for the Disney World castle. I forget the name of it, and could probably find it out relatively quickly through some combination of Google and Wikipedia, but it really doesn't seem two important. In fact, in the time it took me to type these few sentences justifying my decision, I could have easily looked up the name of the place. We payed an exorbitant fee to take a guided tour, and I must admit the inside of the place was pretty crazy. Just to give you in idea, there was an artificial indoor cave on the third floor near King Ludwig's bedroom. This guy was nuts. After the tour, I was permitted to do a little hiking around the surrounding areas. Here I found some breathtaking views of the Bavarian Alps, the valley below, and of course the castle itself. Believe it or not, I actually did take pictures! Unfortunately for you, my faithful and unfaithful readers, I am writing this from work, thus do not have the means to include these pictures. I could lie and say that I'll post them later, but that just won't happen.

After the castle ordeal, we went back to Munich for the night. Like I said, a beer hall has always been crucial to my stereotypes of Germany, so I felt that I absolutely had to visit the famous Hofbrauhaus in Munich. It was everything I had ever thought it could be and so much more. The ceiling was high and vaulted, the tables were long, the waitresses had braided blond hair, a brass band was playing, and of course everyone was being extremely loud and drunk. The only problem is that they apparently stop serving at some inordinately early hour like 23:00, so I was unable to join the festivities myself. Oh well. At least I got to see it. On Sunday, the girls went to some boring sounding town, and Navin, Sameer and I spent the day in Munich. We did a bike tour, very similar to what I experienced in Berlin. Just like in Berlin, I found this to be a lot of fun, and a good way to meet some people and get a quick background on the history of the city. The scene with me holding a beer and a sausage in the near of a brass band took place at the second largest beer garden in the world in the middle of the bike tour. I had two liters of extra-strong beer (even by German standards) and was nice and drunk for the rest of the tour.

Goodbye Kent...

As I mentioned before, I lost a few friends, mainly the people hitherto referred to as "The Ohioans." Unfortunately, this group of people, now renamed "Ohio: Gen I," has returned to their motherland. My last adventure with Nick was on a Monday night when I was innocently sitting in my room at midnight talking to my parents on the Meebo, about to go to sleep. I hear a knock on the door, and am asked, "Do you want to get [non-parent-friendly verb removed] and go to Neustadt?" Well hell yeah! So we went to a place called the "Lebowski Bar." I know what you're thinking, and you're absolutely right. This is a bar that is dedicated through and through to the kick-ass comedy, "The Big Lebowski." The music and art of the wall are inspired by the movie, and the movie itself plays on a continuous loop on two television monitors. Friggin' awesome.

...And Hello Columbus!

You know what they say. No matter how far you travel in this world, you always end up in Ohio. Okay, maybe the proverbial "they" do not say this, but I sure do. With not even a few days lag after Ohio Gen I left, a group of 27 study abroad students from Ohio State University stormed the International Guest House and turned it into the American college dormitory I have always dreamed of crossing the Atlantic to live in. Really, though, Ohio Gen II is a very fun group of people whom I have been going out with all throughout last weekend. They are not the over-achiever types by any means, but love to get excessively drunk and party hard. A very refreshing change in pace. Whereas some of my RISE friends like to complain about my immature attitude and failure to become sufficiently assimilated into the German way of life, these guys like to get drunk and complain about how much they miss ESPN.

Hey, Jeff, where's my #$^&ing post card?

Come on, now. You guys know I'm terrible with anything that can be remotely described as a "responsibility." To put things into perspective, I have done laundry exactly two times since moving to Dresden, and I have about a week-long supply of cloths. I even applied to the RISE program late. Just to reassure you that I haven't completely forgotten, I actually purchased the post cards themselves! Now all I have to do is write things on them, and send them via the mail. This is a lot of work. Like I said, I'm a very busy person. That padded bench near the English section of the library isn't going to sleep on itself.

Okay, I think that's it for now, even though there is plenty I am leaving out. My usual post frequency was once a week, and it has been three weeks since the previous post. There are two ways to handle this: Either make the post three times as long, or include on third of the details. This thing has taken almost 90 minutes to write as it is! So farewell, thanks for reading, and stay tuned for whatever special end-of-summer entry may or may not be to come.