That's all you really need to know of the last month. I'm serious. Maybe another subtitle would be "John stresses, grows up a little, loses a few pounds from malnourishment(how? from where? my eyebrows?), and comes out...okay?". What a month this has been. Now I think I officially settle into more routine stuff, if I choose to. I choose not to.
Let's start with Amsterdam, ey? Subtitle: hey...we have that in America too! Amsterdam is wonderful and beautiful, but who cares? I could lend y'all a couple overly verbose descriptions, but I don't like to stroke my own ego (HAH). Look up some pictures. What are the highlights? We took a tour from a wonderfully awkward girl from New Zealand (kiwi, ey?). Awkward in the sense that she was clearly used to large, diverse tour groups with varying senses of humor. Alas, it was me and my friend Kfriend. So she bust out plenty of concert hall-scale jokes about marijuana and would be greeted by Kfriend's empathetic laughter and, by the end, my stone-faced lip twitch. Oh, I'm that ass.
Some bro had put some books out for free on the street. I grabbed two. A compendium of Chekhov's greatest plays and some German book. I read part of one of Chekhov's plays, then realized what I was doing and stopped. So it goes.
And then pub crawl. Oh pub crawl. In principle, it was fine, as far as pub crawls go: way too loud music, watered-down shots of...something, lots of foreigners, and lots and lots of Usher. Thank god. But here are some HUMOROUSLY-TOLD ANECDOTES that I've collected.
1) Team Plaid. Y'all know the type. Most dudes have probably skirted along the edges of this group at same point of another. You know, small group of dudes, no girls, all wearing those stripey button-down going-out-to-get-laid shirts (DON'T YOU LOOK AT ME) with jeans? Who will try to push themselves up against anything in the neighborhood of 98.6 (now you actually can't look at me)? This particular flavor was from, I believe, Sweden, a particularly ruthless strain that thrives on awkward glances, takes no hints, and only seems to grow stronger with each rejection. I never saw if any of the little lion cubs found an easy prey, but I saw enough misses for a lifetime.
2) Team "WOW WE'RE HOT AND HERE BY OURSELVES OMG LOL WHO ARE YOU STOP THAT HAHAH OKAY!" This strain manifested itself in the form of two short blonde French girls. Y'all still know the type. The type that gets more head nods in their general direction than a guy going over speed bumps. And then, oh! they fall into some dude's arms, dance with their respective guys while they talk to each other laughing about it, while everyone else gets to watch a thousand crestfallen boys limp away in disappointment like newly-made eunuchs. Yikes. They exist everywhere.
3) There was a dude whose sole job was to mill about the first bar squirting a mixed drink (contained in a label-less water bottle, no less) into everyone's mouths. I was unaware of this new low of blunt simplicity when it comes to drinking. Like, I can jive (sorta) with keg stands, floor slides, bubble pits, vodka pong, vortex with nothing but surprise cups, whatever. But a guy squirting off-pink liquid into your mouth with nary a smile to be seen? He could have literally not worked for the pub crawl, and could've walked in, squirted liquid with like spider's eggs in it, and walked out. We all woulda accepted anyway.
4) ...
5) Don't tell yourself how surprising it is that you're not drunk yet. It makes the eventual fall a matter of pride as well as, uh, survival. Also, don't try walking home at night in Amsterdam. Everything looks the same. Thank you English-speaking man with iPhone who shook my hand in a nonchalant "wow, I'ma read about him in the newspaper tomorrow" way, for helping me home. And no, responsible parties, I wasn't black-out or something. Not even close. But I wasn't about to go shooting no apples off heads or something ya know heh heh
That's enough of the mildly uncomfortable stories, innit? Moving on.
While Amsterdam had the immediacy of a nuclear warhead, Germany is a grower, like a Joanna Newsom album or something. By now I'm pretty cozy with the city. I'm working up some travel plans, working up some chutzpah to cook something more ambitious than bread and jam, or pasta with salt, and working up the courage to starting really solidifying connections. I've met some random people, but since FU students are strewn all across Berlin, it's impractical and difficult to actually make something of a friendship. So be it. I've found a potential a cappella group (coed thank goooood, as a physics major on the men's track team in a male a cappella group I find activities with women in them startlingly beautiful), a choir for sure, and a language speaking program or something. Maybe I can try to find a swing dance club, so Lankyville and Limbs 2011 can hit Berlin.
So I've cooked some honest-to-god meals for myself lately, and oh my gah. Suddenly my facial hair has felt fuller, my voice a little deeper, my mind a little sharper. I cooked. And it was good. I really think so. Onions, garlic, sliced tomatoes with some tomato extract stuff for more flavor, salt, and pasta/chicken/rice/potatoes. Total number of ingredients exceed 5...that's a big moment.
I'm taking four courses right now. Three are good, one sucks, so I need to find a new one ASAP. German lecturing styles tend towards a stream of words with a breath every fifteen minutes are so. When the lecturer is engaging, this is okay, even when you miss some words. When the lecturer has all the presence and charisma of Droopy the Dog, it's not okay. Thus is my last class. And the stimulating subject matter of different historical theories applied to the Renaissances as a case study means John's eyelids are heavy. I'm not doing that for a semester.
The choir is dandy. It's a choir. It's kinda boring and easy. So it goes.
Anything else? I visited a bunch of places recently.
1) Tempelhofer Damm - a former airstrip now relegated to function as a park. Quite lovely on a nice day, huge field with tons of giggly children with kites. Tons of Germans on rollerblades...my goodness, Germans seem to love their rollerblades. And everyone has safety gear on, elbow and knee pads, gloves, helmet, very thorough. Meanwhile they meander contently along the runway like lazy sloths (sidenote: I had to look up whether the plural of sloth was "sloths" or "slothes". Harumph.) It was almost like the beginning of a twisted horror movie, right before everything goes wrong. I took some pictures. They'll be up on my photo account later tonight.
2) Zoologischer Garten. As the name suggests, it's a zoo. It was a normal zoo. Animals rejected my birdfeed, whatever the hell it was. Monkeys touched themselves, and eight different languages began firing off at once, all of them surely saying something like "LOOK THE MONKEY IS MASTURBATING". Very united we all were, for a moment there. The lions were missing. Knut is dead. Sad. But it was fun, and I can cross that off my last now.
3) Großer Tiergarten. A giant park. Oh man, I wandered through this alone as if I was high. I kinda wished I was, because these place was beautifully scenic. Again, pictures up later. But I'd walk around a corner, or into a new room, and my knees would literally weaken. I never realized I was such a sucker for nature. But I guess I am.
Library at FU is about to close, so I'm gonna close this blog post at the same time. Some massively sad (read: cheesy) piano music is being played right now, I guess to denote the sadness of the library closing for the day. It sounds like a scene out of a Final Fantasy game, where the love interest dies or something. NOT TODAY GERMANY. Anyway. I'll begin uploading pictures when I get back...so cheers. For now. I promise to be a bit more consistent in the future.
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