Back to Blog

Hey all!

Sorry for the epic blogging fail on my part over the last few days.  Life has been exceptionally hectic, but at least I've gotten a couple good stories out of it.

The last time I posted was Wednesday, right?  And afterwards, Al and I met up with the Sports kids, who were super friendly but made us do multiple shots of apple schnapps.  Or tried to make us, anyway.  I sipped them to be polite, but wound up passing them all on to Al.

My first class of Thursday was canceled due to furniture (or lack thereof), so I only had two classes, Mesoamerican Codices in the morning, Swedish at night.  Mesoamerican Codices is taught by the same guy who does Indigenous Cultures of North America, and, likewise, consists of me and four other people.  The class itself was fine, but trying to find it was interesting.  Why Germany, a country that prides itself on efficiency, would place room 181 next to room 230 (and on the opposite side of the building from rooms 179 and 180) is beyond me.  It took me half an hour and the help of a janitor to find it.

Swedish was just fine, super intense, but now I can ask people if they're single.  Also, I learned to say "polar bear," not in Swedish class, just on the internet.  Because I need to know it's name before I can pet it.

Friday was the first day of my intense battle with the crappy seminar.  Background information: a few weeks ago, I got an email from my department saying that this seminar was a requirement, and that I could take it on one of these two dates.  I showed up on one of these two dates, only to discover that the email had the wrong room number in it.  I found this out after I stood outside it for twenty minutes pounding on the door until someone opened it up just long enough to tell me that I was in the wrong place.  So I went downstairs and asked the guy at the front desk, who had no clue and sent me to another lady.  Who also had no clue, and sent me to another lady.  Who was young and motivated and decided to call someone after it because apparent that the seminar I was looking for wasn't even in the building records for that day.  We finally located the room, but I wound up being forty-five minutes late for the seminar.

Having gotten off on the right foot, I quickly made friends with two other kids in my program--who promptly informed me that this seminar is meant to be taken in conjunction with a research project in your third semester.  I asked why nobody had bothered to tell me this, or at least put it in the email.  She said "welcome to Germany."

Have I mentioned how I occasionally hate this country with every fiber of my being?

I immediately went to the professor and was like, "Oh, hey, don't actually need this for another year, can I have my weekend back, please?"  And she said, "Since you're here, you may as well just do the seminar, it'll still be valid in a year or so when you get around to doing your presentation that we film."

Oh, yes, there's the part about having to be filmed.  And about how Friday was the first day in almost a month and a half where it was a) warm, b) sunny, and c) didn't rain at all.

Fuck me.

So I did the seminar, and it was long but generally not horrible.  We did a pretty interesting game where we divided up into groups, one person turned their back, and the other people basically gossiped about that person and drew conclusions about everything from their favorite toys as children to where their interests come from.  And it was actually freaky how spot-on first impressions are.

The shitty part came when we got put in groups, given half an hour prep time, and had to give a presentation for the class.  The other groups then made a list of the positive and negative things our group had done...and I was the negative list.  Not "Tina didn't talk enough," or "Tina's hair looks stupid," just "Tina."  And if that's not a self-esteem booster, I don't know what is.

After leaving the seminar, I was in a horrendously black mood, so I took Game of Thrones down to the river and decided to enjoy whatever dregs of Vitamin D I could suck out of the last twenty minutes of daylight.  But by that point the temperate was dropping, so, in an even fouler mood than I was before, I locked myself in my room, curled up on my bed, and hated everything for a solid two hours.  Then it was time for the Couchsurfer meet-up.

My mood picked up quite a bit then, because the Kiwi had also had a super shitty day, and we spent most of the meeting commiserating, cursing, and wishing plagues upon those who had done us wrong.  In the end, we both felt a lot better, and even convinced a fellow couchsurfer to go to the big Uni party with us.  So we headed over to the university, picked up Al along the way, and enjoyed a couple hours of dancing (read: bouncing) to every song the 90's are ashamed of, remixed to techno beats.  We entertained ourselves watching one little man in a bright yellow shirt dance around like a crazy person, although I looked away when he started rubbing his nipples.  And, sure enough, some German guy came up to me thinking he could improve his Spanish.  Yeah, no.

One of the Bulgarian girls posted this picture to her Facebook of the party, check it out!  The amount of students you can pack in that building is insane:

This morning I was up early again to deal with the godforsaken seminar.  It started off with us having to march around the room imagining we were in a cave, and blasting apart the rocks with our elbows and weird sex noises.  Then we had to give a spontaneous presentation on how our nervousness manifests itself, while drawing our symptoms on a stick figure man the professor had put up on the board.  I went last, and, needless to say, was completely and totally beyond caring even a shred, which is never a good place for me to be in.  Because when my "give a shit" is running on E and the traction on my social inhibitions is worn down to slippery slope, that's when I start playing one of my favorite games, Make Fun of People to Their Faces and See How Long it Takes Them to Figure Out You're Making Fun of Them.  In this case, I stood in front of the class with a completely straight face and said, "When I'm nervous, I have negative thoughts."  And then I drew a giant thought bubble from Stick Man, in English, which said, "Dear God, kill me now."

The professor, because she was a nice lady with a sense of humor, laughed, and then came up to me afterwards and complimented me for being funny.  Once it became apparent that there wouldn't be any more negative lists, my mood improved, and I participated in the next few activities more animatedly, although I still refused to make the noises.  I'm still angry no one told me I didn't need this semester for another year.  And I'm furious I missed probably the only sunny day we'll see this summer.

Today, the Kiwi, Galway, and his girlfriend all came over.  We ate an ENTIRE batch of chocolate chip cookies (some of which were cooked), drank vodka and coke, and watched Kick-Ass, which turned out to  actually be pretty kick-ass.  Lots and lots of fun, so Saturday ended on a good note.

Tomorrow, checking out some castle ruins with Al and then going to a poetry slam with Roommate.  Yay!

Adios!