EuroYankee

Five minutes from our apartment is a large urban forest where I go to walk. Although it doesn’t feel wild, it is often dark and creepy like a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. 

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Here’s a measurement of all the words I have been taught during my first month of German class. For some reason, I liked how the index cards look with my sock. Of course, my small foot size makes this look more impressive than it actually is. The number of words I can actually use among this pile would not reach the top of my heel. Lots of words look similar to those in English or Spanish, which makes word recognition easy. Yet each noun has a mystifying article (der Artikel) with it. I always did okay in Spanish with “lo” and “la.” If stumped, the odds were 50-50 of guessing right. Here, a third ungendered gender gets thrown in. Very tricky. Fortunately, I’m still at the stage where I’m unselfconscious about my bad grammer and just stick in front whatever article seems most convenient.

Got a new sticker in my passport today which allows me to stay here for the next year as a “freelancer.” Some bureaucratic bizarness involved to get my residency permit, but as this is Germany, I expected worse.

To celebrate not having to go back to the U.S.A. any time soon, I watched five episodes of The Simpsons (I’m well into Season 2) and didn’t study for my German test. It’s tomorrow morning. I’m searching for my inner slacker. Work with me here. Plus, everyone knows last-minute cramming is the way to go.

No actual pictures of the pope, I’m afraid. I worked during the World Youth Day festivities. My pictures were either crowd shots or of Spokane folks. World Youth Day, a big gathering of Catholic young people from around the world, brought more than 400,000 people in Cologne. I still haven’t come to a personal opinion about the event. Like any large gathering there was a mixture of true believers and partiers. It was entertaining to watch young people splashing in a fountain and cheering for the Pope. It wasn’t fun to take public transportation and be packed among Italians who seem to sing non stop.

The coolest flags spotted: Cyprus, Sardinia and Lithuania. I also discovered the existence of two new countries: San Marino and Malawi.

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Sorry I haven’t been here to rap with y’all lately. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in Pope Benedict XVI. He came to Cologne, Germany and I haven’t gotten much sleep because I’ve been working. Deadlines are brutal. It’s 3:25 a.m. and I don’t know where my story has gone. It’s in the hands of an editor somewhere across the ocean.

We saw an advertisement for Das Museum Koenig in Bonn, which claimed to have “der schönsten Leichenhalle der Republik” (the most beautiful corpse hall in the Republic.) Naturally, we went the next day. My favorite scene was a bunch of young children watching a blood-filled video of an eskimo stabbing a seal. The girls seemed alarmed and saddened. The boys thought it was cool. I was transfixed. The eskimo sat–beard covered with ice–and waited next to a seal’s breathing hole. He had made some type of sensor to let him know when the animal would going to come up for air. When it did, he plunged his spear into the hole. Water, ice, everything turned red. The rest of the museum was blood-free. Seeing all the stuffed animals was kind of creepy. I didn’t not agree with the assessment that they are “masterpieces of taxidermy.” But it was still interesting. We were surprised by the gargantuan size of ostriches and the smallness of kangaroos.

   

Yep. I gots wheels. We bartered the woman at the Flohmarkt down from €35 to €32. My bike has pedal-powered lights, back breaks and four gears. I got a flat tire almost  immediately, probably because I rode on the back rack while R. pedaled us home. The bike hasn’t made me any more punctual about getting to my morning German classes on time. But it does allow me an extra 15 minutes of sleep. Sweet.

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