The goals for the day were to clean up, do laundry, return the bottles to the bottle depot, learn some German and finish Jurrasic Park. All the cleaning and washing went down in its standard fashion. I finished Jurrasic Park (a great book by the way) and gave myself a pat on the back as this is the first novel that I have had the time and motivation to finish in the past three or four years!
My trip to the bottle depot consisted of me attempting to communicate with a guy who did not speak English and I ended up pointing at the bottles shrugging my shoulders and looking confused. He understood this and led me to the spot where I put my bottles. As I walked back with him I realized that this was not just a bottle depot but a drink depot too. I looked around. All the prices here were crazy low. I found a 20 pack of 500ml bottles of my favorite Altbier for 10.5 Euro. I had been missing out. Anyways I did not have the motivation to walk home with 10L of beer at this point and I continued with my chores.
Time to learn some German. I realized by this point that most everyone my age in this country speaks English so I have set my sights lower then being able to carry a full conversation in German. I find the most frustrating thing about not knowing the language is having nice old ladies ask you something at the bus stop and not having a clue what they are saying or people in a store asking a basic question that I do not know how to respond to. My goal is achieve this ultra-basic conversational German in the next couple weeks. To begin I watched MTV Germany; I like MTV Germany because it is a nice mix of English music videos, German commentary and the odd German music video. The only problem is that the only commercials are these really annoying commercials telling you to punch a code into your cell phone in order to get a lame X-Ray scanner video for your cell phone to “impress your friends”. I maintain, as Reston told me once, that I refuse to be friends with people that buy 5 Euro X-Ray Scanner videos or pay 1 Euro every day to get a new quote delivered to your “Handy”. Anyways I also listened to some German tapes and looked over my text book in preparation for my German/English exchange with Viola from work tomorrow.
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