Weekends

The weekends are so nice and restful for me here. Saturday I slept in, cooked some lunch, took a nap, fixed dinner, then went out at about 22.00h. We went to a bar somewhere in the East called Point of No Return which was pretty boring and then to an indoor beach bar with sand on the floor. That was more fun but I think most of us are still really tired and we were all back home by 4.00h.

Today was another restful day and after fixing lunch, I went to Balzac in Rathaus Steglitz where I saw three other program participants on their laptops. Tomorrow afternoon I'm going to the Deutsch Bank to get an account and then purchasing DSL for my apartment. It takes about 2-3 weeks after that but I really can't wait! It really is amazing how Internet-dependent my generation has become... not having the ability to look up information on the fly feels so limiting but also results in some nice spontaneous discoveries. Friday night, for example, Jill, Marion and I were wandering around somewhere northeast of Friedrichstraße and came across an outdoor market in the courtyard of several clubs and bars.

That night was also a lot of fun because neither Jill or Marion wanted to speak English... so I got by with a strange mix of German, a little Spanish and even less of Arabic. We also were going by "German" sounding names (or at least less-American) ... Jill became Yulia, Marion got a slightly different pronunciation and I became "Georg" with two hard-"G"s. I guess I am picking up the language here pretty quickly... I've had a couple successful food/drink interactions entirely in German!