Things I don't especially like about Germany

I wrote the first 5 of these sitting in a hot, humid waiting room in the Ausländerbehörde while waiting to get a visa. I'd gotten there at like 6:35.

1. Advertising. Ads here are so skanky. Like porn. It's gross. Totally have to avert your eyes.

2. Registering with the police. so at the Goethe-Institut they do it for you. Only problem there is that you have to give them your passport for a week. A week I didn't have. So I did it the good old fashion way: the Bürgeramt. It took no less than 1 hour which is currently beating the Ausländerbehörde. Now the police know where I live. And they'll know when I move to Tübingen.

3. Getting a Visa. Why can't I just do this in San Francisco? I'd much rather wait in a room there than here. At least it'd be air conditioned. But no, they want you to apply in country. Probably so you can have this great cultural experience. Good thing I have my own wit to keep myself entertained.

Ok, what I really don't like about registering with the police and getting a visa is the signs. Ok, I hate the system. Take a number, sit in a room, and wait for it to pop up accompanied by that little chime thing.

Aufruf Raum (8:45 ish)
969 025
214 012
118 027
968 026
117 027

4. Lack of reduced fat foods. They write "nur 4% fett" on cottage cheese as if it were a good thing or some sort of improvement. I just found cottage cheese with only 0.8% fat last week. I can sometimes find 0.8% milk, but rarely. Skim, I've heard it exists but I've never seen it. As for reduced fat crackers-NO.
There's diet yogurt with like 200 calories in like 8 oz. That begs the question: How much is in the regular yogurt? Ok, maybe it's better just not to ask.

5. No good Mexican food. I might be wrong, but I think this may have to do with a lack of Mexicans.

6. No screens. For the most part, I love the design of German windows. The tilt and swing open all the way. The one problem is that there are no screens-ever. I would really like to open my windo because it's kind of stuffy but it's night and I would definitely get bugs in my room because there is no screen.

Berlin Premiere of Hancock

We went to Potsdamer Platz for the red carpet thing for Hancock. Yes, we saw Will Smith. Talya wanted to jump over the rail and get onto the red carpet. Thankfully, she didn't.
After the thing was pretty much all over, I decided that I wanted one of the banner things that was covering the railing keeping us off the red carpet. So I pulled out my trusty pocket knife and started cutting through the zip ties holding the banner one at a time. At one point I was cutting through one on the bottom and my friends were like "don't get up. just stay down." When they told me that, I stayed down and slipped my knife into someone else's purse. After the coast was clear, I got back up and started cutting. The key was not to draw attention to what I was doing. That meant not letting banner fall where it was already cut. Easy solution: there were like 7 of us so the others spread out and held the banner in place until I was finished cutting. When I was done we passed the news along and on the count of three like two people walked off with the banner and shoved it in Cheryl's purse.
Then I cut off a second banner. Then the employees started to come out and take them away. Kyle tried to bribe one of the guys working. That didn't work. The same guy gave Kyle a banner later when someone else just tried to grab it.
So now I have this huge banner from the Berlin premiere of Hancock that I have no where to put. You see that white thing at the bottom of the picture by Will Smith? It's one of those.

Italy

I went to Italy a couple of weeks ago with four of my friends: Liz, Kyle, Talya, and Cheryl. It was lots of fun and chalk full of those experiences that are totally not funny at the time but you know will be later.

So we left Berlin on Friday afternoon. We got out of out Goethe classes, went home, grabbed our stuff and met at Zoo. Everything ran smoothly until we got to Venice. We followed the directions to our hostel but somehow managed not to find it. We ended up hanging out in a parking lot for like a half hour while we called them. Liz took 2 years of Italian at BYU so it fell to her to call. They gave us better directions and we got there eventually. We checked in and everything around like 3 am. The room was actually a single wide mobile home. That's right, we stayed in a trailer park. It was actually pretty cool because then it was just us in like a little apartment. We were right next to the airport but I was so dead tired, and I live by an Air Force base anyway, that the planes didn't bother me. It was just starting to get light outside when I went to bed. That's never a good sign.

Saturday morning my friends let me sleep in until like 9:15 or something. We had to check out at like 10:30. So we all got ready and packed up our stuff. For breakfast we had snacks that we'd brought with us from ze Tchermany. The hostel we stayed at offered a bus service to Venice. We utilized it. But there was traffic and it came late. Kyle went and sat down on one side of the parking lot and us girls went to the other cause he's got cooties. So this picture is from when a car pulled up. That's his head through the back window.

So then we took the bus to Venice. There were lots of tourist there. Seriously, I think that's the main source of income for that city. Well, there are also like glass and lace production but that's really touristy too. Good news is that it wasn't so hot that the canals were stinky. Cause let me tell you, the last time I was in Venice, it reeked.

Here's the short version:

Saturday we left Venice for Florence. Our hostel was like 45 minutes outside of it but it wasn't a problem because they offered a shuttle service. We couldn't find it. We all ran out of money on our phones calling the hostel trying to get better directions. We never found the hostel that night but at like 8:30 the next morning. I didn't sleep that night. Then we went to Florence. I took a 20 minute nap on a doorstep while Liz waited in line for the museum to see the David. There was an insane beeping noise in the car because there was something wrong and we couldn't figure out what the warning on the dash said. It suddenly occurred to Kyle that it was about the seatbelts. The alarm didn't stop. That was when I was at the end of my rope. Then we went back to the hostel. The next morning I found the problem and fixed it. But on the return trip we got a flat tire in Italy 300 km from the Austrian border. It was a holiday in Italy and everything was closed. We had to drive 50 mph until we reached Innsbruck. That took forever. Unfortunately, we got there after all the tire places were closed. We went from place to place trying to find someone to help us. Finally we called this guy and he came back to his shop and changed the tire. Then we got dinner at Mc Donalds. I saw a guy I swear I met last summer at a Tagung. We got back to Berlin at like 4 am and then I went home and slept for a really long time.

The Bike Race

So you remember like back in May when I wrote that I might have trouble getting to church because of a bike race? Well, I had trouble getting to church because the bike race went right past the church. I left early and got to Zoo at like 9. Church starts at 9:30 and the next bus wasn't going to come for like 25 minutes. That wasn't going to work. While I was considering my options I saw this guy, Kendall, who's doing an internship in Berlin. So I went over to him. He didn't know how to get to church without the bus. It just so happened that I had walked from Hackescher Markt to Zoo following the route of the 100 bus, the bus we needed, a few days before. Hence, I knew exactly where to go. So we walked and made it on time. Downside: I got a blister. It was pretty much the end of the world.

8 Dinge, die ich an Deutschland liebe

Hej Alle, es ist schon wieder die Zeit!

In diesem Eintrag erkläre ich euch 7 Dinge, die ich an Deutschland liebe genau wie es im Titel steht. Die sind in keiner Folge, einfach eine Liste.

1. H-Milch. Mir schmeckt H-Milch genau wie frische Milch. Mit frischer Milch habe ich immer das Problem, dass sie schnell verdirbt, weil ich fast keine Milch trinke. Aber mit H-Milch muss ich mir keine Sorgen machen. Ich habe gerade einen Liter im Schrank neben meinen Haferflocken und auch einen Liter im Kühlschrank. Toll, oder?

2. Das Geld. Ich liebe Euros auf mehrere Gründe. Die Münzen finde ich einfach zu v und auch hilfreich (Außer die 2 und 1 cent Münzen, ich habe einfach zu viele von denen). Mir gefällt das System total gut. Die Münzen sind von einander leicht zu erkennen, nachdem man sich daran gewöhnt hat, was leicht ist. Die Banknoten sind auch gut, weil die verschiedene Werten sich Farbe und Größe unterscheiden.

3. Müsli. Ich habe heute Knusper-Schoko Müsli gekauft und schon ein bisschen mit meiner H-Milch gegessen. Oh ja. Es war wie eine Party in meinem Mund. Früher hat mir Knusper-Schoko Müsli gar nicht geschmeckt. Was war los mit mir?

4. Haribo ist auch eine Party in meinem Mund. Aber diese Party hat in den vergangenen Wochen zu oft stattgefunden. Man muss sich beherrschen, denn alle Arten Haribo schmecken so furchtbar gut. Ich weiss nicht, wie mein lieblings heisst, weil ich es nur 2 mal gekauft habe. Aber, es ist eine Mischung von Konfekt und Goldbären. Hmm, süß!

5. Öffentliche Verkehrsmittel. Ich kann fast jeden Ort in Deutschland ohne ein Auto erreichen, weil die öffentlichen Verkehrsmittel so effektiv sind. Deutschland ist ungefähr so groß wie Kalifornien aber ich kann nirgendwo in Kalifornien ohne ein Auto gehen. BART kann man mit Deutschland nicht vergleichen.

6. Nutella. Ich habe Nutella noch nicht dieses mal gekauft, was gut ist, denn ich konnte eine gnaze an einem Tag essen. ABER, ich habe Nutella trotzdem Lieb auch wenn sie zu viel Zucker enthält. Aber deshalb schmeckt sie so gut.

7. Döner. Was muss ich noch schreiben?
8. Knusper Schoko Müsli