Party Time, Excellent!

Hi everybody! Sorry for the delay, again, I wish I had good excuses, but you know... Actually, for awhile the only thing I had to report on was that I was extremely stressed about what I want to write for my thesis, and what to do after I am done with it. The first part is finally solved, taking only every waking moment for two months to come up with, and the second, well, I have just started to stop thinking about it.

In other news, I have not one, but four parties to report about.

First off, Halloween:

As you scurvy dogs can see, I be a Pirate, savvy? It was a really great party with a bunch of first semesters in WHS, so I finally got to meet a bunch of the new crowd who will inhabit Cottbus for a bit. None of them had to walk to the plank though a few of them did visit the poop deck.

The next three parties should be listed in order since they were all in three nights, in a row. The first, was, as everyone should know about me, my absolute favorite holiday ever, Thanksgiving. There was a lot of planning that went down for this thing, and my humble role in the whole show was making pumpkin pie and cornbread. I had never made pumpking pie before, so I was a bit nervous at the undertaking, but I was even more worried about finding a pumpkin. I finally managed to snag two small ones at an organic food store, and did everything (including dough, also a first) from scratch. It turned out mega great. Earlier in the day a couple of us went out to throw a football around, but not many people showed up. We were there for about an hour, when all of a sudden four Cottbus kids ran over and started playing with us. Eventually two other random people came, and we managed to play a very disorganized 4 on 4, that turned out to be great fun. Of course, the best part was later in the day when we finally got to eat, having squash soup, Ukrainian salad, a huge turkey, home-made stuffing, faux gravy, copious amounts of wine, home made chocolate, hazelnut and of course, pumpkin cakes and pies, and even cranberries (a hard-to-find in Germany). It was mega fantastic.

Turkey hats designed by a (I think drunk) art student from New Zealand

The next day I was off to Berlin for my friend Sarah's birthday at a wine bar that, get this, allows you to drink as much as you want, and when you leave, you pay as much money as you think you drank. Cool does not begin to describe such a great idea.

And finally, on Saturday, was the long awaited World Heritage welcome party. It took so long, because evidently, as a Bavarian said, "the (insert colorful word here) Prussians, and their (think of another colorful word, I know you can) bureacracy" made it nearly impossible to get things off the ground. Just to have the party they had to get signatures from no less than 10 different people, including the health department for the state of Brandenburg and the chancellor of the university. All this just to consume beer in the basement of an old Nazi-era casino. Well, it finally worked, but before this some of us went to an exciting Cottbus Energie soccer game to see them barely lose to a far superior team...good times though.

In other sporting news, me and an Australian girl managed to come up with a new game; Human curling:

And with that, I leave you for now, because I am pretty sure that I have some thesis to do...

PIG HEARTS AND A CAREER CHANGE IN THE WIND

So today we will start with what happened to me last night, go back into the past and in Tarantino-like-fashion will miraculously end up back to today, without a clear idea why and probably with a lot less violence then in the films. I would also like to note that it would be nice to see some comments from you out there, so at least I know that some of you are pretending to read what I write.

So my good friend Zhu here in Cottbus finished his master thesis, and I had a go at correcting the grammar and sentence structure, which probably wasn't the best decision for him since my grammar has been known to be on certain occasions, well, how do you put it, "creative" at best. In any case, I managed to make it through the whole thing and in reward for my help, I received a mega cool kick ass Chinese dinner. It was an interesting affair, to say the least, and the best part of the whole meal was that half of the things he did not know the English for. There was something, however, that he did know the English for: Pig Hearts. Yes, loyal reader, I had pig hearts, and they were pigheartarrific. He said that in special dinners it is traditional to always have one dish that is strange, unusual, exotic or potentially deadly, to impress, mesmerize, poison or mystify the guests/victims. But this was most excellent, as was everything else.

On Tuesday night, I was co-moderator for the welcome and information party for new international students (I'll let you use your own imagination on how one partys with information) here at the BTU. It was a good time actually, and I got to make some really bad jokes and even more importantly, embarrass people, which, next to eating, might be my favorite thing to do. In any case, a lot of people were happy with my performance and have said that I could do well in acting, stage performance or even as a professional informational party representation dude (PIPRD for short). So, I guess if this whole heritage thing doesn't work out, then I always have an even more uncertain chance at employment in another precarious field.

Back to heritage though, I saw two masters defences recently (one as recently as a couple of hours ago), one from Barbara and another from Mariam, both from my semester. It was really interesting to see both and to understand what they have done, and get ideas for my own work (which I am in the process of barely almost ready to start thinking about to consider the steps needed to be taken to actually maybe get that under way). In any case, they both did a great job, and made, at least me, feel a bit nostalgic. Good to see people accomplish something, but a bit sad to witness people that I worked alongside with for nearly two years to be done and soon to be gone. So, with that in mind, I think might have actually found some motivation to be under way...get this thing done before I am the last one I know in Cottbus and have no one left any more to cook for me free heritage rich meals.

BACK TO COTTBUS/THOUGHTS OF EIRE

So, here is my first posting from the land of chocolate since I got back. I arrived in Germany last Thursday, jet lagged and disorientated, only to be led to a bachelor party in Dresden. No, this wasn't an accident loyal reader(s), I actually planned to spend the night on a plane, have a four hour lay over in London, get a two hour ride from Berlin to Dresden, and then somehow go to a restaurant, eat some doners, drink some beer, then going partying with the guys. My friend Kate (from Thanksgiving fame) was getting married to Tobias from Germany, and we had to get our party on before the wedding. Luckily, nothing was planned for Friday, so we all slept till oneish. Saturday the wedding went off without a hitch at a castle with vineyards engulfing the surrounding hills. Wunderschoen. I would like to write more about the wedding, but I will do so later with some photos, but now, I must return to what happened in Ireland.

So, I left you last time pondering the inner workings of that crazy and grammatically confused language. Now, let's take a closer look at the place and it's people. First of all, I lived in two places in Ireland. Both were in County Kerry, in the extreme southwest of Ireland. This area is known as being the most touristy spot in Ireland (next to Dublin), as tour buses run over each other on the infamous "Ring of Kerry". The Ring is famous mainly for being the principle means which people choose to die on a regular basis. It is quite possibly the most dangerous road ever constructed on purpose, and also perhaps the most beautiful. You see, in an effort to provide nice scenic views to the tourists and perhaps the locals, people way back when built roads to accomodate horses and carriages and the like, but once the old auto voiture came along, no one thought it necessary to widen the road. The consequence is one of the most hair-raising experiences that you will ever go through, and an affirmation to anyone that survives (about 2o percent of all that actually finish it, I think) that there is little else to fear in the world, even a drunk leprechaun chasing you down for making a go for his pot o' gold.

Even if you some how make it through a few dozens miles of this road of death, then you eventually turn onto another road (some how narrower than the Ring), and after a few turns, your life flashing before your eyes a couple of times, narrowly avoiding other cars, sacrificing your side mirrors to the asphalte god, you miracusouly end up in a little village called Portmagee, in all likely inhabited by people who felt just like you do now, too scared to go back on the Ring, and just decided that this was as good as any place to stay for the rest of their lives. Yet, just like the others, after you are wowed by the amaying beauty of the place, you are suddenly hit with the deeply regretting realization that their is absolutly nothing for you to do. So, like the locals, you start to drink. And man, do I mean drink. I have to say, I went to Tennessee, one of the number one party schools, I have lived in Germany were drinking on the street is as normal as walking your dog, but the Irish could easily drink everyone under the table. It is not like they are genitically different than the rest of us, rather, as mentioned, there is not a whole lot to do there, plus when everyone was unemployed, no one had any money to do much else. Now that people are relatively less poor in funds, the only difference is that the price of a pint has gone up, while the dozen or two pints you might consume in an evening remains unchanged.

So somehow, I ended up here....lost...confused...and soon, as drunk as anyone....

Greetings and Salutations Once More

After an exceptionally long hiatus, I have decided that once more I should probably get around to telling all those semi-dedicated people who for reasons that are beyond comprehension interested in the goings on of yours truly, what I have been up to for the past, uh, well, year or so. I think there might even be some new readers (evidently boredom is now an epidemic and in a last ditch effort to find mindless stimulus, stumbled upon these ramblings in between profile stalking on Facebook and googling their own name), so unlike my other blogs, I have left what I wrote in my previous entries so as to give all those who would be so inclined to rummage among the chaos. So, with no further adieu, I will drive forward, and in several installments over the coming, well, period, I will attempt to catch people up on what has transpired in my humble life.

If you have kept up with my other blogs (I am sure both of you are very grateful that you did), you would know that each time I spent a considerable period of time in a new country, I would remodel my blog and put a new title at the top in the language of the nation in which I would be spending a brief but undoubtedly memorable amount of time in. Now, I happened to just spend six months in Ireland, from March till August, but not only did I not change my blog around, I did not bother to write even a morsel of what I was up to. Why is this? Well, for starters, what language should have chosen for the title? Ireland is officially Irish speaking (according to their constitution) but English is obviously the language for business, daily discourse, swearing, a surprisingly short list of witty remarks, how politicians and specifically the Taoiseach (prime minister) answer questions to a very long grocery list of accusations of corruption and other felony related items, as well as the language that despite its reputation has very less irregularities in it than that most ancient language of Celtic legends and drinking.

Yes loyal readers, Irish is quite possibly the most screwed up language that I have attempted to study. It breaks down like this: I was determined to master at least enough Irish in my time there to talk about the weather, say that Guinness is indeed good, but Murphy's and Beamish kick its ass, make jokes about tourists and plenty of other fun things that you can do when the amount of native speakers of a language numbers the same as inhabitants in my home town. Alas, none of this was to be so. My problems started immediately as soon as I opened my lesson books in Irish, to discover that words such as Oiche (night) and aibhneacha (rivers) were pronounced "ee" and "ownahee" respectively, which not only shows that there seems to be no reason why anyone would even think to devote the time to write words that are five characters long but with a single syllable, but even more annoying to anyone that there is no regular system. For instance, did you notice in both Oiche and aibhneacha there is the letter combination "ch", and did you also notice that they are not pronounced the same? Even in my previous example of Taoiseach (pronounced "teeshuck" for reasons that a congressional hearing would have a field day with) it is pronounced yet a different way. Basically, Irish has more exceptions to the way it writes versus how things are pronounced than how many roads actually have names in the whole country (three at last count). And this is just one dialect. There are no fewer than three major dialects in Ireland, and such a difference that native speakers sometimes find speakers of another dialect so unbelievably incomprehensible, that they just nod their heads and pretend to understand when being spoken to. Compound this with the fact that very few (somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 people) use Irish on a daily basis, and by all evidence is dwindling quicker than you can say Baile Atha Cliath (Dublin in Irish, pronounced "bal a clia" incidentally. Interesting fact that I will put in the middle of this thought: Dublin comes from the Irish "Dubh Linn" which means Black Pool...something to think about).

So, why did I just bring you into the inner workings of a language that needs a tune up more than my rusting bicycle? Basically to explain that no matter my effort, I would just end up in the end learning the phrases in Irish that anyone learns when the have lived there for awhile, namely that something is good "craic" (pronounced crack for ultimate confusion to the average person not aware that it does not refer to the product of a plant manipulated to snort up your nose, rather to good atmosphere or conversation, essentially the word "fun") and possibly most useful of all, "Pog mo thon" (pronounced, surprisingly like it looks, "pog mo hon", meaning "kiss my ass", or "arse" is it were). In end, I never did learn much more of this language, which I find to be a pity, but what I did learn is that I was not alone as so many Irish bemoan the fact that they don't speak Irish, but equally fascinating to find nothing extraordinary in the fact that they devote no time to actually attempting to learn it.

So ends segment one of my time in Ireland. Stay tuned soon for my next installment on how I spent six long and rainy months on the Green Island.

I'll get around to updating this thing soon....just check back...

(In Irish) Geez lads, fak off, I'll do it when Kerry wins the All-Ireland, do you know what I mean, like