Words cannot describe how happy I am to be finished, for now anyhow, with T-Punkt. I finally tracked down my “Schplitter” at the post office today and for the first time since I arrived I can function normally online without spending a fortune in time and money at the internet cafe near the university. I know I’ve spent too much time at the T-Punkt store also because today when we walked in “The Dude” not only recognized me and the guys I was with, but anticipated our problem and remembered our address from the millions of other trips in there. We decided that Deutsche Telekom and the postal service must be at war and we just got caught in the middle because it’s just astonishing how many things have gone wrong. So much for German efficiency. The End.
Today started off as a really crappy day, but when I got home this afternoon I had a letter from Kate which improved my mood a ton, and then we won the internet war. So it’s turned out to be not such a bad day afterall. Sadly, I missed volleyball today, but there’s always tomorrow. A trip to the grocery store may not be a bad idea; provisions are running low. But then again, maybe I should try to finish some of the food I already have, because it will go bad in another day or two. Everything here seems to go bad really quickly. I guess the lack of preservatives will do that.
This has been quite a week. Tuesday was the 21st birthday of this Irish kid, Aidan. So a bunch of people from our German course met at an Irish pub to celebrate. We were a pretty wild bunch, but it’s an Irish pub, so that’s acceptable. People bought me a couple of beers for my “birthday eve” so by the time we tried to catch the last subway back at 1 am, I was pretty drunk. German beer is stronger than American beer, and it’s served by the half liter, so it doesn’t take many. The evening was a blast, but we didn’t leave quite early enough. We missed the last train by about 4 minutes and then had an interesting time getting back. We were under the train station so we walked up there but apparently it pretty much shuts down at 1 am. They were closing most of the entrances so we went back down through the subway station where they were also closing some of the exits and got out that way. It was a really cool evening, probably around 50, and we weren’t really dressed for it. We ended up walking most of the way across Frankfurt back to our dorms. Lots of things about it would have sucked a lot more if I hadn’t been drunk, but I’m glad I had people with me who could find the way home because I certainly wouldn’t have. An hour and a half later we finally got back and crashed.
Yesterday I finally got around to setting up my university e-mail account. To do that I had to go to the new campus of the university which is nowhere near the subway stop that has the same name. Luckily I had just picked up a map of the city or I probably would have given up. On the way I walked down this street with all these barricades and tons of barbed wire and police with machine guns and a police tank. It must have been an embassy building or something but it wasn’t at all what I would expect an embassy to look like, so who knows.
Last night we had a party. Surprise, surprise. It was a combination 21st birthday party for me and party for a Brazilian girl who has been in Germany for one month now. Any excuse… I really thought that having my birthday in Germany was going to suck, but aside from wishing I was with friends from home, it was a great birthday.