New video!

Hello!

I'm back in Mainz (ski trip was canceled due to sickness, but now we have lots of time to catch up on work and relaxation here!) and just finished a video about my everyday student life here. I've been working on it for a while and am very proud of the result. Go and have a look!

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Please listen to this song.

Movie Reviews!

Alright. I've been thoroughly enjoying my first few days of vacation. After a long, looong time, I finally feel healthy again - I visited the doctor in Mainz the day before we left for break and got some antibiotics against my sinus infection/vicious cold. I think the combination of sleeping more than 6 hours a night and not having to walk around the campus in the rain made these antibiotics much more effective than the ones I took a week and a half ago, and praise goodness, I feel so much better now! I'm done with being sick. Yaaaay!

Along with copying old homework assignments and making long lists of theorems, lemmas, and corollaries for all of my classes, I've also got down to some serious movie watching since break began. The second night we were here, C and her mother and I all sat down to watch the Muppets Christmas Carol. It was the second time I've seen that movie, and I really think I need to start watching it every Christmas. :)

The day after that, C and I snuggled into our bed rather late at night and watched The Fugitive, which I had never seen. To be honest, the only connection I had with the movie is that in an episode of Scrubs, my favorite TV show, one of the characters finds out that another character (The Janitor :D ) was in The Fugitive. He's only in the movie for about thirty seconds (very close to the end) as a policeman who gets shot and dies, but still! I wanted to watch the movie for those thirty seconds, but then, of course, I got hooked! I thought it was a really well made, fantastically understated movie. Definitely a lot of fun!

Then, two days ago, Claudia and I decided to drive to a nearby city here and treat ourselves to a double feature - Jane Eyre and (I know how weird this sounds) Carnage. Now, I think Jane Eyre is a rather well known book to the audience of this blog, so I won't say too much about it. I was impressed with that film as well - impressed that it didn't fall into the nice, all organized and pretty box we have lately for films like Pride and Prejudice. It was also understated and intuitive and engaging - way more than I had expected. The story itself isn't as much of a "happy ending" story as Pride and Prejudice and I haven't read it recently enough to be able to compare it critically to the movie, but from my non-expert point of view, it was well done.

Now to the last movie - Carnage. In German, the movie was called "Der Gott des Gemetzels", but it had nothing to do with Carnage or Gemetzel! The movie premise is thus: two boys are arguing with each other at a playground, one shoves the other, the other shoves back, one insults the other, the other responds by hitting him with a stick that he had in his hand. Now, the parents of each of those boys decide they need to meet and discuss what happened and whether their sons need to apologize, etc. The cast: parents of the boy who was hit with the stick: Jodi Foster and John C. Reilly (you may remember him as Mr. Cellophane in Chicago) - she's an author and very much into art, he's a household supplies salesman. The parents of the boy who hit the other: Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet - the lawyer (currently trying to deny charges about a faulty drug from a pharmaceutical company) and the investment banker.

That's the entire cast. What starts as the most uncomfortable and tense cup of coffee in the world at the beginning of the film eventually dissolves into name calling, swearing, destroying cell phones, and all other kinds of childish behavior as their own issues with themselves, their husbands/wives come rocketing to the surface. About 40% of the time, I wanted to leave the theater because it was so uncomfortable with all the tension, and the rest of the rest of the time I thought the movie was absolutely brilliant. Definitely worth seeing.

I'm gonna go back to enjoying my vacation now. See you all again soon!

For you English-only people, this last one says: "Well, that's not a good sign!!" :)

Zoo Pictures

Frankfurt Zoo

So, last weekend, the lovely Josi came to visit Claudia and me in Mainz, and on Saturday when Claudia had to go to one of her classes in Germersheim (Haahaa...) Josi and I went the other direction to Frankfurt and spent a lovely morning and early afternoon at the zoo, and then found a French Bakery for lunch!

I wouldn't call myself a zoo-connoisseur, but I have been to my fair share of them (Pittsburgh, Oakland, San Diego) and so has Josi. The zoo in Frankfurt didn't look like much on the outside, but it had lots of really neat exhibits inside buildings. The coolest thing that we found right at the beginning was the "Night House" , or a building where on the inside, they kept it completely dark except for lighted plaques on the walls which told what animals were inside the exhibits. The building had an amazing collection of nocturnal animals that you would normally not be able to see in a zoo. Certain parts of the building had big clocks that told you what time it supposedly was for the animals that were in there -- it was really neat!

But I actually skipped the first thing we saw -- we were rounding a corner and trying to find out exactly which direction to go when in front of us, in the middle of the lovely fall foliage and in front of the Frankfurt skyline, there was a lion! He did some fantastic posing for us and then went back into the building (probably to sleep), but it was a great start to our day!

We also saw some amazing desert lizards, an impatient rhino, a massive hedgehog, adorable miniature monkeys, an entire otter family, and some very calm camels a the end of our visit. Pictures will follow!

They both hugged me!

So, C and I just arrived back at her parents' home in Ostfriesland in northwestern Germany. Last night was a fabulous dinner with two of our friends from the Mainz area (and I was praised to no end for some twice-cooked sting beans (with ginger, garlic, soy sauce, scallions, etc. -Thank you for the recipe, D!) and some Thai-Lemon Chicken (though I didn't make that marinade. :) ) and we all sat around and had a fantastic time with the two and watched Tim Minchin videos on youtube. Dessert was vanilla ice cream with raspberries. Awesome.

Anyways, last night is relevant because we were having such a fun time, we completely avoided packing our suitcases for this trip. So, with our 8:20 train from Mainz this morning, it was a bit rushed! Still, we made it to the train station in time, I slept quite a bit during the journey, and ten minutes ago we arrived at C's parents' house.

And as I walked in the door, I got two hugs - two actual hugs - from her two younger brothers. Oh my goodness, it made me so happy! I think I was kind of a scary-not-part-of-the-family person who only showed up maybe once a year and speaks a strange language, but apparently, I'm not so scary anymore. :D I'm so happy!

I'm watching Claudia help the older of her two younger brothers to play songs on the recorder. It's so sweet to see them working together, and in a few minutes, we're going to walk next door to her grandfather's birthday party. So far, pretty great day!

I need at least one more pair of arms and legs - and possibly another head!

Ah!

I can't shave my legs and do my programming homework at the same time.

I can't watch Lost with C and go running at the same time.

I can't be in one of my lectures and do my homework for that lecture. (well... :D)

And going to the store, writing Christmas cards, going rock climbing, practicing juggling and eating meals can't happen gleichzeitig either!

The worst part of it all is that now the people I'm getting to know here keep inviting me to do things with them outside of homework. !!! How can I find the time??

You might be wondering: If I don't have time for all the stuff I actually NEED to do, why do I have the time to write a blog entry?

Good question.

I don't!

See you later!

Concert and all-around fantastic weekend!

Hey!

The people up there are the ones Claudia and I went to see in concert in Frankfurt! The band is called 'Dota und die Stadtpiraten' (Dota and the City Pirates) and we saw them in a really fun bar in downtown Frankfurt on Friday. After a wonderfully fancy and amazingly authentic meal at a Thai restaurant (:D) we headed over to the bar and then got to hear this woman and her band perform. I posted a link to one of her songs on youtube here a while back. If you didn't listen to it, then - I suggest you look her up on youtube! The band plays lots of kinds of songs- some very jazzy, some more in the reggae direction, and I think on their newest album they went more in the rock direction. It was just fantastic!

After the concert, C and I walked around the city a bit and checked out all the enormous, important buildings there. It really is a business city. It made me feel like Mainz was a tiny village in the country in comparison! Still, somehow walking around in it made me feel important, too. :) We were in a jungle of huge buildings with hundreds of offices and as we were standing next to a particularly imposing one, we saw a glass elevator gliding down the outside of the building, lit up on the inside but it was night outside -- so cool!

Then we got back and proceeded to ignore lots of stuff we need to do and continue instead to feed our addiction to the show Lost. We're in the last season - four episodes left! If you haven't watched the show, you probably think I'm crazy, but hey - it was a fun way to spend a weekend and I actually don't think we got too behind at work.

Class is gonna be over soon and then I've got to go pick up some packages from the post office, run to the grocery store, and then attack the Christmas Card demon once again. Wish me luck!