Alright, my bags are packed and I am about to leave... tomorrow morning. Rumor has it it's snowy in Germany which feels kind of unreal considering how sunny the Bay Area is at the moment.
Just so I know what's expecting me in Germany (in case I forgot), Jean Pierre sent me a link to 20 things to keep in mind when visiting Germany, a quite funny list of things you might (well, you will) stumble across when you make it to my home country.
Things I am looking forward to? The food. The beer, obviously. Spring and summer. Some of my classes. Making more music again (my trumpet really does want to get played more often than recently!). German folk festivals. That the price on the shelves is actually what I have to pay. The metric system. Buildings with walls that actually deserve the name. Public transportation that works. The autobahn and people who know how to drive stick (no offense ;) ).
Things I am not looking forward to? The cold weather! Some of my classes! Gas prices. Closed stores on Sundays. Bad customer service, at times. Kind of a shortage on the "free wifi" front. Dubbed TV shows. 19 % sales tax.
As you see, I am all set -- except for that "proud to be an American" t-shirt morgamic wanted to get me, of course :) Cheers!
(The picture is CC-licensed by caribb on flickr, and it's purely symbolic: my plane(s) are not even going to be Airbuses)
Auf craigslist (einer bekannten amerikanischen Kleinanzeigen-Webseite) stehen von Zeit zu Zeit amüsante Abhandlungen von Menschen, die einfach mal anonym Dampf ablassen wollen. Und so schreibt ein Barmann bei Starbucks: