Glückspilz/kostenloses Wochenende!

So I really lucked out this weekend: I paid for just about nothing and still did tons of stuff!

My weekend started on Thursday (I don't have any real class on Friday - just tandem team). That night my March language course group got together at a beer garden on the harbor.


Here's my half of the table. (The guy next to me is Denis, my tandem partner.)


Our professor came, too. She is great. I gave her this drawing I did of her as a gift, and she loved it and kissed me on the cheek and kept thanking me. That was sweet. (I purposefully did it on notebook paper, because she always teased me about my doodling during class. She said once that she wanted me to make a booklet of all of my best doodles from class.)

On Saturday we Oles went to Sea Life Center (yes, that's its German name), which is an aquarium mainly for little kids – screaming little kids with microscopic attention spans. We got in for free with a coupon from the booklet that we got when we became residents.


What's a blog post without a photo of Chrissy doing something weird?


There was a cool tank with baby sharks and rays and the real mermaid's purses from which they "hatch."


And they had one of those tunnels you walk through with sharks and sea turtles and eels on all sides. I'm a sucker for those tunnels.

At the end there was this wall where kids stuck post-its answering the posed question "What do you wish for the future of the lake?" Here's my favorite response:

DAS GANS FILE DELFi NE GiBT. [sic]
(dass [es] ganz viele Delfine gibt. that [there] are lots of dolphins.)

After that we went to a free museum above Sea Life with taxidermied animals, which was also cool.


I love Constance.


Then we split up, and Kirsten and I went to Osiander Café to use another coupon (Gutschein) for free hot chocolate (heiße Schocki), which was perfect on a somewhat chilly day. (Don't worry, parents, it's already back to beautiful today!)

After that the two of us went to the Archäologisches Museum, which is free Saturdays. It has artifacts from all over Baden-Württemberg from the prehistoric up through about the 14th century.


Here are some trepanned skulls.


And here's a Carnival (Faschnacht) mask and part of a window from an old Gothic church.

Then yesterday six of us (one German and five foreigners) went to Kreuzlingen, our Swiss neighbor city, to watch Germany wallop Poland in the European Football Championships. While we were standing in line, some extremely nice woman offered us her tickets for free (they had cost her 11 franks, or about $11, a piece)! We lucked out so much! Plus she said there were only four tickets, but it turned out there were six (perfect)!


Deutschland schalala!

Tonight I'm going Shamrocks for their Monday special: delicious half-price hamburgers and €1 off a pitcher of beer! And better yet, my family is coming from the US to visit on Wednesday!

Vokuhila, or The Mullets of Europe

That's right, I'm dedicating this entire post to the mullet. I went into town today to get my hair cut, and in the period of just under three hours, I saw two things I'd never seen before in one day: an old man mullet and a small child mullet. For some reason it's come back to Europe. You may remember the mullet from back in the 80s, but in America it has become associated with the White Trash movement. "But why?" you ask. My response: Get your eyes checked before operating heavy machinery or taking that goofy kid up on their offer to grab dinner and a movie.


The German word for mullet is Vokuhila, which is a surprisingly Soviet-esque contraction of Vorne kurz, hinten lang (front short, back long), which led me to believe that the mullet may have originated in the Motherland.


So I looked it up, and indeed, the mullet "sprang fully-formed from the head of Rus" (Nestor, 1290).


altogether an attractive look


A Lady-Mullet is a rare speciment, but I'm vigilant.


You might not be able to tell, but this man has his mullet in a pony-tail.


Too young to be able to fight off his evil parents, this American child is forced to wear his hair like a savage European. Oh wait, that's me!

Alright, so maybe there'll be a serious post in the near future, or maybe it'll just be more junk from the mullet paparazzi. There's only one way to find out!

Side note - The German newspaper Die Bild recently ran a hilarious article making fun of a British guy for suing his travel agency due to there being "too many Germans" on his trip. For those of you who can read German, I'd highly recommend it. (Click here.)

Überraschung! (My sister graduated.)

"Why hasn't there been a blog post in the last week?!" I'll tell you why: I surprised my sister by flying home to good ol' Byron, Minnesota, (very very briefly) for her graduation!

My parents and I plotted surreptitiously for months. The effect was awesome.


graduation ceremony


my sister and I


the whole family
My lovely grandma Mary was at our house while I was home, but she's not in this photo.


My sister's graduation party was a blast. I saw loads of friends (including Cody, in this picture, who's coming to visit me at the end of July).


Ain't she purty?


And this is Cody's mom. She's a gangsta ;)

Even tho it was really brief, it was a blast, so thanks again everyone who came over, went out, etc. I'll see some of you sooner than others, but I'll be back in August to see the rest!

meine Freizeit

I'm sure you're all wondering "What do you do with all of your spare time, Colin?" Well, hopefully I can answer this pressing question (j/k all, of course).

1) Read - Thank you, massive, labyrinthine UoK library, for having an enormous English-language section! I found The Third Policeman at the U's library with ease (well, relative ease - it took me about an hour to find the physical book, but I found its listing in the catalog in mere seconds). I also checked out ("lieh aus") The Road by Cormac McCarthy, which looks interesting as well. I'm already about finished with Policeman.

2) Doodle - I brought crayons, pencils, markers and paints with to Germany. It's therapeutic, so my insurance should cover the airline's mulct for my luggage's weighing too much, right?

Still Life


Mater Dolorosa

*I forgot to mention, three paintings I submitted to St. Olaf's other magazine, The Quarry, were accepted for this year's edition (Sadko, Mona Lisa, and The Sudan).

3) Experiment with this foreign concept of "cooking" (in the sense that "cooking" is equivalent with "heating things that I also unwrap") - The waffles and whipped cream were a very wise purchase.

yum!

4) Hike - I think you might have already figured this one out from my last couple of posts ;)

near Mainau

5) And naturally schoolwork/homework/studying… NOT! But seriously, though, I do have a decent number of lecture hours a week.

So that's it, just a brief post.
And Anna, enjoy your grad party! Wish I could be there; they're loads of fun! Con-gradu-lations again :P

Ciao amici!

um den Bodensee wandern, oder letzer Tag mit dem Eurailpass

Yesterday was my last day with the Eurail Pass. Technically I could still use it today, but I'm too tired from my adventure yesterday! So I took the train from Constance to Radolfzell, another small town on Lake Constance (der Bodensee in German). The trip took about a half and hour, and marked the beginning of another massive hike.


I started off mucking thru the forest along the Bodensee and wound up on the outskirts of Radolfzell when I finally managed to get out. I decided to just continue in that direction, having no clue where I was going, but I had the entire day free until 8 pm, so…


There's Radolfzell in the distance.


Following Lake Constance brought me to the even smaller town of Moos, which is really quaint - a close second to Egg for prettiest tiny German town.

Next I wandered thru Iznang, another small town, and continued along the way towards Horn.


Somewhere before Horn I got this photo. This plant is a so-called "living fossil" (I learned way more about plants in my Organismic Biology class than I did about animals). It's called a horsetail (Equisetum sp.), and split off from other plants before the evolution of seeds. In the Carboniferous period the Constance region was home to horsetails that grew as tall as trees (nearly 100 feet tall!), though now only one genus of horsetails survives.


Then I walked along a nature reserve (Naturschutzgebiet) on my way back to Radolfzell, where I bought waffles and whip cream - brunch today! - and took the train back to Constance.

Before I close, I want to ask a question: Yesterday I read about a book called The Third Policeman, and I was wondering whether any of you readers had heard of (or better yet, read) it? Anyone?

Feiertag! Warum? Einfach so :D

Yesterday was a holiday. No one knows why, but it makes sense, because we hadn't had one yet this week ;) So I had the day off, and decided to go hiking. But what was going to be a few hour stroll quickly turned into a full-blown, day-long adventure!


I made a map of the area (above) to give you a better idea of the area. I started out wandering thru the natural lands between Sonnenbühl Ost and the university, and then ended up going to Egg, to Mainau, and then finally to Litzelstetten, a little town about two hours by foot north of my dorm.


My trek took me along beautiful Lake Constance…


thru fields,


and the Black Forest…


to little Litzelstetten.
Of course, once I got to Litzelstetten, nothing was open, because it was a holiday. While in town, however, I did hear this amazing quote from a little girl (about 2 years old): She was pointing out people to her mom and telling her whether they were men or women. She pointed to me and said "Da ist ein junger Mann" - one point for her! Then a group of four people walked by. Her mom asked her, "And what about them?" And her response: "Da kommen zwei Männer und zwei Mauer!" apparently conflating the words for men (Männer) and women (Fraue) to produce the word for wall (Mauer) - ie, "Here come two men and two wall!" I got a bang out of that, and the mom had a hand over her face, cracking up, too!



I sat on a bench here and ate my lunch.


In the background of this one, you can see Insel Mainau.

So that was my adventure - very quiet, very pretty. I felt like I needed something like that after Egypt.

zurück durch Zürich - في ألمانيا ثانيةً

Yesterday I left Egypt :( But on the bright side, the internet is working in Ost (knock on wood)!

After the massive train ride back from Luxor, we had the whole day free in Cairo, so we went to the big souk/market (Khan el-Khalili) in town. Unfortunately I didn't get any photos, but it was enormous. And Brady, Sara and I picked you up a hookah (and it survived the flight)!

After that we had a dinner cruise on the Nile.


A friend (Akhmed) of one of the young guys from the hostel (also Akhmed) accompanied us on the ship. I had a lot of fun, even tho parts of it were really weird.


Entertainment included not only an S&M belly-dancer (complete with cane and black lingerie), but also this whirling dwarf/small person/midget/insert correct PC-term here.

Dinner was buffet style, and it rocked. Over dinner we talked with Akhmed, but his English wasn't good, so for the first and only time the entire trip in Egypt MY ARABIC CAME IN HANDY! Now if that isn't incentive enough to learn what the US Dep't of Defense ranks as one of the most difficult languages in the world!

After dinner Akhmed was supposed to drive us back to the hostel, but we decided instead to say we were "taking photos of the Nile," and Akhmed cruised us around downtown Cairo while blasting a mixture of American and Egyptian music, including the original Aicha (or watch my favorite verison)! - this made my night!

The next day (yesterday) all we had time to do was wander a bit more around our part of Cairo. Then we said our good-byes (Alex and Vera get to stay in Egypt for a while longer), and Sara and I headed to the airport. Three hours and fifty minutes after boarding our plane, we were in Zurich, where the two of us separated, and the quartet was down to one.

Back in Constance I was immediately confronted by the stark contrasts: It had apparently just rained, and everything was shiny, cool and fresh, compared to Cairo's dry, hot and dusty It was absolutely silent on my walk home except for the random chirping frog or songbird, the exact opposite of the insane level of noise near our hostel (honking, yelling, muezzins' calling to prayer).


snail on the sidewalk in Constance - Another difference is the pace of life ;)

While Egypt was quite possibly my favorite trip ever, it is good to be "home" …for now!