I just had to post this link to a hilarious anecdotal column about intelligent design. I was laughing out loud reading this, something I’m sure my suitemates loved. Check it out.

Yesterday was a momentous occasion. My first true conversation in German. I was cooking dinner, when one of my suitemates walked in. At first, it was just the standard, “I dont speak German very well, so we’ll just do the hi, how are you” routine, but we ended up talking for about 20 minutes about all sorts of things. It was the most incredible feeling being able to, for the first time, hold (and understand!) a full conversation with someone in the language you’ve been studying for the last couple of years.

I went back to that wine store yesterday evening, and spent roughly an hour walking through the shop. I had a nice conversation (in German!) with a very nice employee. We talked about what kinds of wine I like, especially cabernets. We ended up having a little conversation about cabernets from different countries. As my experience with them is pretty well limited to the California cabernets, he recommended that I try a particular bottle of French cabernet, explaining that the taste was completely different–not as big and earthy, but still pretty distinctly cabernet. I ended up buying that and two other bottles, a dry (!) riesling Kabinett and some varietal called a samtrot, also Kabinett. For the uninitiated into German wines, Kabinett is a designation of wine quality. German wines are classified by quality and length of time left on the vine. A Kabinett is on the lower end of the high end of classifications, Qualitaetswein mit Praedikat (quality wine with distinction). That doesn’t mean that the wine is really any good, just that it isn’t total swill. I think I’ll probably go back today and buy some of the table wine from the barrels, because one, I think it’s really cool and want one of the bottles, and two, because I used the last of my cooking wine last night. Which brings me to last night’s dinner.

After the wine shopping, I wandered around to several of the market stands in the Altstadt, looking for something fresh to have with dinner. I found some sugar snap peas, one of my favorite vegetables. I headed home, and let them marinate in the last of my red cooking wine, along with some garlic, pepper, and a bit of salt. After 30 minutes or so, I pulled out the beans and sauteed them in butter, then dumped in a good bit of the wine marinade and some more garlic and reduced it down into a thick red wine sauce, which I then poured over the beans. It was one of the best meals I have ever cooked. Part of this is probably that I hadn’t really had any substantial greens for a while and so my body was clamoring for them, but rest assured that I’ll definitely be making this again.

After starting off as one of the worst days I can remember, the day managed to cap itself off OK. I won’t go into details about the bad side, but there were several highlights:

1) I found an awesome wineshop. Living in wine country is definitely a cool thing–the sheer abundance of cool wine shops is testament to that. Today, I found what is, so far, my favorite. Sitting in the basement of one of the Altstadt’s medieval buildings with stone walls and exposed beam ceilings, it exudes the most wonderful atmosphere. It’s pretty small, so the selection isn’t great, but the coolest thing are the different liquors and wines that are basically on tap. For the liquors, they sit in large glass vases, for lack of a better term, with a sort of hose tap arrangement. You get a bottle (they have baskets of new, empty, unlabeled ones there) and fill it up, for rather affordable prices. For the wines, there are basically taps sticking out of the wall. There are, I assume, barrels of wine behind them (since you can see empty ones out back), and again, you grab a bottle and fill. The wines are all table wines, but are very cheap–the most expensive is around 4 euro/liter–but look perfect for cooking or just quaffing with dinner. I’ll be returning, probably tomorrow, and buying a few bottles of different types of wine. I may also break down and buy an Eiswein, a dessert wine where the grapes are left on the vine well into winter, where they freeze on the vine and are then pressed, making a sweet, very intense wine.

2) A random act of kindness by the woman working the bus ticket counter came at just the right time to keep me from exploding.

3) Pesto filled gnocci.

4) I formally met all my roommates today, and was pleasantly surprised at how much of their conversation I understood. We met to setup a cleaning schedule for the suite, and sat around talking for about an hour afterwards, which was nice. It takes away most of the awkwardness that came from me being a foreign student here that they didn’t know (they all lived together before) who doesn’t know their language very well and thus doesn’t speak much.

Also, I’m supposed to be getting campus internet in my room in the next couple of days. That’ll be nice as the internet I’m using now has gotten progessively slower as more and more people have moved in and begun using it. I’m not, however, crossing my fingers about the campus internet–from what I’ve heard, it’s not fast either. Internet access really just isn’t the necessity here that it is in the States.

There have been a couple small updates to the site you may have noticed: I finally got a link to the photo gallery working like I wanted it to, and I added a little blurb about the site to the right nav bar. Now you can easily browse through all the photos. Enjoy.

More photos are up…

And this is it. In two and a half hours, I leave for the airport, gone from the States for an entire year.

My feelings at this point are weird. A bit of melancholy at having to leave so much behind, but at the same time very excited. I wasn’t able to sleep last night because I kept thinking of things I didn’t want to forget, but nervousness hasn’t really been much of a problem.

Anyways, I’m hoping to be able to sleep well on the plane. I’ve got my travel pillow and I’m plenty tired, so hopefully I’ll pass right out and the flight will go fast.

Next post: Germany.

Less than 48 hours left in the States. I just got this website setup, and while I have grandiose plans for it, I don’t have time to get them all running before I leave, so I’ll have to get them done once I get there. Here’s hoping I have internet access in my room.

As for the plans for the site, I’m going to make this a sort of travelogue. I’ll document my travels, both written and through photography, and document that here. I’m looking forward to it all, and think it will be a good way to share my travels with others and serve as a history for me to be able to look back on in the future.

Back to packing!