Long Walk for a Pint

On Friday night I walked to the downtown area -- around 4-5 miles from my dorm -- because the busses run only once per hour after 9pm (and I arrived at the busstop around 55 minutes before the next bus arrival). I went back to an Irish pub called Fiddler's Green, that I'd passed earlier in the day, to drink a beer and listen to some live Irish tunes. My other motivation was that I thought perhaps I would happen upon a multi-cultural looking group or hear someone speaking English there... and they would turn out to be some of my future classmates. (I've been feeling bored lonely, since I got here, and I'm really ready to meet some folks who can speak English well enough to carry on a decent conversation.) But no such luck. Everyone looked local and was speaking German, so far as I heard (except the singer/guitar player, who was speaking and singing in English). It took me a even longer to get back home (in the dark in this still not-too-familiar place).

I've spent most of Saturday and Sunday holed up in my dorm room reviewing engineering and math concepts (so I don't look like a dunce when classes start) and listening to German-learning CDs. My cold is in full force now, so hopefully it'll wear itself out in the next couple of weeks.

Tomorrow I'm hoping to start a local bank account and buy a cell phone. Apparently -- as a counter-terrorism measure -- German telecom companies are required to get proof of residency/address before they can sell a cell phone to a customer. And since I don't yet have any documentation proving where I live, they won't sell me a dad-blamed cell phone! So tomorrow I plan to corner one of the university admin ladies and try to get the necessary goods.