Reading (For Dummies)

To Hell and Back

Forgive this entry, for it is a mishmash of previous things I wrote down over the past two weeks. It basically summarizes my trip here.

The Saga Begins...

The Singapore Airline 747 I flew over on. Huge fuckin' plane

At least it wasn't made out of Legos!

The flight was pretty damned cool. I actually wrote an entry I never posted about it. Maybe I'll get to posting it.

The flight was only 6 hours 35 minutes. It felt faster. I managed to get 2 hours sleep, which I thought was a mistake in my grand calculation. It turned out to be a good thing.

People in Frankfurt spoke pretty good english, and I didn't have much trouble getting out of the city. It was the train ride when things started going wrong. The attendents on the train didn't speak english. There was a transfer in Leipzig and nobody could tell me where the busses were. Well, the train was delayed until 1905 (was supposed to get there at 1835). The bus left at 1900. Public transportation, by the way, *always* runs on schedule here.

So I missed the bus and had to wait until 2100. That sucked.

I managed to get a room at the Hotel Burgk. The taxi driver that took me didn't speak English. I had to write down on some paper where it was I wanted to go, and it took him a minute to figure it out.

The woman at the hotel didn't speak English (we're sensing a pattern here, no?). But I managed to get a room and pretend I was a deaf mute.

German alarm clocks reading 0 at midnight)

I spent two nights at the hotel to sort of regroup myself, and figure out what the hell I'm doing. Day two in Germany (Thursday) was when I figured out about the Zalussengescheid. What an ordeal that little piece of paper causes.

Anyway, I managed to meet up with the interim secretary (the main secretary for the CL program is on vacation in Spain, how nice), and she gave me a 10 page instruction booklet on things I have to do. Basically it goes something like "Bring your passport, visa, zalussengescheid, etc, to the studentenwerk, get a room *reserved*, go to the bank with the paper from studentenwerk, open an account, fill out an automatic payment form for the studentenwerk. Then, go to the university and register as a student with the previous two pieces of paper. Then, go to the studentenwerk and confirm your room. Then get medical insurance. Then go to the police and register as a resident. Then go the studentenwerk and get your room. Then go to the university and get to enroll in classes. Then register with the immigration authorities." Failure to do the police and immigration thing means you get arrested and executed. Or maybe it was deported, I don't know. I don't speak German after all :).

You have to do everything in that order, because everything relies on the paper you got from the previous stop. It's like a bad Sierra puzzle game -- if you forget to get the dehydrated water from the shuttlepod when it crashes, you're screwed.

Anyway, complaints about German beauroucracy aside, things ain't so bad, especially now that I have a room in a dorm and I have ethernet access.

I stayed at a youth hostel for a few days, and even managed to "hack" the computer there into giving me unlimited internet access for only $1.50 (usually it's $0.10 a minute). The day I left, I taught some other people the trick. Unfortunately one of them got busted and the computer had a sign on it that said "Out of Order" (well, I guess it said that, it was written in German...) and the keyboard was gone.

While at the hostel I went wandering.

Almost everybody in Germany smokes. Here is a cigarette vending device on the street outside my hostel

First stop: Internet cafe to send some emails

One thing that sucks about *all* the internet cafes in Dresden is that none of them will let me plug my laptop into the 'net :(.

Floodwaters still being pumped out of the Hauptbanhof

After wandering for quite a long time, I had to pee badly. One of the most annoying things about not speaking German and not bringing my dictionary along with me was that I didn't know how to say bathroom. "Wo ist die wassercloset," I now know. The gender articles are still giving me some trouble though. I guess coming from learning two non-gendered languages this is natural though.

Anyway I ate dinner at a little Lebanese restaurant a block from my Hostel. The people there don't speak English (surprise surprise), but I managed to sit with my dictionary and the menu for a while and figure things out.

My salad, making me overcome my fear of cucumbers

Apparently, the germans like fried cauliflower (or the Iraqis do) and eggplant with potatoes.

Well, Sinbad's (the name of the place) scores some serious points for being the first swag in Germany that was 1) filling, 2) tasted good, 3) was vegetarian and 4) wasn't pizza.

My brother and Dad met me here and we wandered around a bit, but I'm still sketchy on what we did as my mind was thinking other things. A few things? Yes, we went to Konigstein Castle down south of Pirna.

Konegstein, as seen from the castle lookout tower

Well, Erik and Dad left on Friday morning, and the fun began with matriculating. Nobody there spoke English, and I needed a piece of paper that said I graduated from college. I brought it to them Today, even though they already had it on their file (after all they admitted me with it, the Computational Logic secretary said so when I got a copy from her). Tomorrow is the immigration authorities. That's going to be a real treat, I'm told. I'll start taking pictures again, now that I can recharge my camera batteries and actually have something to do with the photos....