Reading (For Dummies)

Travelling II

The last few days have been a blast. I finished up reading Catcher in the Rye. Scary book. Awesome. Funny. Depressing as all hell.

On Thursday night, I went out with an International Something-or-other party. It primarily consisted of Germans seeking hot people from other countries. So I gave it my best.

Beginning our evening, a colorful sunset of sorts

I went to the gig because Andreas said I should. Met a lot of neato people there, too. I didn't take so many pictures of them, of course. We did, however, go to a Spanish bar, so I took a picture of the "urinals."

Seems a little more like Mexican, ya think?

I got some names and email addresses and phone numbers and what not, of some future friends to call. I revel in the fact that my new cell phone makes me more accessible...to people who will probably just piss me off and ask me for computer help.

Friday meant rock climbing at the gym. I climbed with my now-regular partner Ferri. Afterwards he noticed the button on my bookbag, which says "Linux is the shit". He was a little confused by the quote, he asks "Linux is shit? But I like it." I explained to him American slang, he understood. "So, you're good with Linux? Could you take a look at my computer sometime?" Sigh. Actually, it turned out to be good. The two problems with his computer were easy to fix, and one of them was a problem with DNS server at my university. So we called the system administrators and told them the problem. They were probably impressed that I figured it out.

Ferri wanted to thank me for fixing up the computer, so he invited me over for coffee. Really freaking strong, blacker than the dark side of the moon coffee. You put the spoon in this coffee and, after it's 1mm down, you can't see the spoon anymore. Yeah. Saying that this stuff was strong is like saying your mother is older than you. No shit.

So I drank the coffee and we made a date to go hiking through the Sachsische Schweiz. That date was Saturday. We got on a train at 8am and headed south....

A rainbow, when we got off the train

Strange rock formations

The Schweiz (the Saxon Alps) are sandstone. I made some comments about them in an earlier post...how climbing is quite challenging. We did some bouldering, when I discovered his unsafeness :). We were going up a bouldering path, and after doing a few moves, before you realize it, you're hanging over 30' off the ground. At that pound I decided to screw that and started downclimbing, so he followed (thankfully). I didn't photodocument things so well, probably because I was in awe of the cliffs. I think too many people do things just to take pictures of them...I wanted to be sure I was getting the right things out of the hike.

The weather proved interesting too. In America, we get these storms with "Gale-Force winds." As you might have guessed, Gale-Force winds are called that because the winds are similiar to a Gale. What's a Gale? I'm glad you ask. We've been having one for the last two days. It's basically a series of fast showers with 65 mph winds the whole time. It made the hike interesting....

We hiked for about 3 hours and finally came to a restaurant in the park, and had some lunch (about noontime). That was a relief as I hadn't eaten breakfast. We finally made it back to Dresden at about 4pm, so that was a good 5 hours of hiking. The stretch after the restaurant was the worst...I hate hiking downhill.

I came home and have been playing guitar for the remainder of the weekend. My skills improve every day it seems...pretty cool. What's annoying? Well, there's this song that I haven't heard in a long time, and I've got the chords to it, but I forget the rhythym. I would be using some Napster-like software if there was anything good for linux/ppc (anyone know of anything? Let me know!). I read this Don Henley story, though, which is interesting. Need more artists like him....