Janingalina

My 2006-2007 New Years' Eve happened in Prague, with a certain Miss Sheila.  Fab way to begin the year.  2007-2008 New Year's Eve happened in Barcelona, it started in an Irish pub with a couple of Scots, and proceeded with coworker Christian and his girlfriend at a Discoteca. 

Even though it's 2008 already, I would like to tell you about my 2007. 

January came in with a bang, Sheila and I were in Prague, then Berlin.  But after she left Jan was blah.  i was stuck in a stupid furnished apartment in a no-horse-town waiting for my household shit to clear customs so i could move into the apartment i'd found.  It took about 10 weeks, but my junk did manage to cross the ocean from America to Europe. 

February I unpacked and finally got hooked up in the internets (allowing me to communicate with you lot, and the fam).  I saw homeboys Thunderbirds are Now! in Nürnberg, bought a new bike and leased a car, mixed it up a lot at Ikea.  I also got to see Ok Go in Nuremburg, where i became acquainted with the Films.  I bought the ceiling light fixtures and had them installed.  First Snowboard trip to Austria with the Siemens Lawyers.

March - Second snowboard trip to Austria, with Brose coworkers.  Building of extensive closet systems from Ikea.  Soccer practice started.

My first soccer game was played in April.  Easter was silly, I tried to spend the 4 day weekend in Salzburg, but that old Salt Castle was only good for 2 days, then I went home to Bamberg and rode my bike around the countryside.  In the end of April i met Hannes, who became my love interest and travel partner for most of the year.

In May Hannes taught me to eat Weißwurst, we went to the Devil's cave to see the cave bear skeleton and the stalactites/stalagmites.  I also threw the famous Tiki Housewarming party, and then we ran off to Croatia for a little beach vacation on the Adriatic.

June took H and I to Füssen for a visit to Neuschwanstein.  my fancy dancy sofa finally came. 

July was long.  It started with a quiet little barbecue/4th of July party.  H and I went to NL for a cold rainy week of camping. 

August brought the Berliner Beer Festival with Alex, Jens and the Wondertwins.  Supersis Ginny came, and we hopped around the Grecian Islands, avoiding the wildfires and watching Albanian MTV before bed. 

September I attended a couple of soccer games, visited the Frankfurt Auto Show.  Then for fun I went to Oktoberfest and Venice (on the sleeper-train!) with my protogées, the Wondertwins.

Oktober Mark took a couple of us to see pro-soccer, Nürnberg played Frankfurt and won 5:1 (unbelievable number of goals).  I had a bad attack of Green Slime Lung, and as I got better Hannes and I flew down to Rome.  There was also Bockbier in Franken, and I threw a little Halloween party.

November I was in MI for 3 weeks!  Fam, friends, Thankschristgivingmas.  beauty.

December, was spent getting used to being back in germ'ny.  There were some Christmas Markets, some Glühwein, and I started taking scuba classes (in german).  After Christmas I got fed up and flew to Barcelona to be in a big city and get some more sun. 

In 2007 I was in 11 countries:
Germany
Czech Republic
Austria
Italy
Slovenia
Croatia
Netherlands
Greece
Vatican
USA
Spain

2007 By Bicycle:
I bought a lovely little city-bike, Bella, with the girlie top tube, and lights and fenders. I rode it mostly around town to the bars, to work a couple of times, and do a few of the outlying breweries. it was one of my favorite things this year to go visit different breweries. dinner would be brotzeit (cold cuts), or some sort of sausage or pork shoulder and a half-liter of the local brew.

I did one little mountain bike tour with my coworkers Matthias and Christian, and that was pretty great. That was right before Johannesfeuer, where they celebrate solstice in the villages by lighting bonfires and drinking beer.

Some of my favorite 07 vacation moments involved bicycles - riding down the coast in Croatia, riding through a nature preserve to a Modern Art musuem in the Netherlands, and riding around the lakes in the foothills of the Alps in Füssen. 

In 2008 I'd like to ride more. I found some websites for mountain biking in the nearby nature reserves. I've started looking into some of the ways to travel with bikes here (including taking them on the trains). There are supposed to be a lot of hotels/inns that accept bike travellers. I want to learn more about that.  

2007 as a Footballer! (soccer player)
The spring season went well, I played about 20 minutes in each game. I went to practice at least once, usually twice a week. We won enough games that we moved up to the next league, where I wasn't really good enough to get any field time. I dropped out near the end of the season because sitting on the bench is too boring for me. I love to cheer, but i wanna play too. I've looked into joining a not-so-good team so i could play more, but you have to be home for the games - and i found i sort of resented having to schedule my travel around them.  so there will probably be no organized soccer in 2008.  

2007 knitting:
cool projects included finishing my first pair of socks! working up a thick wool/alpaca fair isle hat to keep the ears warm. i tried a yarn swap/secret pal thing, and it was cool, but i'm a little too distractable for that kind of thing, i think. on the needles now is a dark purple wool/silk cable yoke pullover, the forever leaf shawl (that's how long it'll take me to finish it), 2 pairs of fingerless mitts for friends, and a pair of socks for another friend.

I read a tonne of the Yarnharlot, and started listening to the Cast-On podcast.

in 2008, i think i want to knit more socks. they feel great on the tootsies, look cool, there's an over-abundance of sock yarn in germany, they're small, easily transportable, don't take forever, and did i mention, kinda fun to knit?

also in 08, i'm trying to incite a stitch and bitch circle. i think ideally for me, we'd meet about once a month. most of the girls here don't knit yet, even though a lot of great sock yarn comes out of germany. it was mostly the grannies knitting socks for people, and the younger women (while they learned to do it in school) don't knit things for themselves.


2007 Books I Enjoyed
I read a whole pile of books, because at first i didn't understand very much of what's said here, but also because i really love to read. 
- Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series
- Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently Books (i read them every coupla years, and i still laugh out loud)
- Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness
- Harry Potter 7 - i cried a little when one of the characters died.
- Lonely Planet Everything
- Y: The Last Man - a great graphic novel about the one man who lives after a plague wipes out all people with Y chromosomes. Read it, it's cinematic.
- Tankgirl Comics started up again! woo!
- Frank Herbert's Dune - now i know why it's a classic. very imaginative.
- Melville's Moby Dick - i'm not quite through it, but the first half is extremely entertaining
- Crazy Aunt Purl's Drunk Divorced and Covered in Cat Hair - she has a great voice and talks a lot about how knitting helped her brought her back around.

2007 Music:
The radio here isn't really worth listening to. Instead, I was plugged into the Ipod almost the whole time. My 2007 Mix CD includes:
- First we Take Manhattan - Leonard Cohen
- Bohemian Like You - The Dandy Warhols
- Seven Languages - Camper Van Beethoven
- A book and No Disasters - Some by sea
- Smile - Lily Allen
- A Good Day - The Films
- Worry About You - Ivy
- From Debris - Matt Pond PA
- Rub Alcohol Blues - The Fiery Furnaces
- Road Leads Where It's Led - The Secret Machines
- Tiny Cities Made of Ashes - Modest Mouse
- Our Time - Imperial Teen
- Skullcrusher Mountain - Jonathan Coulton

While someone put together an amazing collection of recent/choice indie music before I left for germland, associated computer storage problems prevented me from enjoying all of it.  Of the collection, I especially liked The Ditty Bops, The Fiery Furnaces, The Magnetic Fields, The Epoxies, and Erin Tobey. 

The rest of this collection will figure heavily into my 2008 playlists, as will the Bucovina sound that's getting pretty popular.  It's basically eastern european traditional music with electronic beats.

2007 Food:
- i finally made soft boiled eggs, using the egg pick, and egg timer. eating it with an egg spoon out of my egg cup (which makes a very handy shotglass as well). very euro, yummy breakfast. 
- i also learned to make coffee with a french press.  Mmm! 

2007 Travel Review:
- Prague - the czechs love a party, and the cultural scene is really hip.
- Berlin - one of my favorite towns in Europe, def my fav in Germany so far. A leisurely breakfast in the spinning TV tower beats waiting in line for the glass dome at the Bundesrepublik any day.
- Salzburg is not worth a 4-day weekend.
- Croatia is beautiful, but the 8hour drive is a bit stressful if done all at once (in pounding rain)
- The Netherlands - can be done by just going to Amsterdam, and then making day-trips from there. Ride the trains, don't take a car. A'dam is wonderful, the canals are beautiful, it's interesting to look at the women in the windows, and the pannekoeken are sort of like taking an omelette and replacing the eggs with pancake batter.
- Oktoberfest - really overrated, but it was a good laugh.
- Venice - beautiful and amazing - they really have no cars there, because they have no streets
- Rome - was gorgeous, but with the crazy traffic, no overview of where the busses go, and its crappy subway layout, it was a good weekend, but not the most relaxing.
- Barcelona - Fanfrickintastic. Go shopping, eat Tapas, drink coffee, listen to spanish guitar on the streets, or in the churches. Consider buying a chipmunk as a pet from the vendors on the street.

2007 - What I Could Have Done Without
1. Work's been weird and dissatisfying.  I've wandered from department to department. I'm learning a lot, but not doing much that makes me feel accomplished. That's been a drag.
2. Slicing my finger open, driving myself to the hospital, being sewn up with no anaesthetic.
3. All the parking tickets (i swear, the rules about parking change every 3 minutes here)
4. Missing my peeps in the Americas.

2007 Things I LUFFED:
- Podcasts - i started listening to the Cast-On podcast, This American Life, and some assorted buddhist and travel podcasts.
- Ikea - they had all the closets and light fixtures i needed for not too terribly much money.
- Movies on Ipod - A woman I respect shared with me a pile of pirated movies, costume dramas ripped to ipod-watchable format. woo! a pile of Jane Austen and also, all the harry potter movies!
- Snowboarding in the Alps, it got me out of Germany for a bit, gave me some social interaction, and was just frickin amazing. Nothing in Michigan compares.
- German Bakeries - fresh bread any time. Deelish.
- Fränkisch Breweries - I live in the part of the world with the greatest density of breweries per capita. I never thirst.
- Leberkäse - it's a slice of hot bologna loaf on a fresh roll with ketchup, usually. Makes a fantastic hangover breakfast, available at your local butcher.
- Hot Pot - boils a liter of water in about 35 seconds. good for tea, and as a time-reducer for boiling anything (noodles, eggs, sausage, whathaveyou).
- Thermal Baths - There are a bunch in the area, it's kind of fun to go sweat naked in a sauna with 40 germans.  Weird, but relaxing.  Plus the hot saline swimming pools are very nice.


All in all, I have to say that 2007 was an amAZing year for me.  I was for the most part, healthy. I am now pretty much fluent in German. I got to see some places/things that I really wanted to see. Noone died. Some friends and some family got engaged/married. Everyone I know was pretty much well and comfortable, and doing what it is they do. Looking back, I can only be happy.

2008 promises more adventures, and less of the initial set-up and language-learning crap from last year, so press your thumbs for me.  And Prost!!