It’s been a week, and in lieu of anything substantial due to my moving to a new apartment today, here are some stray thoughts about my earliest forays into Germany.

• No one back home finds my Stones reference with the whole “Exile on Meißner Street” thing to be nearly as cool as I do.  Screw you guys, it’s clever.
• To say another thing about the Stones:  Classic Rock in the English language sounds something like sweet love in your ears when all you hear anywhere else is the strangle garble of long-“u” sounds and consonants that make up the tongue of the Fatherland.
• Time in a foreign country causes you to have romantic thoughts about parts of your homeland that you really never experienced (e.g., the odd expanse of the American Left Coast).
• Saxony (where I am) is not to be confused with the Germany you might have in your head.  There’s no lederhosen, I haven’t seen a single pretzel, and I have been privy to no weird sex stuff.  I can’t decide if I’m relieved or disappointed.
• There is a preconceived notion that Germans have no sense of humor.  I have found this to be incorrect.  They do, indeed, have a sense of humor, but allow me to say it is not now and will never be YOUR sense of humor.  The laughter will always have nothing to do with you.  Accept it.
• Lights flicker here.  Prepare for the use of a light switch to turn your late-night bathroom visit into an episode of the X-Files.  Luckily, I have not been attacked by a giant fluke-worm monster as of yet.  Knocking on wood as I type.
• Coke Zero tastes almost identical to American regular Coke.  Why American Coke Zero does not, I can’t say.  I can only assume it has something to do with background Chernobyl radiation in the artificial sweetener here, and that a pernicious illness is on the horizon.
• Something about the way I move and exist, even when dead silent, “screams American,” so I hear.  I have no inclination as to what that might be, but I’m open to suggestions.  To my knowledge, I wasn’t wearing my “Two Time World War Champ” t-shirt.
• Speaking of which, I can see Anne-Frank-Street from my window.  I somehow find this strange, but can’t really figure out why.
• Germans have a thing for Westerns.  Who knew?
• Suburbs in Germany are much like Suburbs in the US.  A not much going on besides a proliferation of middle-aged white men in ever-so-slightly-too-small clothing .  I have yet to make my pilgrimage into Dresden proper.
• Booze is cheap; live it up.
• The heat settings on the shower have a certain temperature marked as “comfort.”  I can’t necessarily pinpoint why, but I feel the heavy weight of judgement as I push the thermostat up to the “burn off the top three layers of skin” setting.
• Entschuldigung is a very long way to say “excuse me” and does not roll off the tongue easily when you bump into someone.

For now, this will do.  Pictures are forthcoming and expect more closely spaced, but erratic, posting in the future seeing as my wireless connection will be a bit more reliable.

To all of you back in the States, I wish you well from six hours into the future on this rainy Radebeul day.  Bis Später!