So, I’ve been gone again.  I’m a dreadful blogger.  I just don’t think there’s all that much interesting, and thus don’t write about anything.  Again, I’ve just been a on a tear of working and working and working, and I don’t much care to write about that, especially.

However, I’ve made several more forays into Dresden and the surrounding country and have a handful of pictures worth sharing.  There aren’t any captions because there were just too many pictures to put up.  Enjoy.  Click on them to see them a bit bigger.  There are a great, great many of them.  As always, after the wall of pictures, there will be a few new stray thoughts about my time here.

Thanks for checking in again.

Here’s those stray thoughts:

• Still working on the trash thing.  To my understanding, there are six bins for various forms of recyclables.  Rather, five bins for recycling and one fifth bin called “waste” which I believe to be a government plot to catch people not recycling.  The investigation continues.
• If someone invites you to a concert in a foreign country, you should absolutely go.  Just don’t be too put off when it turns out to be six Ukrainian women performing what my ticket stub tells me was an “all girl freak cabaret.”  It’s been weeks since I attended, and I still haven’t managed to codify and arrange my thoughts on the event well enough to write anything more than this small blurb.  I am, for the first time in my life, at a loss for words.  I’ll file this particular experience in the drawer for “things that make you go buuuuuuh.”
• This stray thought isn’t necessarily about Germany, just about something I read on a train here:  Lincoln in the Bardo, by the incredibly talented George Saunders, is one of the finest books I’ve ever read.  I can’t recommend it enough.
• Some fine German economic math for you:  20 half-liter bottles of beer costs 6.40 in euros.  Each of those glass bottles can be turned in at a certain location for .50 apiece.  That comes out to 10 euros, total.  That’s right, ladies and gentleman:  you can turn a sizable profit by drinking cheap beer here.  Lesson to be learned.
• I don’t like chocolate.  Most people who know me are aware of this fact.  It turns out my life is a lie.  I just don’t like AMERICAN chocolate.  Hershey can kiss my grits.  German chocolate is a gift sent from on high.
• In addition to my previously mentioned Turkish food experiences, I have now added Asian and Italian to the “cuisines that definitely aren’t German but are still delicious here” list.  The one Schnitzel I ate left me rather ill.  Sad.
• My German language skills are….still…..so bad.  I’m limited to choppy commands given to German actors that are limited purely to “change the scene” and “do it again.”  Oh!  That and the ever popular “I don’t speak German.”
• Seeing the German government take taxes out of my paycheck hurt.  No quip on that one.  Just sucked and needed to share.
• I was walking in Dresden on my way to customs the other day (more on Customs below) when I heard Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s seminal classic about statutory rape “Young Girl.”  It’s been stuck in my head for at least two weeks now.  Send help.
• Customs.  Customs detained a gift from my dad.  Incidentally, the tan coat I’ve been wearing almost non-stop since and which can be seen in some of the pictures up there.  Thank you, Dad.  Excellent gift.  I digress.  What I would like to point out is the immense ridiculousness of making me take a train to Dresden and walk thirty minutes, one-way, to pick up A COAT.  Good thing all the heroin I smuggled in was done rectally and not sewn into the lining of that coat, huh?  It was A COAT.  Stupid bureaucratic oversight.
• I didn’t really smuggle in any heroin.  Jokes are tough to convey via text over the internet.  Just wanted to clear that one up for grandparents, various government agencies, and those of the cloth.

That’ll probably do it for now.   I’ll be around again, but maybe not for a little while.  My play opens this Saturday and I’ll be pretty bogged down with all that for a bit.

Until we meet again.

I know.  I’m as shocked as you are.  In case you were wondering, I’m on vacation until Tuesday.  This is far from the norm.  This post exists to get you all back up to speed on all the stray thoughts I’ve jotted down in my handy-dandy notebook that never warranted an entire post.  Hopefully, moving forward, I can be a little more consistent (don’t hold your breath for more than once a week), since I’m now aware people are reading this monstrosity.   Onwards!

• If invited to an “authentic Irish pub,” prepare for unrelentingly disappointing experience.  It’s exactly as German as everything else, just as few people speak English, and you’re paying a premium for Guinness and something potatoey.  It will also require you to take a train to another town.  Everything does.
• Speaking of the train, there are few things so disheartening as arriving early, buying a ticket at the automat, standing on the platform, watching the train approach from down the track, quietly patting yourself on the back for not messing anything up, and then watching the train fail to stop for you.  In that moment, your entire life becomes a sitcom and you look around for a camera to shrug at.  There is no camera.  Just the same ancient woman smoking a cigar that was there when you arrived.  Advice:  shuffle home sadly and try again tomorrow.
• Other modes of transportation:  walking.  Prepare yourself.  You WILL be hit by a bicycler, and they WILL blame you for it as they scream and ride past.  Resist the urge to show them everyone’s favorite finger, that will get you a fine here.  No joke.
• When your Scottish director offers to take you to the grocery store, accept the offer, but regret it immediately when you realize his car’s steering wheel is on the wrong side.  Enjoy peeing yourself as you feel almost flung into oncoming traffic at every narrow, cobblestoned turn.
• Toilets.  Good news:  everyone knows the word “toilet.”  Bad news:  They’re all strange.  They jut out of the wall and hang in space precariously.  Also, the flush button doesn’t so much flush as it does spray your entire ass with a frigid stream of water.  Prepare yourself for that uniquely horrible experience daily as you always seem to inadvertently lean back and hit the button.
• Light switches are massive.  A solid four square inches of light switch.  You know that “Oh no!  I can’t find the light switch in the dark” feeling?  Germans don’t.  The middle third of all walls is predominantly light switch.  Swat blindly, you’ll find it.
• Luckily, you really won’t need them all that much.  Your lights should be off at all times if you’re not actively defusing a bomb in the dim glow of the one lamp you’re allowed to have on at a time.
• My landlords make me open all the windows in my apartment once a day, every day.  They don’t speak English, but they keep saying something about getting air and CO2.  I honest to goodness am not sure what the deal is, but I haven’t suffocated yet.
• The best food I’ve eaten in Germany is Turkish.  Döner Kebabs are flatbread sandwiches stuffed with meat of questionable origin and enough sauce and vegetables to distract you from this fact.  It’s also the only thing open after about 9:30.  Magical, wonderful, but they may have also given me aggressive, third-world-country-style dysentery.
• Speaking of questionable meat, I don’t exactly know how high the standards are for meat packaging and sale are here.  Most meat (sausages notwithstanding) I’ve eaten tastes ever so slightly of prison ass.  Not to mention my dilemma of accidentally buying one package of ground beef and one of ground “meat.”  To the German who recently sent their dog to “a nice, big farm somewhere,” he made a passable foodstuff.
• They play Ke$ha on the radio here.  I love Ke$ha.  She brings out the disease-ridden party girl hidden deep inside me and I was glad for her unexpected company as I stared aimlessly at the alien symbols on all the food in the grocery store.  Did I dance?  A little.
• To any aspiring home builders or designers out there:  Haphazardly sticking a shower faucet into the wall above your bathtub spigot does not a shower make.  If at any time you find yourself thinking, “You know what I want to do while I’m washing myself?  Constantly worry about the direction I’m holding the shower nozzle I’m forced to keep in my hand the entire time.”  It’s not so much a means of hygienic maintenance as a clever way to flood your entire bathroom when your rice-paper shower curtain just fails to work.
• Baths are not fun for anyone over the height of about 5’6″
• Wedged between the Coke and Water in some vending machines (all that I’ve seen) is beer.  It’s cheaper than either of the options that are next to it.  Which is discomfiting.
• To all the people on the street who have seen me ambling about my apartment in various states of undress.  I’m sorry.  I keep forgetting about the giant windows in the living room I never use.  Stop peering into other people’s business and we won’t have this problem.
• Germans stare.  They’re not embarrassed about it, either.
• Are you a German woman over 40?  That’s not a question anyone ever has to ask.  It’s easy to tell by the unnatural shade of red they all seem to dye their hair.  It’s like the government is mailing out bottles of “red velvet trollop” to all the women on their 40th birthday.  My experience with the kafkaesque nightmare that is German bureaucracy wouldn’t necessarily make this a totally unbelievable scenario.
• To the restaurant “Sushi and Wine”:  I respect your honesty, but your name makes you sound less like a respectable place to eat and more like a money laundering front.
• McPaper?  It’s the name of a chain of businesses here.  I have no idea what they do, but I can only assume it’s an Irish news conglomerate of some kind.
• The trash/recycling/multiple choice test situation here is deeply confusing.  I’ve resolved myself to avoid it entirely by packaging my trash and mailing to Sean Penn.  I think it’s cheaper than the fine for getting the sorting wrong.

That’s just about all I have for now, but these stray thoughts tend to pile up every day.  It’s a very odd place, this Germany.  More next time on:  Some Guy’s Blog!