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.