Boozin' with the post-modernists

Ok. I know, I'm late. You probably sat down Sunday morning/afternoon with a cuppa joe to see what those wacky expats were up to. And nothing. Not a word.

Sorry.

But, here's the scoop, quickly because David is waiting to use the phone, which doubles as the internet - like back in the day. Only now it's the internet that doubles as a phone. Semantics aside, we met our friends (Melonie, Jens and Michael - see earlier post) for a few beers on Friday. We met at 9pm and when we finally stumbled home it was half past 4 and the sun was coming up. Good lord. It was Misawa-style. Although, this little fest was capped at a Turkish "pida" place where a husband and wife were freshly rolling out these phat little oblong pizzas that were loaded with spinach, feta and an egg and then baked in an oven. I'm telling you, that was the best meal I've had in Germany. And the food is generally darned good here - so that says a lot.

Saturday we didn't get up to much in the day. But in the evening we took a stroll through something called the "Dom" (pronounced Dome). It's like a carnival on steroids. This thing spanned acres and acres - there must have been a hundred different wurst vendors. We enjoyed a hearty dose of pommes frites. Although, I have to tell you, Germans have a nasty habit of serving this weird ketchup. It's like some kind of liquidy goo that vaguely resembles ketchup thinned with water and then re-thickened with corn starch. So it is sort of red and translucent. The really ick thing is that it just tastes like curry. I've got a pretty tolerant palette, but this viscous ketchup-wannabe isn't doing it.

I also had a "waffeln" covered with whipped cream (no sugar) and cherries. Now, that, my friends, was devine! Anyway, the Dom had so many rides and full sized roller coasters, it put Knoebels to shame. I kid you not - and the whole thing is open for just a couple of weeks. It was really remarkable.

We ended the weekend with Sunday dinner. Melonie, Jens, Michael and his girlfriend, Sabine (Suh-bean-uh) came over and we had a huge pot of tomato soup and bread and chocolate cake and fruit with yoghurt. Whoa, momma. It rained all day but the hot soup was just the trick. And it's nice to make friends - really cool friends. It took us nearly two years to meet people in Illinois. (I know, did we stink, or something?) So, this is record friend-making. And it's nice.

Language class is dragging us both into an abyss from which I'm not sure we'll ever recover. I was thinking today, we just defended our dissertations two months ago (in record time, mind you), moved to a new country, started a new job. And now we both sit in a class for 8 hours a week. I'm just not fit to sit in a class anymore. I can't. But, we have 4.5 weeks left. So, I go. David keeps threatening to drop the class. I hope not - then it would suck more.

I still love Hamburg, but I don't like German.