Ahh… Germany… wherefore art thou on the wrong side of the planet?

So yep… I’ve been here for a while, but I have five days left. I haven’t written since I got back from France…  mostly because not a whole lot has happened. I guess I’ll write a bunch now though, because I don’t have anything better to do at the moment… and when I’m done, I’ll go downstrairs and finish memorizing “Bugz”, our field show for this year. (It’s pretty cool, but I still think the whole bugs theme is really really lame…)

So.. France. We went to France, and it was nice. We were a la cote d’azur. I can’t make those weird French accents and I can’t make a circumflex, I’m sorry, I just don’t know how. But anyhow. French people are actually pretty nice, and I’m not sure why so many people hate them… I will admit though, that there are some places in France that smell funny… but it really wasn’t *that bad*. The cheese is fancy, and the wine is fancy… of course, I don’t have any experience with wine to compare it to… we can think the good old US of A for that. 21 is a stupid drinking age, but then again, we have a lot of stupid people… so maybe it fits. Europeans have a slightly different attitude toward alcohol compared to us, and I think it’s mostly because they don’t have the sort of stigma associated to it that we do. I really can’t put into words what I want to say about it… it’s just really hard to describe. One of the reasons why I think the US has so much trouble with young people and alcohol is that in the US, it’s forbidden to them, and any “good law abiding responsible” adults aren’t going to let their children have a beer or a glass of wine or what-be-it… But I would argue that that is exactly the problem. How is a person going to learn about the effects of alchohol? Through consumption. And where better to consume and learn about the effects of alcohol than in the presense of these responsible adults?! Instead, our government makes it illegal! This is just so ungodly stupid to me! Of course young people are going to drink. Young people are curious, they want to learn, it’s part of what makes them young people. But they can’t just responsibly consume alcohol with responsible adults, because that would be “illegal”. Instead, they find it somewhere else, and they go out drinking with other people who also have no experience with it. Then what happens? Someone gets hurt. Why? Because there were no responsible adults around to make sure nothing bad happened. When you make it illegal for young people, you take the adults out of the picture completely, and that is why people get hurt. Am I wrong?!

Ahhh… but I have made a massive digression. Anyhow, more abou France.

We also went to Saint Tropez, which I thought was pretty nice… lots of places where people with way to much money can go shopping. We stayed at a campground for about two weeks called Camp du Domaine, and it was pretty nice. We spent a lot of time at the Cafe, mostly because it had Wifi. I updated my iPhone to the new 2.0 firmware, which is absolutely wonerful.

Then we went to Munich. I love Munich. People in Munich love beer. I love Munich. I might venture to say that more beer is consumed per capita in Munich than anywhere ever. When you order a beer in Munich (not that I would know), there are a billion different options. First, is the size of the beer. There is either the Maß (I believe it is spelled with an ß), which is a full Liter of beer, or there is always the 0.5L option if you don’t want to drink a lot (haha). Those two options are really only for three of the beer varieties. There is of course, normal beer, which is kinda a standard beer. But beyond that there are Helles Beer (lighter [colored] beer) and Dunkles Beer (darker colored). Ahh.. but this is Munich. Just three kinds of beer that you can order universally? Don’t insult Munich with your barbarian simplicity. There are also the Weisbeer. There is the standard Weisbeer of course… just like the normal beer. But there is also, you guessed it, the Helles Weisbeer and the Dunkles Weisbeer. I have no idea what the difference between them it, but I hear Dunkles Weisbeer tastes a little bit like Banana…

Anyhow. Munich, and the rest of Germany has interesting beer. None of which, of course, I have consumed, because that would be naughty.

Let us now for just a short moment discuss German keyboards. There are a lot of things on German keyboards, that are not on English keyboards. And this upsets me. Luckily, it is easy to find a German keyboard in Germany, and it costs relatively little. Here are just some of the symbols available on a German-style keyboard. ° § € µ ß ü ä ö « » ¢ · æ  ð đ ŋ ħ ĸ ł ¶ ŧ ← ↓ → ø þ ¹ ² ³ ¼ ½ ¬

These sybols don’t actually have their own individual keys, but they are only two keystrokes away… (with exception of the umlauted letters and the ß, which do, in fact, have their own keys) If you’re ever bored, and you want to type some fancy looking random letters on a German keyboard, you can hold down the Right-ALT key, which should be labeled Alt Gr, and then hit some other random key, and if you get lucky, you’ll land on some fancy looking symbol.Otherwise, the only thing that’s really different about German keyboards, is that the Enter key is smaller, to make room for a few extra keys, and the Y and the Z are reversed, presumably because German hardly ever uses the letter Y, and it most often occures in foreign loan words, like “Baby”.

Ahh… so yes. I’m going to regret having to go home. There’s a lot of stuff over here that I have really come to appriciate. It is nice to have not seen a wallmart in a very very long time. But McDonalds is still extremely prevelant. And in big cities, KFC is not uncommon. I will miss German roads. Especially Kreisverkehr(s), which is German for “circle traffic” and is kinda like the fountain in downtown Belleville. The difference here is, that people actually understand how the right-of-way works, so it’s a lot less annoying to drive in them.

But I do miss my friends, and I do miss coloquial English (who wouldn’t?). I also miss drumline and band. And I just found out that we got new drums, and they look undeniably sexy. I hear we get to use them for the first time at our first football game… sweet. No one goes to football games to watch football, btw, it’s all about the band playing the half-time show.

But yep. Let’s see… other places we were… We went through Switzerland, which was awesome. The alps are pretty hard-core. There were waterfalls and stuff all over the place… I just wish I would have had a decent camera to take pictures with… I’d have loved to take pictures of waterfalls with a long exposure so the water looked all smooth and pretty and stuff… maybe with my dream camera, the Nikon D80, but alas, the effect really cannot be achieved with the mortal Canon Powershow A560… which I have to give back when I leave. 😛 My Kodak V1233 broke… and I am still sad, because she was a good camera. It was her LCD… such a waste of perfectly good camera, but there was no viewfinder (bad idea) so I can’t really use her anymore. Maybe if I can find the LCD on ebay or something, but I doubt it… because the whole camera’s going for about 30 bucks. I’m better off saving my money for the D80, but I still want a point-n-shoot, because it’s hard to put an SLR in your pocket.

Anyhow, Switzerland was cool… so was Italy, even though we were only there for about 20 minutes, driving through. We stopped for about 10 minutes to see Monaco, which was all pretty and blue and what-not. And that was about it. Way more than I could have asked for, and it was all very nice. I’m going to try to upload all of the pictures from these trips today, but flickr kinda sucks when it comes to uploading large batches of pictures, so we’ll see. Btw, Flickr Pro is totally worth the 25 or whatever dollars it costs a year, if you’re into sharing photographs. Just thought I’d throw that out there.

Anyhow, I need to practice Bugz, I memorized the first movement yesterday, and I’m planning on memorizing either the 2nd or 3rd today… depends…. 3rd would be easier, but I do need to work more on the 2nd movement… maybe I’ll just be on a roll and memorize them both… that’d also be nice. I need to print out a new copy of the second movement because I’ve written on it so much I can’t read the stickings for the fancy 6-let passage, and the stickings might be important.

Ciao.