I'm in Germany!

It's been 2 years, but I'm finally back in Germany :)

Mate Tristan moved over here last year for a job in the German town of Kaiserslautern. So that is my current HQ. It's actually 3am here now, I guess the jetlag is still adjusting.

So got in Thursday morning about 10:30 and got to lug 3 bags to Tristans place. Thankfully backpack + 2 bags on rollers so wasn't all that bad. It's so freaking cold here all the time! Loved it at the time, since 20 minutes lugging heavy stuff wasn't too exhausting. I nearly died having to move those bags 5 mins to train in brisbane when I was leaving!

Don't think it's really kicked in that i'm overseas yet. Staying at tristans awesome little unit, feels just like visiting tristan back in aus. Recovering from last night/jet lag, we just watched tv shows all day (thankfully brought my hard drive with many tv shows, and tristans got a large collection as well). Cosy set up could easily do this for a few more days, but feels a bit cheaty to do in germany what i could do in aus hehe. Is cool just chillin with tristan though so it's justified.

Some things about Germany:
1. Their Keyboards are laid out really weird. Because of umlauts, they need extra keys to change the letters, so not only is there shift, ctrl, alt, but AltGr. But fare more annoyingly, they readjust the other key positions based on what they use more. So y and z on the keyboard are swapped! All the other symbols like + and ' are all in different spots to, so touch typing goes out the window a bit as you get to go back to the two finger search and click.

Interestingly, tristan's laptop is german, but he's remapped the keys to the typicaly US keyboard layout (which we use in aus). Which means I can touch type again, but really, really have to make sure i don't look at the keys while typing or it just gets way too confusing!

2. Cold. All. The. Time. I like the cold, but after a whole day of it, really thinking I should have brought a jacket. I brought a couple of jumpers, but the issue is that everywhere is heated in doors, but outside obviously not. means when you're moving between places you want to quickly throw on jacket, and then remove it the moment you get indoors. Jumpers are easy to get on, but quite difficult to get back off without lifting your shirt as well. Not really my desire to flash my belly at every german I meet.

3. German's eat some really disgusting food. Like every country has those things they eat that everyone else finds a bit disgusting. Well last time in Germany staying at nice hotels and travelling with two girls, we mostly ate at respectable places. Thursday night, I got forced upon me what I guess is the German equivalent of a kebab on a night out. We went to a supermarket and got the most disgusting looking giant sausage of processed meat and other things on bread. I still feel ill just thinking about it. Can't find a picture of it on the net, probably a good thing though. It looked the size of a loaf of bread, round and bright pink, with lots of little things in it, and oozing out an oily watery substance. Looks like an infested severed leg or something urggh... next thing I know someone had thrown it on some bread and given it to me, tried my best to eat it but urgh... got half way through and then donated the rest of the meat to tristan. They called it's pizza sausage i think.

4. Beer is cheap! In supermarket, you can buy six packs of beer for 3.50 euro. At current exchange rate that's like $5!

So Tristan has a German friend here who took us around a bit yesterday. Got to try some German beer, went to a few supermarkets to stock up on our trip. We ended up going to a wine tasting from this wine seller shop he is a member of. Was pretty cool, the shop is set up for permanent tastings, there are glasses hanging on the wall, and you could just help yourself to any opened bottle along the racks. They also had featured wines for the tasting, which were some lovely european whites. The theme was wines that go well with Asparagus.

After the wines, we left with some other german guys i think tristan's friend was friends with. We went to the scary food place (urghh) and dropped stuff at Tristan's before going to a german brauhaus (brewhouse) to try there tasty beers. Everyone seems to speak quite good english, so 6 of us were having a good time with beers and chatting, enjoying the nuances of the different languages. Tristan's mate explained a few of the German things that were said, but was interesting how little sayings jut don't translate. All in all a good time.

Oh, so I was pretty jet lagged at this point, I had jumped on a plane 2:30pm on the Wednesday in Aus, and it's roughly 24 hours of travelling before I finally got to tristan's. So at this point had been without proper sleep for 30 hours. Was not sure I could stay awake much longer. But a few beers and merry conversation propped me up and didn't notice it (about 9pm at this time).

Anyway, Tristan's friend was going to another friend's birthday party, and invited us along. Normally would hate going to a party where i don't know anyone, but everyone else was keen so we went along.

IT WAS AWESOME!!!

little flat, but they had bath full of beers available, food, some nice champagne, and like 3 different rooms (kitchen, hall, lounge) to mingle between, though all were quite packed. Everyone else was german, but they could all speak English so had some really interesting conversations with different people. The guys birthday was actually the next day, so we had to wait till midnight to wish him happy birthday. Apparently it's considered bad luck to wish someone happy birthday before their actual birthday!

Oh, and germans seem to LOVE ACDC. Is pretty cool to be Australian here hehe. We managed to high jack youtube and put some cat empire and hilltop hoods on for everyone too.

We managed to peel out around 4am, the party was still going but tristan wisely got us out of there. The next morning was quite painful for both of us, I think the worst was the memory of that sausage though. Just lay on couch all day watching tv shows hehe.

in 2.5 hours we should be on a train and headed to Australia for our Snowboarding adventure at "Snowbombing"!