Yes, I'm still alive!

Well, I don't quite know where the time has gone...I've been back from Berlin for a week and a half. Actually, I suppose I do know where the time has gone, in that I wrote 45 pages in the space of a week. Word. Lots of words, in fact. Chapter 5 is done, although it's not nearly as impressive as it seems since 4 doesn't exist yet, haha. 4 and 5 go together as a binome, so I can't truly complete 5 until I write 4. And for the record I was planning on writing the diss in order but then I started what I thought was 4 and then realized that it made more sense as 5 and that my original 5 made more sense as 4. So I flipped the order and ended up writing 5 before 4. But no worries, I'm almost ready to write 4, hopefully that one will be done by the end of the month. yes! In any case, this means I have 4 chapters written, so I'm officially halfway there! Yay!

Anyway, our trip to Berlin can generally be broken down into two themes: eating/drinking and kitschy historical tourism. hahaha. Kari's comment on my penchant for the tourist trap goofiness was: "you embarrass me." hahaha. That did not, however, stop me from getting a picture trying to climb the wall:


Nor from getting a picture with checkpoint charlie:


And getting a fake visa to leave the eastern part of the city, from the random dude set up by a piece of the wall:


And yeah, I seriously pondered getting my real passport stamped but decided that the Americans might take a dim view of that when I try to get back into the States, haha. So I settled for the fake visa instead!!!

Kari was not embarrassed to join me on the sausage and beer fest, however:


This was our first (of many) pints in Germany! Check out those fun glasses. And the foam. We were pretty wiped at this point since it was our first night, but the beer perked us up. Until it made us crash later, haha.

One of the specialties in Berlin is currywurst, which is a white sausage covered with a sauce that appears to be ketchup sprinkled with curry powder, HAHA. Since the sausage was clearly high quality, it was actually delicious. Kari and I enjoyed currywurst on multiple occasions. Goulash too.

Our snacks through out the trip tended to come from this store, billed as the largest chocolate shop in Europe. We approved, particularly because they had a chocolate Reichstag which I insisted we record (that's Leah with me):


As you can see in this picture, Berlin was COLD. And I mean, really, really cold.


We never thought we'd be warm ever again. Fortunately the Germans have an antidote to the weather, in the form of mulled wine. BUT. This is not your average wussy French mulled wine. Oh no. The Germans add a shot of captain morgan's to their wine. Yes. I don't exactly know how it works: either the rum warms you up or else just leaves you so tipsy you don't care about the cold anymore, haha. In any case, our routine became a glass of wine around 11 or 11:30, which then led to an immediate need for currywurst to sop up said wine in our stomachs, haha.


When we weren't busy eating, drinking, or falling for stupid tourist traps, we went to Dresden. And I'm really glad we did, despite some pretty intense train issues (long delays). Dresden is fascinating, for two reasons: first because of what happened there and then for the fact that you can't really tell. Everything is totally reconstructed. Here are two examples, the first is the Zwinger palace:


And then this is the main church in the center of town. You can see darker stones sprinkled in there; those are the originals from the first church. And they're put in as close to the same spots as possible. This church actually only reopened in 2005!


Anyway, plenty more pictures are available here.

I think that's about it for now...I'm currently on a theater kick, saw a play by one of my authors last night, and then Judy is in town and we have hot theater dates tomorrow and Saturday nights. Yes! Saturday's is kind of funny since the show was totally sold out and they told me there was no chance in hell we could get tickets. Judy called and pulled her strings, and sure enough, we're good to go!