Back to school

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Well, interesting series of events lately. For my last weekend of freedom, or aptly put, my last weekend of my 1.5 year hyades, or my holiday life, I went to Munich for Oktoberfest.
















As you can guess, the idea is to drink beer all day long and eat roast chicken, while you listen to live music and drink with a million people or so. It was really fun.
















But forgive me if 'tone' is lacking in this post. I did end up catching a cold, and now I'm quite sick today.

I tried going to my first day of university yesterday, to study Media and Computer science. Basically, computer science geared at working in a multi-media area later in life. It was of course rather intimidating being entirely in German, but compared to the similar speeches I heard at this time last year, instead of understanding 0.8% of what was being said, I understood about 80% of what was being said. I could infer the rest. Not bad. It's really funny - this phenomenon I've been commenting on, this one where EVERY german I meet compliments me on my German has even stepped up a notch. I asked that "...since I'm a native speaker of English, I'm no doubt exempt from this part of my studies, but in its place I should probably take a german course, no?"

- But your German's already really good!

I just realized in this moment that maybe he was taking the piss out of me. No...

Anyway, after 3 hours of listening to organisational details, I was really hitting a limit - one, because I'm sick with a cold, and two - germans like to address every possible detail and potential outcome, and fail to realize that such a concept such as chaos theory exists (i.e. the factor that screws even the best of plans), and you can actually save a hell of a lot of time if you just deal with things as they arise, rather than wax the hypothetical and plan for things that'll never happen, or are actually rather trivial in nature. For this reason, I would make a good German, as I was brought up in exactly such an environment!

I know sometimes I sound like I take cheap shots at Germans, but let's be fair - I take cheap shots at everyone. It's all a bit of fun. People take cheap shots at me, I live with it. Anyway, I would never want to leave such a tolerant group of people, ever, and I've never felt more safe, free, comfortable, and accepted in my entire life. Why? Because the Germans have it good - there really is no reason to not accept somebody. Everyone seems to simply enjoy life here. There are similar values to North America over here, no doubt, but Germans don't seem to put 'winning the rat race' ahead of their own well-being and general happiness, and that I think is something the whole world could learn from. Productive and happy. Best of both worlds. Maybe I'll be productive one day.

love
steve