Thursday is the new Wednesday

Not true, not true, I will still plan on posting on weds. but don't be surprised if there are more delays to come. Not that I think anyone really minds. Also, I would like to apologize about the last post. I promise you won't be getting anymore "lectures" in the future. I guess sometimes, with no one to really speak english too, I get all these things stuck in my head and can't get them out adequetely in German. So it spills out here.

So the latest is.....Last weekend I went to Cologne where they had the World Youth Day (Weltjugendtag), which is actually an entire week where all the catholic youth of the world come to see the pope. It has been going on for 20 years, has been in the states and was in Germany this year. So I thought I would check it out, maybe convert to catholicism or at least pick up some really horny girls. Neither happened unfortunately. Instead I talked to a Fransiscan friar from St. Paul, MN about this and that. He comes from the brotherhood of peace and in between living a communal life on very scarce means, he helps those in need in the community. Basically, he is a guy who lives on a Kibbutz in St. Paul and works at a non-profit co. Oh and he wears a brown cloak with a rope belt. By the way, the ice cream is so damn good in Europe. Fuck.

Then on Sat I rode my bike with some friends to Holland. As I've said before, Holland and Belgium are really close to Aachen, maybe 3-5 km. So I went to a town Vaals, and had some beer, ate some Dutch-style french fries (with mayo) and then just chilled. Soon I'll go play some golf in Belgium. And this weekend Noemie, my french friend, is coming to visit me. We'll do this and that, and on sunday go to Bonn and take a ferry along the Rhine river from Bonn to Cologne. Afer that, I've got some more french friends coming on wed to sund. Somewhere I;ll do work, which is going great. Making some good progress, learning still a lot (which is great) and coming up with some interesting designs. I should start building a prototype in a couple weeks.

Other points of interest. In case any of you know about it, I am no where near the massive floods happening in southern Germany. Found a funny website about American slang written by an Aussie who enjoyed some language exchange on a visit to the states. It was funny, he had a couple warnings as a preface. No. 3, don't use American slang (or any other slang in a foreign language - yes Aussie english is a foreign language) since you will sound stupid and probably will offend someone without realizing it. I thought it was good advice, since people are naturally eager to learn slang when learning a new language and are often far to eager to start using it. There's this one guy from poland in my lab who always trys to say American slang to me that I can only assume he learned from songs. He then laughs really hard (and in his defence, it is fun and funny to use another language's slang) while I stand there thinking that just sounded terribly unfunny. I smile.

So with that said, here is some German slang. Diese Puppe ist scharf! (That chick is hot!) Pronounced: dee-suh poo-puh ist shaarf.

viel Spass (have fun) Pro: feel shpaas
spence