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Directories
Just another day
Today, I got to know my dog walkin’ buddies better. There’s Joerg (the doctor-aura guy), who is actually an SAP expert. They apparently don’t make as much in Germany as in the US, I dated a guy in Richmond who was an SAP consultant and he had money coming out the wazoo. Anyways, Joerg is the owner of Fritz, the husky-mix who is Charlie’s love buddy when there are no females around. Cigarette guy is Thomas, the owner of Senta, who Charlie LOVES. Toothless guy is Norbert and he says he actually has three teeth. He was a Klempner, which Leo.org translates as plumber, but he described it more as a guy who can fix and/or build most anything around the house, including the house (like a handyman, but with more skills and training). He owns Sparky (a shephard mix), Paul (a little black dog), and Alte Oma (“Old grandma”). Alte Oma is so endearing. She’s 22 years old (and he has the papers to prove it)!!! She’s blind, but throws fits if she doesn’t get her daily two hour walk with the pack (she also makes the Brötchen round every morning with the little dogs). She’s so sweet and funny. If Norbert is handing out treats and doesn’t get around to her fast enough she calmly, but assertively, starts barking in five second intervals. The picture below unfortunately doesn’t capture the happy look she always has on her face. She positively glows sometimes. It’s cool.
“Alte Oma”I then came home to enjoy a meal of Thai meatball soup. To make this, you first fry a couple cloves of crushed garlic and some chili-in-garlic-oil for a few seconds, add chicken stock, Thai meatballs, then vinegar, fish sauce and sugar. In a seperate pot, boil thin rice noodles until cooked, then drain and run under cool water to stop cooking process completely. Put some noodles in a bowl, top with preserved cabbage, fried garlic and cilantro, then add soup and meatballs. It’s super yummy! All/most ingredients can be found in a decent-sized Asian market, although I have to substitute Vietnamese meatballs, but they’re close enough.
Thai meatball soup
And courtesy of Stacy, I now know that I am 24% white and nerdy. Apparently this has something to do with a new Weird Al video, but my lame dial-up connection doesn’t allow me to download videos and I don’t think Weird Al ever made it over here, I haven’t ever seen one of his videos on MTV or VIVA anyway, so I guess I’ll never know.
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Expat meetup in Berlin area???
Would anyone be interested in having a meetup of expats and/or bloggers in Berlin, perhaps sometime in October? We’ll probably be moving away from this area before the end of the year and I’d like to meet everyone before I go, you know, put a face with a name. And this is not just for Berliners, but for anyone who’s interested in making a trip to Berlin.
How about this, you comment what days you’d be able to meet up and you can also make suggestions as to what to do (I’d suggest lunch or dinner at someplace not too expensive or difficult to get to), then we’ll do it on whatever day the most people can make it. Maybe we can go someplace on Oranienburger Strasse. I am unemployed and have no plans for October yet, so any day/time is fine with me (oh, except I’m getting my teeth cleaned on the 16th). And if there are a lot of out of towners, maybe we can do a self-guided walking tour of Mitte.
Fee Fi Fo Fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman
As nobody seems all that into the category thingy, I’m not going to bother keeping up with it and I will eventually get around to removing them.
For lack of anything interesting going on, I invite you to peruse my StatCounter visitor log with me. Somehow I’ve managed to get up to an average of 40 unique visitors a day. Let’s see, over the last week, apart from the usual suspects, highlights include…
- someone in Shanghai, China found me through a Yahoo email message - interesting.
- someone in Canada searching for “Storm on the Water” - they were probably very disappointed, in that I only mentioned the title of the song in some old post.
- two people searching for “German movies”.
- someone googled “Leipzig killy willy” and got my Leipzig post - what the heck is a killy willy? Any idea, rita?
- someone in Munich is looking for me, or at least someone with the same name as me.
- and three people who did blog searches for the term “Potsdam”.
- But by far the most traffic comes from the fact that I posted the lyrics to “I know you belong to me”, which is being used in an ebay commercial. I get two or three visitors a day for that post. - Well, actually, that’s only 5% of visitors, so the most traffic would be coming from my wonderful readers!
And two of my boxes of stuff from my childhood bedroom have arrived. One item is an assignment book from high school, which includes juicy tidbits like…
Vicky: Did you get a date yet?
Me: Nope
Vicky: Did you ask anyone today?
Me: Nope
10/2, Test on: Big O-notation, Simple Algorithms, Binary Search, Bacchus NarraformsExtra Credit Hum. II: visit National Gallery of Art-East Wing, Seeds of Change Exhibit at Museum of Natural History, After the Revolution: Everyday Life in America Exhibit at National Musuem of American History.
Unidentified Handwriting #1: DAMNIT THIS IS HELLISHLY BORING!
Unidentified Handwriting #2: Shut!!! Up!!!
Unidentified Handwriting #1: Shut the fuck up!!!! Damn it! Ick!
Unidentified Handwriting #2: This is soooo boss!!!!!!!!!!!
Me: Stable sort def!!!
Boss sounds like an Alex term, but I suppose it could also have been Marcus. Who knows…
And in “I’m awesome”-news, I stepped on the scale this morning and my weight loss since March 2006 is 21 pounds! I’m halfway to me wedding day weight and ONLY 59 pounds to go till I reach my pre-moving-to-germany weight. Yippee!
Should they stay or should they go now?
Well, it’s judgement day for the FreshTags categories. Personally, I’m not sure this site really needs them, but I will be using them on my genealogy blog where I think it’s more likely people will want to use them and things fit better into categories. I had a lot of trouble here deciding if something was worth making a new category for, should I make a lot of very specific or only a few very broad categories, etc. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s the “Filed in” statements at the bottom of each entry and the “FreshTags” section in the sidebar. What do you think? Are they useful/useless? Has the loading time of the blog been significantly slower since they were installed, or slower than other blogs you read? If you don’t comment, I… won’t know what to think and will be left with my indecisiveness.
Thai Food in Berlin
In my four years living in or near Berlin, I’ve tried many Thai restaurants, searching for the perfect meal that would make me feel at home again. Most were very dissappointing. To save you time and money, here are my recommendations:
Krua Thai Imbiss at Luxemburger Str 4, near U-Leopoldplatz in Berlin-Wedding, is excellent, authentic, inexpensive, has an extensive menu, and friendly service.
Thai Cafe Arisa, at Muthesiusstrasse 38, near U-Rathaus Steglitz in Berlin-Steglitz, is also excellent. It’s located next to the Thai embassy and started as a catering service for the embassy. When I lived in Berlin, it was only open Monday-Friday for lunch, but thailand-restaurants.de says it’s open daily from 9am-11pm. As of two years ago, it was cheap, with almost no menu, but they would make whatever I asked for, as long as they had the ingredients on hand. This may have changed if they are now a full-time restaurant, but on my last visit, the place seemed to be closed.
Kien-du at Kaiser-Friedrich-Strasse 89, near U-Bismarckstrasse in Berlin-Charlottenburg, is more expensive, but makes up for that with a nice atmosphere. It’s good, but not quite excellent, Thai food.
In Potsdam, Sala Thai at Dortustrasse 71C is great too. It’s a chain that has locations in Berlin, Hamburg, and Kiel as well.
As far as Asia shops go, I recommend the Vinh Loi Asien-Supermarkt chains. My favorite Vinh Loi is at Müllerstraße 40 near U-Seestrasse in Berlin-Wedding. It has more selection and is less crowded than the one in Berlin-Steglitz at Rheinstraße 44-46 near U-Walter-Schreiber-Platz. There is also a location at Ansbacher Str. 16 near U-Wittenbergplatz.
Any places or tips you’d like to add?
Shhhhh…
I think at some point in the last few months I have actually started to like living in Germany.
Not that I didn’t ever “like” it before, but I haven’t been homesick in a while and I got reverse culture shock on my last trip to the US. I also find myself wanting to defend Germany when people diss it. Hmmm… scary. I’m assimilating.
Nothing but phlegm
I’m currently sick sick sick. Ugh. I just spent the last 31 hours asleep (except for two half-awake steps outside to let Charlie pee. And Rainer’s in Tubingen. I’ve been mainlining Nyquil (known in Germany as Wick Medinait) since yesterday afternoon. I hate being sick.
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