Heinous in Germany - 10 Jan 2001
In the morning, I embarked upon my mission to take a shower. This time, I noticed, I had two pink towels. This confirms my theory about the girl and boy towels. They must have figured out by the panties and bra's I had strung everywhere to dry, that I was a girl. Fortunately, one of the towels was bigger. I couldn't remember if I was going to have to move to the company flat that day or not, so as a precaution I packed all of my things and I think I checked out. I handed my keys to the nice chain-smoking waitress, and she waved goodbye.
I headed off toward the office, again bewildered by the lack of homeless people. I found the Apotheke, and between me pointing to my finger and saying the word Infektioncreme (or something like that) I managed to buy some antibiotic cream. Now, If I can only figure out if the office has some sort of first aid kit with bandaids in it.
After reaching the office, I settled down, read some email, and managed to trade some of my pfennig pieces with Bernhard for some marks, so that I could buy some cigarettes. The cigarette machines only take Mark coins of either 1, 2, or 5. They cost 6 Marks currently. The interesting thing is, that when the price for cigarettes rises, they have to increase it by an entire Mark. What they do to compensate you, if the price increase is not completely the same as the price in Marks, is give you more or less cigarettes in a package. Most of the packages I have been buying have had 22 cigarettes in them, I believe. This morning, when I bought my pack, the package had 1 Mark taped to the front of it. At first, I thought I had won some kind of German cigarette lottery, but then I realized that this package only had 18 cigarettes, and the mark was to compensate me for the difference. How odd.
I went and had breakfast in the cantina again. I have decided not to do that again. It is not so bad, but they insist on putting mayonaise on the sandwiches, and I do not like mayonaise that much. I bought some milk along with my kaffe and sandwich. I again, felt very stupid, when trying to figure out how to open the darned milch container. After breakfast, I ran into Michael, who showed me a bunch of pictures from his trip to California. He has some very good pictures.
It started to snow this morning. My predictions are coming true. I told Olaf when I got here that the snow would follow me . . . It looks like pretty decent snow too, the flakes are not quite as big as they were in Pfaffenhoffen. (I like that word.) They are still kind of big, so the snow will be pretty wet.
Apparently I was correct in my guess that I will be in the company apartment today. Renate (secretary of the manager of all the techs) gave me the keys to the flat and tried to explain how to get there. I am completely confused, but Marc has offered to help me find it. Yeah! I should probably buy a map of Nuremberg, It would probably be quite helpful.
Went and had essen with Marc and Olaf at an Italian restaurant. I had some nice Chianti and Bruchetta. Not too bad. I got a bandaid for my finger at the Apotheke on the way back. This was good because I had not yet found any kind of first aid kit at SuSE. I looked in the kitchen, but all that happened was that I was surprised by how much the fridge resembled a cabinet.
After work, Daniel Bischof came by, wanting to go to the Greek restaurant for dinner and some biers. Olaf and Marc came along, as well as Edith and a bunch of other people. We had a pretty good time there, although Edith (a crazy woman who works in documentation) was up to no good. She was trying to set me up with Carsten . . . or embarriss him and me a lot. It was a pretty fun dinner, with lots of bier. Afterward, Marc helped me to find th e company flat. The company flat doesn't have a phone, but it least the one I am in has a kitchen, and a bath tub. I have never been so happy to see a bathtub in my entire life. The phone jacks here in Germany are very strange looking. I guess I expected them to look the same, like cat5 looks the same everywhere . . .