Arrival in München

All three posts I have made on this blog has been made when I've been jetlagged and didn't know what else to do with myself (the rant about that random NYT article will, hopefully, not be repeated). It is currently midnight in Munich, although I feel like I'm essentially detached from normal temporal cycles altogether. I just slept for about four hours, so I'm partially awake now and have the delightful prospect of a sleepless night in which I'm too groggy to do anything actually productive. Hence this blog post, even though nothing remarkable has really happened. I've moved into my Wohnung, which is really nice and features a piano (isn't that the kind of thing you would expect would be in the ad? What if there were a harp, or a tuba?). I didn't want to sleep all afternoon, so I biked to the university library to attempt to register. This was a bad idea, as my German is atrocious even when I am alert. The whole adventure ended in confusion on both sides. I'm pretty sure that I did not successfully register and that a whole battery of official papers will be required before I can enter the hallowed halls of LMU-Bibliothek, which looks really nice on the outside but feels kind of like a public swimming pool inside (everything is linoleum and grimy, at least outside the reading rooms, and everyone has to use lockers). Nobody else who matters works on Friday, so I ate an enormous kebab and pretzel before taking the aforementioned nap.

I'm attempting to speak in Germany with my roommate, but his English is of course much better than my German; it remains to be seen whether he will be willing to keep up this charade. I have only uttered about 10 sentences to him, two of which contained howling errors. When he was giving me a tour of the neighborhood, I told him I wanted to go to the pharmacy to buy "Senf." This means "Mustard." What I was trying to say was "Shampoo". The way to say shampoo in German is "Shampoo". There was a complex set of mistakes in my head that led to this result, which I won't go into here. The end result is that I seemed like a maniac. The kicker is that he didn't ask me to explain; he just looked puzzled and said OK and left. Maybe I should just embrace it, and try to act like a person who after 20 hours of travel wants nothing more than a nice jar of mustard. I turned it all around when I got home by asking him for the password for "der Strom." Strom means "electricity" and in Germany, as elsewhere, electricity does not require a password. What I meant was internet. The correct way to say internet in German is "Internet."