Back in Bonn

This morning Dorothea drove me from Wuppertal back to Bonn. It was good to return to my "Heimstadt" (hometown). After moving my stuff into my guest room, I went to say hello to my colleagues in the digital lab. Only two of the four of them where there, but they should all be back on Tuesday. (Monday is a holiday, the Day of German Unity) Within a two minutes of my arrival Klaus decided that they must speak German with me, and I did not argue. Hopefully Andreas and Bernd will follow suit.
I don't feel near as nervous about being in a foreign country as the last time I was here. Part of it is probably that I'm not taking in everything as new. I also feel more confident with my German, and perhaps more importantly, I don't care so much if people can tell I'm not a native speaker.
Anyho! The rest of day I spent in my room. After spending after 24 hours around people, I needed to recharge my introvert meter.

The Longest Day

My long trip began with delays. Never a good start to an international trip. It was raining in Chicago, so they had to ground the planes. ::Blink:: Gotta love Chicago. Air traffic is disrupted by rain.
Anyho! I ended up arriving in good old ORD just in time to catch my flight over the pond. The plane was a Boeing 767 and didn't have the cool individual screens in each headrest with five different films and the little map that shows you where you are. I was rather disappointed. On the upside the flight wasn't full, so we could spread out a bit. And of course since we were going to Dublin there were many people with wonderful irish accents.
My time in Dublin was a bit more exciting. We arrived almost an hour early. Quickly I was hit with a dose of cold. I'd really, really left summer behind. Ever since booking a flight with a layover in Dublin, I'd been debating whether or not I wanted to try and leave the airport in search of the Guinness brewery. Well the question was solved for me because they made all passengers go through passport control and customs, and the stairs for "Departing Flights" was next to the exit. So I walked on out into the brisk irish morning, bought a one-day bus pass, jumped on a double decker bus, and headed to Heuston Station. For the next 45 minutes I sat on top (which was enclosed by the way) and watched Dublin go by. The first thing I noticed was that all official signs had two languages. First was what I assume was irish and second english. Dublin is an architectural patchwork quilt. Like anywhere in Europe, entire blocks of buildings are juxtaposed, but the architecture of any building will likely not resemble the building on either side of it. There is also alot of traffic on the rather narrow streets. I was so enthralled that it took me a good half an hour to realize that we were driving on the wrong side of the road! In fact at some crosswalks the words "Look Left" and "Look Right" are painted on the street to remind people to look in the appropriate directions.
So I get out at Heuston Station sporting a map I picked up from Dublin Bus at the airport and went out in search for the brewery. I then learned something rather annoying about Dubln: They don't believe in street name signs. The only way I could have any idea which street I was on, was if I found a building with the address in the name, such as "St. James Bank". So here I am wandering around Dublin carrying my backpack and laptop, with I map I later learned to be very misleading, and no idea what street I'm on. Finally on my third attempt to find the brewery I ignored the map and just walked in the direction of the big white building that said "Guinness". You'd think I'd just done this in the first place but no. I put my faith in a map that had me going south and west, when in reality in needed to go south and east. (I later checked the map I found on the website for the Guinness Storehouse, and yes, the Dublin Bus map has Heuston Station in the wrong place. Wonderful!) Eventually I did find the Guinness Storehouse, which houses the museum and gift shop. Unfortunately by the time I found it, I only had an hour before I wanted to catch a bus back to the airport and didn't figure I had time to get through the tour. Though honestly I was being a little overly careful with the timing, but I didn't want to miss my flight to Germany. That would've been a disaster. So I had to be satisfied with looking around the gift shop for a few minutes. I must say the whole Guinness complex is HUGE. As I was walking to the Storehouse, I could smell whatever it is they roast to make the dark color, and oh my did it smell good. It made me want to go on the tour even more. Oh well. Next time I'm in Dublin I'll know exactly how to get there.
I then took the bus back to the airport and waited to board the plane. By then I was REALLY tired and fell asleep almost immediately after boarding. But that was not the end of my time in Dublin. Due to a mechanical problem we had to disembark, wait, and get on a new plane. By the end I arrived over an hour late into Düsseldorf and kept my friends waiting. Dorothea and Mattheus took me back to the house, and I went to sleep. So ended my long day.

The Day

T minus 7 hours and counting before takeoff.
I can't believe it's finally the day. This evening I fly to Germany for 10 months. I will miss all of you. Please keep in touch, and I'll see you next summer.

Banned books

This is a list of the top 110 banned books. I stole this off Kris's blog. The bold books are the ones I've read all of. The italicized books are ones I've read part of, and the underlined books are ones I plan on reading.

#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
__#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin__
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchel
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Earnest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
__#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood__
__#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown_
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Weekend

So far I've had a fun weekend.
Friday night I went with two of my friends to a bar to play pool. As usual we had a good time. I even won a game against Marty for the first time ever. Ya me!
Today my friend Aaron and I went to the Oktoberfest celebration in downtown Des Moines sponsored by the German restaurant Hessen Haus. Aaron being an avid ballroom dancer quickly found the polka band. After a few dances we really started to stir things up. They weren't used to seeing young people polkaing around the floor. I don't really know how to dance, but fortunately Aaron's a good teacher, so I just follow him. We even got the opportunity to learn a traditional German dance that neither of us knew called the Schotisch. (I'm guessing on that spelling.) A highlight was when they played "In Heaven There is No Beer", which is known to the marching band as the "Hawkeye Victory Polka".
On a more unfortunate note, Iowa lost to Ohio State today. Not a huge surprise, but it would've been nice. Defeats do not damper the Hawkeye spirit. We celebrate none-the-less, so join me in a chorus of Iowa's unofficial school song.

In heaven there is no beer.
That's why we drink it here.
And when we're gone from here.
Our friends will be drinking all the beer.

Ramblings

One week from this very minute I'll be sitting in an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. It's hard to believe. So much to try and finish before I leave. Such is life.
I'm spending many hours a day trying to finish the cross stich I started the summer after I graduated from high school for my friend Tina. It was supposed to be her wedding present, but it's looking more like a 5-year anniversary present. Oops!
But it does give me time to watch a lot of DS9 while stiching. I'm making my way through the seventh season of DS9, and I must say, it's really good. Yesterday I watched an episode ("The Siege of AR-558") which really stuck out in my mind. At the end there was a big battle with several of the main characters helping battle-worn starfleet officers fight off an attack by the Jem Hadar. It was a pretty typical Star Trek battle with phasers and hand-to-hand fighting, but instead of your usual Wagnerian war music, the soundtrack was a slow, somber, haunting melody. It similar to the movie Platoon which has you watching a grusome battle but what you hear is Barber's "Adagio for Strings". Being pulled one way by an active, horrific visual stimulus and pulled another by calm, simple music is rather unsettling.
Here's my complaint for the day. As some of you may know, the new movie "Serenity" (based of the short-lived TV show "Firefly") opens in the US on the 30th, two days after I leave. Last night I learned that the film doesn't open in Germany until the 24th of November, which is Thanksgiving for us and the day before my birthday. I guess Hollywood decided to send me a birthday present. Arg!
I guess that's all the ramblings I have for tonight.

Blog #2

After using Livejournal for a couple weeks, I've decided to try this blog site because it will let me upload photos.
Here's a picture of my new hair cut!