OK, so I’ve been in Germany for about 4 days and I haven’t posted a blog entry yet. So I’m catching up. This one will be about my first stop in Heidelberg.

I arrived in Germany at Frankfurt Airport, and Wing and I were graciously picked up by Andi’s mother, who I’ll call Frau Walker. She then drove us to Heidelberg on a long freeway. She was driving quite fast (around 90 mph) so I thought to myself, “I wonder if this is the Autobahn.” But I figured a lot of Americans come and think the same thing on the first street they get onto. (Later, speaking with Gerrit, he did say that Americans always ask that and they’re usually wrong.) So I decided to ask the question in the negative: “So this is not the Autobahn, right?” But it turned out it was! And we definitely passed through a few zones with no speed limit. Cool.

We stopped to drop Wing off at her hotel, but Frau Walker said she had an extra room so Wing could stay with us as well. So that worked out nicely. We also stopped by a bakery, which Frau Walker seems to visit daily. We got a bunch of croissants and pretzels and went back to her house to have a nice breakfast.

It seems that breakfast is not simple in their household. I’m happy just sitting down and eating a croissant, but Frau Walker would get out trays, plates, teapots, orange marmalade and apricot jam. And she would put out bowls for us to put all the food in. Then we would bring all of the food upstairs to the porch, where we would set the table (with placemats). It was a big production.
Their home is just beautiful, and it has an amazing garden, including tomatoes and cucumbers, which we would sometimes pick and eat fresh from the plant.

The first day, after breakfast, Wing and I walked off to the old town.  We saw the old bridge, the old castle, the old church, and the library displaying old books.  We got a guided tour in English at the castle.  The guide was this funny old German guy who was trying to make jokes in English, but they weren’t going over so well… partially because of his accent, partially because the audience was mostly non-native speakers (Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Chinese).  But mostly because of the jokes themselves… At one point he described something as “as you say in English, like greased lightning! [wait for laughter]”  The wait for laughter was quite pronounced.  He told a joke about a grandfather clock that didn’t have the cuckoo in it anymore: “Why did the bird leave? Because the bird flew!”  There was total silence, and he looked to me, one of the few Americans, in hopes of seeing me crack a smile.  I said, “Uh, I don’t get it…”  He explained, “You haven’t heard of the bird flew?”  And then I realized… “Oh, the bird FLU!”  I kind of faked a little laughter, and we moved on to the next room.

I think that’ll be all for now.

So last night, as I was getting out of my car, I noticed a yellow note in the pocket of the driver’s side door. I opened it up, and read it. It began, “To the owner of Toyota Corolla,” and included my license plate number. It said that I had bumped into his car in the parking lot, that there were minor scratches, and that I should be careful in the future. I didn’t really recall hitting a car, but I decided I should call the guy just in case. So I called, but he wasn’t there, so I left a message with my name and phone number.

After this, I started thinking… How did the note get inside my car? I then remembered that I sometimes lend my car to my roommate. Maybe he had hit the other car? He’s a nice guy, though, so I would be surprised if he was trying to hide it from me. But that was the best theory I had, so I asked him if he had found the note. He said that he hadn’t. Strange.

Well this morning, I got a call from the guy who had left the note. He was a bit confused, because he didn’t remember leaving any notes recently. I read him the note to refresh his memory, and he said, “Well, I have a vague memory of leaving a note like that about a year ago. This would have happened in the Lockheed parking lot.” I told him, “Oh, well that’s possible, because I’ve been there before… Actually my dad works at Lockheed.” He said, “Oh, is Leo your dad?”

So this guy knows my dad! Anyway, I told the guy that I didn’t remember hitting him, but I’m sorry if I did. He said it was no problem, and that he’d mention it to my dad.

About an hour later, I get a call from my dad. “So you called Brian about the note, huh?” He proceeded to tell me the truth. HE had driven my car to work when I was in Europe, that HE had bumped into the guy’s car, that HE had taken the note off the windshield and left it inside the car. And to top it off, he NEVER called the guy back, even though he knew him! He thought he was going to get off scott-free, but he made the crucial mistake of not throwing away the note!

So now my dad is totally embarrassed, because his coworker now knows everything that happened. Whoops.

I’m currently working on my taxes, and I realized yesterday that I didn’t receive a 1099 form from PayPal. I tried using the instructions online to get the 1099 form electronically, but they didn’t work. So I had to call customer service.

After a long wait on hold, I got to talk to a lady. I told her my problem and she said, “OK, I’ll e-mail you the instructions on how to do that.” I think she was about 2 seconds from hanging up, but I interrupted her, telling her that I’d rather do it over the phone, because I had already tried the directions online. She agreed. So we walked through the process, and of course it still wasn’t working. She asked if I minded being put on hold again. “Yeah,” I replied. She put me on hold anyway. To her credit, I actually meant “No, I don’t mind,” so perhaps she was reading my mind instead of listening to my actual response.

She eventually came back and asked, “Did you receive more than 10 dollars in dividends last year?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, “I didn’t receive my 1099 form.” I immediately felt guilty saying that because it came off sounding much more snide than I had intended. I realized I could look this up on the website, and she realized the same. So I got to a page that showed me all 12 monthly dividend payments, but there’s no total. I figure the customer service people probably have some way of calculating the total themselves, so I wait. She starts reading out numbers, “One seventy-five… forty-eight cents… a dollar two cents…” I figure she’s adding them up, so I wait. Then she finishes, but doesn’t give a total… She had just been reading off the numbers! I say, “Um… I guess I’ll get my calculator.” She says, “Yes, I don’t have a calculator here, so maybe you could add those numbers up for me.”

Is that not the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard? A financial institution where the customer service reps have no way of finding important information on an account, and they don’t even have calculators to help them determine the information themselves? At the very least, I think PayPal should buy an abacus for the customer service people to share. Wouldn’t be too expensive.

So when I added up the numbers, the total was probably the fourteenth worst possible total that I could have had. It was ten dollars… and fourteen cents. The lady asked me to double check my calculations, so I did. $10.14. Fourteen (or fifteen) cents away from not needing a 1099 form. Sigh.

The lady passed me off to another representative, who says he’ll call me back in 2 hours. I also asked him to help me with another problem, where I couldn’t change my home address. He told me that you have to remove your old address before you add the new one. “OK, great, thanks!” I replied. A few seconds after hanging up, I tried it. Can anyone guess what happened? That’s right. An error message that said, “You cannot remove your home address.”

So I’m biking to the CS department today, and a car pulls up beside me and someone yells for me to stop. So I stop, and this girl in the back seat asks me, “Excuse me, where is Stanford?” I was like, “Uh… right here?” She looks a little confused, and then says, “Um, we’re looking for the hospital.”

How in the world was I supposed to know she was looking for the hospital?

I’m calling the election for Bush and going with a new color scheme that expresses my feelings about it.

So we’re playing this game here called Assassins. For those of you who are not familiar with the game, there’s a circular list of participants, and each person in the list is trying to “kill” (with a squirt gun) the next person on the list. When a kill is made, the assassin continues on to the next person, thus shrinking the circle. The last person standing is the winner. It’s pretty difficult because all you get is a name, and that’s it. You have to do your own research to find out where the person lives, and where they’re likely to be. Oh and there’s a little twist. If you don’t make a kill within 3 days, terminators are dispatched to remove you from the game.

Anyway, this game is definitely not for me. I got my first target back in September, and I finally made my first kill tonight. I ran into my target at a restaurant, but the rules don’t allow kills to be made inside. So I sat there and waited like 20 minutes, eating very slowly. Sitting there was just unbearably stressful. I kept going over worst-case scenarios in my head… What if it wasn’t the right person? What if she’s not even playing the game? Great way to make an impression on someone… run up to them and shoot them with a squirt gun. What if she’s the correct person, but she gets really sad to be out of the game…or angry at me? The one that really scared me though is that it was dark out, and what if she and her friends mistake the squirt gun for a real gun, and attack me? It sounds ridiculous… actually it *is* ridiculous, but at the time it seemed like a very reasonable thing to worry about.

So of course none of my worst-case scenarios happened. But all that stress remains with me. Maybe I should resign my position, I just can’t take the stress of this game.

So I went to see “Garden State” with my friend Terry today. As I walked up to the counter, I realized something exciting. This was my first opportunity in a long while to purchase a student ticket legitimately. So I walked up and asked for one student ticket. As expected, the cashier asked for my ID, and I presented my Stanford ID with a big smile on my face. “No, I mean your real ID,” the cashier said. My smile fell and my eyebrows furled up in confusion. “It’s an R rated movie,” continued the cashier. Ohh the embarrassment, she thought I might be under 17!

But it’s actually not all bad. Just two days ago, I looked in the mirror and noticed that some of my hair actually looked gray. So this mistake was somewhat welcome.

So I’ve been back for over a week now. I have been encouraged to post a wrap up message, so here it goes. First of all, a whole slew of pictures are now available here. Enjoy those. Now, I’m not going to waste time on the obvious stuff about how much I enjoyed my stay in Puebla. Instead, I’m going to talk about the stuff that really annoyed me.

First off, the bathroom faucets. A good percentage of the faucets in public bathrooms have this ingenious mechanism for turning them on. It consists of a small (about 2 inches) metal rod that hangs below the faucet. You push on the rod, and the water comes out of the faucet. It’s essentially like one of those soda dispensers at fast food restaurants, but the rod you push on is actually in the center of the stream of water. Now I’m not being sarcastic when I call this ingenious. I think the idea is that the faucet doesn’t have to be cleaned much, since there’s always water rushing over it. Compare this to our standard handles, which we touch both before and after washing our hands, and those things rarely get washed as well.

But there’s a big problem with the mechanism. It becomes a major pain to use these when the water comes out too fast. Normally if a faucet is running too fast, you can put your hands lower in the sink to avoid splashing water everywhere. But since the rod is only 2 inches long, you can’t do that with these faucets! So every time I went to a public restroom, I ended up with water all over me.

OK, the next thing is really small, but really annoying. There are many radio stations in Puebla, but you wouldn’t know it, as everyone tunes into the same station. Every restaurant, every bus, every store has this radio station playing. The music is actually not bad. But it seems like before and after every song is played, they play this quick jingle, “Digital! Exitos, solo!” which means “Digital! Only hits!”. After a week of being there, I found this stupid 3 second jingle running through my head whereever I went. As you’re looking through the pictures linked above, you can pretty much rest assured that “Digital! Exitos solo!” is running through my head in all of them.

The next topic is the food. Some of you are feeling vindicated as you read that, but not so fast! As I’ve mentioned, I decided before I went that I would just eat whatever was given to me. I held firm for everything except one particular type of food. It’s called the ham sandwich. OK, clearly it wasn’t the bread or the meat… It was my old nemesis: sauces. My host mother made me these sandwiches with both mayonnaise and mustard. Blech! The first time she made them, she left them for me before leaving for church. So I was able to cut off the saucy parts without her seeing. I made a mental note to tell her that she can leave off the sauces next time, but of course I forgot. So guess what my lunch bag was full of when I went on the day-long excursion to Teotihuacan? Oh man, it’s too painful for me to even think about it, so I’m gonna stop writing.

So that’s the worst of it. I didn’t even have to use socks as a substitute for toilet paper, as another unfortunate student did. Anyway, if that’s the worst, then you can see that it was a wonderful trip overall.

Something really funny happened today in class. The teacher gave us an exercise where she drew simple figures on the whiteboard, and asked us to make pictures out of them, and then make two adjectives to describe the object we drew. For example, one of the figures was a small circle, so I used the circle as the nose of a clown, and then described the clown as funny and scary. Other students used the circle to draw the sun, etc. There was also an S shape, which I used to draw a picture of Trogdor. But then I realized that (sadly enough) I can’t draw Trogdor, so I changed the picture to something else (as to what, I’ll reveal that later).

So after we were done, the teacher revealed that this was actually one of those fortune telling type games, where those adjectives determined things about you. The adjectives that you used to describe your circle picture described you, yourself. So that means I’m funny and scary. The picture with the square determined your economic future. Now, the picture with the S shape was supposed to describe your sex life. The teacher asked me what I had drawn, and after a little bit of nervous laughter, I responded, “I have a long, flexible garden hose.”

The other two students both agreed that I won the game.

By the way, new pictures are available.

Last night, a bunch of students, a couple guides, and I went to some bars in Cholula. I had never seen anything like the first bar we went to. Everyone was dancing, but like real dancing. Salsa or merengue or something. It was pretty cool. I of course know nothing about that kind of dancing, but alcohol combined with nagging friends can make me more willing to sacrifice my dignity, so yes, you will all eventually be seeing yet another picture of me dancing poorly. Not knowing any better, I assumed that this was typical of a Mexican bar, but when I asked Angélica, one of my ex-guides, she said that it wasn’t at all typical.

Around 2 or 3 AM, I thought we were leaving, but we ended up going to another bar. This was more of what I expected. Loud dance music, and lots of people just dancing their own style. I didn’t dance though, I just hung out with Angélica, which was great.

On Wednesday, we went to Cacacxtla, which is in the state of Tlaxcala. When I found out about this, I really hoped that the name of the town and the name of the state would be anagrams, but they’re not. They’re not even the same number of letters. But they’re both really hard to pronounce, and when you put them together it’s impossible.

Hmm, maybe I should actually talk about what I saw there. The thing is that there are a bunch of pyramids there, much like Teotihuacán. They’re impressive, but just not as cool as Teotihuacán. I’ll put pictures up when I get the chance. I don’t want to arouse suspicion in this internet cafe by poking around the back of this computer to find the USB ports.

OK, I hear some of you are angry at me for not posting in a while. My words for you are those of Bill O’Reilly: “Shut up, Shut up! SHUT UP!” It’s not easy to get internet access here, and I don’t always have time to post. But eventually you’ll get what you want. And here we go… a post about our trip on Sunday to Teotihuacán.

Teotihuacán is really awesome. There are two large pyramids, the Pyramid of the Sun, and the Pyramid of the Moon. Besides the pyramids, there are many small temples, as well as the larger Temple of Quetzalcoatl, which is really cool to see. The Pyramid of the Moon was mostly closed, so we could only go up to the first level, but the Pyramid of the Sun was completely open, so I and a couple other students climbed all the way to the top. There’s some sort of legend about being able to take in the energy of the sun when you’re at the top of the pyramid, and there were a bunch of people up there absorbing the energy. There’s also supposedly something special about the very center of the top of the pyramid. So there’s a big group of people huddled around the center, and they’re all reaching in towards the center of the huddle. Every tourist, myself included, was trying to figure out what they were reaching for. Eventually after shuffling into a spot with a better angle, I could see that they were all just reaching in to touch this one particular spot on the ground. I thought about pushing my way in to touch it, but it wasn’t that big a deal for me, so I decided to just take pictures of people touching the center.

OK, here’s something that I’m kinda proud of, but maybe I should actually be ashamed. It’s that I bargained quite a bit that day. I’ve always been afraid of bargaining, because I don’t want to get ripped off. So the pride is that I did bargain down the price. The shame comes in when I start thinking that maybe I didn’t bargain down enough. My strategy was pretty simple, because there were tons of people selling the same stuff, and tons of stores as well. So I would pick a couple vendors and ask what the price was. Then I’d remember the lowest of those, and bring that information with me to the next store. I’d ask the price, then say, “But they’ll give it to me for this price!” and then I’d ask for a lower price. So that worked pretty well. I got a T shirt for 3 dollars, and a hat for $3.50. If you guys think I got ripped off, don’t tell me. I’d rather be proud.

New photos are available.

There’s this one guy in class who’s always saying funny stuff. Actually, both of the other guys say funny stuff a lot, but this one guy in particular has had a few gems. On Monday, we were practicing conditional sentences, for example, “If I were superintelligent, I would understand the theory of relativity.” We were doing an exercise where we picked the two clauses from a list, and formed the full sentence. Well this guy strayed from the list and said, in Spanish, “If I were strong, I wouldn’t have to go to the bathroom.” And then a pause, followed by, “But I’m not strong.” We totally cracked up as he got up to go to the bathroom.

Today was pretty good too. He started talking about bad words, and told the teacher that it was important that he explain to the class what these words meant. She agreed, so he went up to the board to give a detailed explanation of the term “hijo de la chingada”. He had little stick figures and stuff, it was really funny. I have a picture of it. I’ll try to upload it today in the usual location.

Yesterday we went to Tlaxcala. It wasn’t incredibly interesting. We saw one of the oldest monasteries (if not the oldest) in Mexico, we went to the Governor’s Palace, and we went to the Pulque Museum. The Pulque Museum is cool, because it’s all about pulque, which is a local kind of hard alcohol. It’s like tequila, and in fact it’s made from the agave plant as well. They gave samples at the museum and I drank enough to feel tipsy (uh… about 2 shots). It was cool.

One funny thing was this special cup that consisted of three cups joined together. There were holes that connected the three cups. It’s a joke cup, and I’m not sure I understood the joke exactly, but I can see how it would be a novelty item. I believe the idea is that when people are drunk, they sometimes see double, or triple… So you can put this cup in front of them, and they’ll think it’s just one. But because there are holes connecting the cups, they’ll end up drinking three cups instead of one, thus making them even more drunk. There was a poem that went along with the cup, which luckily rhymes in English, too! It goes something like, “One is none, two is half, and three is one”.

When I got back from the Huamantlada, I found myself in the middle of a baby shower. The shower was of course for women only, but there were a few young girls who decided they wanted to play with me. It was really fun… funny actually. Like one of them didn’t really like my name, so she decided she would call me Joey instead. I asked her why she wanted to call me Joey, and she said “Because it’s a nice name.” I also found it amusing that she would always refer to me as Usted, the formal term, instead of tú. That is, until I started eating as I was talking to her, which caused her to berate me with, “No hables con la boca llena.” Which is “don’t talk with your mouth full” in the tú form. Anyway, you can see some photos of them in the usual location.

I think I mentioned before that I was going to a bull run on Saturday. This bull run was somewhat hyped up by the director of the institute. He said that in Pamplona, the bulls all start at the same place, and run in one direction. In Huamantla, the bulls start at two ends of a street, and they run towards each other, thus trapping the people in the middle. That sounded really exciting! So a bunch of us went on Saturday. It was cool, but not at all what we expected. We pretty much saw 3 bulls throughout the whole thing. They do let the bulls out at different ends of the street, but it’s not like there’s a huge crowd of charging bulls. The bulls just wander around the street as people try to provoke them. People were selling shirts for the event with a picture of people getting gored by the bulls. After about an hour of not much happening, one of the students asked a local when we’d get to see that. The local replied, “In Pamplona.”

But we were lucky enough to see a guy in a real wrestling match with a bull. The bull charged him, and he grabbed it by the horns and wrestled with it. The bull carried him out of our field of vision, so we weren’t sure for a while what happened to him. But eventually he came back with his shirt off, showing off the huge scratches he got from the bull’s horns. I have a picture of that. It should appear here soon.

So this is probably the strangest thing I will encounter during my entire trip. Since my first night in Puebla, there has been this siren going on almost every night. It’s not constant. It goes on for about a second, then stops for about 5 seconds. Then it goes off again. 1 second of the siren, 5 seconds of silence. All through the night. I could tell that the siren was moving, so I figured it was a policeman pulling people over during the night. But why the siren went off every 6 seconds was a mystery to me. After a couple days, I asked my host mother what the siren was. She told me it was “the vigilante”. Apparently this guy is a self appointed patrol guard. He watches over the neighborhood at night, and at the end of the month, he visits all the houses and asks for money for his services.

Now he didn’t always have the siren. That started about a year and a half ago. When he started using the siren, people asked him why, and he said that people weren’t paying him because they didn’t believe he was actually patrolling. So now he sounds the siren all throughout the night so everyone can tell that he’s doing his job. It’s really amazing to me that people wouldn’t just stop paying him for creating such a racket during the night! My host mother was laughing as she told me how annoying it was hearing that siren all the time, but she still pays him! Can you imagine doing this in the US? Sounding a siren all night long, and then at the end of the month saying, “Hi, I’m the guy who’s been sounding that siren all month. Give me some money!”

I told the host mother that maybe he should go around and mark the sidewalks with chalk as a way of proving that he’s doing his duty. She said that she’d suggest it to him.

So for a few days, I’ve been having a little sore throat, so yesterday I decided to go buy some cough drops. I went to the pharmacy and they gave me the drops, but the woman took them from behind the counter, so I was a little worried that there might be some drugs in them that I shouldn’t take. So as I walked back home, I carefully read all the information. It did have some drugs in it, but there weren’t any important counterindications, so I decided to take one anyway. The minute I put it in my mouth, I knew exactly what was in it. It tasted exactly like the topical anesthetic that the dentist puts in your mouth, before they give you a shot of lidocaine. So of course it worked great, it put my throat to sleep so I couldn’t feel anything.

So one thing I left out of the above paragraph. As I was reading and walking, I ran into a pole. OK, stop laughing. It wasn’t like a lamp post, it was horizontal, and just the right height for me to hit my head on it. So that marked the third time in 2 days that I had hit my head pretty hard. I haven’t run into anything today yet. Let’s hope it stays that way.

On Wednesday we went to Cholula, a city nearby. We visited a bunch of churches, including a pretty famous one that they made on top of a pyramid. I wasn’t incredibly excited by the churches, although they were *very* ornate… lots of gold everywhere. The guide said that people fear empty space in the churches, so they put up as much stuff as they can to fill the church. For example, there was a grandfather clock in one of the churches.

OK, the embarrassing story you guys will want to hear is how clumsy I’ve been. In one of the churches, there was a bell tower, with a dark spiral staircase inside. As I was climbing the stairs, I didn’t notice that the stone ceiling was getting lower and lower, and eventually I took a big step up and whacked myself really hard on the stone ceiling! After I regained my balance, I continued up the stairs, and got to the top. As I took my final step off the staircase, I hit my head again! I looked around and realized I had hit my head on one of the bells! Stay tuned for more…

Thanks to John Reese, you can see a couple pictures here. I’ll be adding more when more interesting things happen.

OK, everyone was worried about how I was gonna get along in Mexico, with the food being so… mexican. Well it actually hasn’t been that bad. Of course you would probably laugh at what I’ve eaten, but I’m just really proud of myself, because there’s this woman here who is waaay more picky than I am. So… um… the first day, Alicia gave me cereal for breakfast, which was prepared as perfectly as cereal can be prepared. Lunch consisted of something that I forget (it was bland), pasta primavera salad, and chicken nuggets and fries! It was great. It was even better for my palate because they seemed to have done away with the salt. It was pretty much just chicken breast. The woman I mentioned… she ordered the same thing but she didn’t like it much. She asked for ketchup, and then she didn’t like the ketchup. Oh man, some people are sooo picky!

But I have had a few authentic mexican dishes. They were good, but mind you, I decided to eat pretty much whatever I’m given. I’m not saying I’d order these things back in the US where bland chicken sandwiches are plentiful. But they’re alright. One of these dishes was kinda like fried potato tacos. It didn’t have much flavor, and therefore I liked it. Yesterday, I had something that was called chiliqueñas or something. It was exactly the kind of dish I fear most… A heaping mess of sauces with stuff in it. But I ate it! It was little spicy for my tastes, but I cleaned my plate.

So to all of you who thought I’d starve here in Mexico, I tell you, “…” well I don’t know how to write it… It’s when you stick out your tongue and blow and it makes this noise. That’s what I’m doing to you guys right now.