Those of you who watch Grey’s Anatomy may have realized what an excellent soundtrack that show has. I have discovered quite a few songs I love love love thanks to that show, and bands like The Fray. Now I have just gotten into another band, 8mm. You can listen to some of their songs on their site if you are curious. I think the singer’s voice is incredibly soothing, and I am not sure if music can be sexy, but that is definitely the word I would use to describe the music. I actually like this band so much that I just ordered their album. I browsed around a bit to find a cheap place to buy it, because it has not been released in Germany, and on Amazon Marketplace the prices are good but only until you add the shipping.

I ended up ordering it from Play.com, that is, PlayTrade (their marketplace). The awesome thing is that all prices on Play.com include shipping (world-wide I think). They are a UK-based company, so if you order DVDs there you get the UK version. And while I was there I ended up ordering three DVDs as well. They had a 3 for 2 offer, and I ordered Match Point, The Lake House, and 10 Things I Hate About You for €7.99 each. The 8mm album will actually be shipped from the US but I am only paying €11.59 for it. I think that’s a pretty good deal. I hope I won’t have to wait too long for the album.

Anyway, so I am a couple of days into my semester break and I have been fairly unproductive (though I did work Thu-Sat and cleaned the kitchen yesterday). I picked up my first Schein (course certificate) on Friday. Got a 1.3 (which translates to an A), as I had mentioned before. I am really happy about this grade.

Today I spent a couple of hours on the phone with my mom. We might be going up north for Easter. By that I mean the Harz region. My dad is from there, and we haven’t been there in forever. We would visit my dad’s aunt (who is really old, I am not sure how old exactly, but I think around 90), and probably go hiking or do excursions or something (my inner child says ewwww at hiking, but I have grown up since the last time I was forced to go hiking there so maybe my attitude has changed, and plus it’s not like they’re forcing me, I could just as well stay at home). It is also a bit like going back to my roots, or something. I am Munich born and raised, but actually (and shhh, don’t tell anyone) nothing about me is of Bavarian heritage. My mom was born and raised in Munich, but her parents are from Eastern Prussia and Silesia, and my dad is from the Harz region, that is, Prussia. Yep, yep, I still consider myself Bavarian, but if you ever wondered why I do not sound Bavarian at all, there you go. I cannot recount how many times the first thing I was told here after I mentioned I am from Munich, “but you do not sound Bavarian at all”. Dude, not everyone there sounds like a Bavarian farmer!

Okay, I got a little off-track there. So I would be really excited to go back up north, even to go hiking, so I hope it works out. I do hope,m though, that we will be back before the Easter weekend because that will be the only time Tina will be in Munich while I am there. And if I do not see her then, I wouldn’t see her until August, which would suck very much.

Tomorrow Sheela is coming here and we are going to cook lunch together, spaghetti bolognese. I’m really excited about hanging out with her. We both also signed up for the same class (the Almanac of the Dead one), so we will finally be taking a class together again, after almost 4 years. And maybe I will even take the chance tomorrow to go back downtown with Sheela and pay the library a visit to get started on my termpaper that is due on March 13th. (Sounds almost too good to be true, huh? I shall update y’all on whether I actually made it.)

Well, this is it for now. Hope you all had a good weekend.

I was sitting in my Rudolfo Anaya class today (Anaya is a Chicano writer), and our professor was passing around two more books he wrote recently, and one of them, The Man Who Could Fly and Other Stories, was published by the University of Oklahoma press, which made me all excited, because ohmigosh I lived there, and when I opened to it to see which short stories were in that collection, I saw that the book is actually part of a series edited by Robert Con Davis-Undiano, who happened to teach one of my classes that I took at OU (a class on Chicana writers). He is also the editor of the journal World Literature Today (in Norman), where I did an internship for a few months. How cool is that?

On my way home tonight I was talking to an American friend, Caley, in English, when a very drunk German girl (DGG) - drunk as in we smelled it from 10 feet away - interrupted our conversation.

DGG: Where in the States are you from?
Me: I am not, I am German.
DGG: Well, your English is fucking good.
Me: Um, thanks.
DGG: I don’t believe you.
Me: Who, me?
DGG: You are not German, you are American.
Me: No, I am German.
DGG: But you grew up in the States. You know, I lived there for half a year, in Massachussetts.
Me: Nope, I am German, I grew up in Germany.
DGG: Then you grew up around Americans.
Me: No, I did not. I was born in Germany, grew up here, and lived here all my life, except for one year that I lived in the States.
DGG: Hah, you just gave me the answer.
Me: What?
DGG: You grew up in the States.
Me: No! I grew up here, lived in the States for one year!

Very amusing conversation. Since she kept speaking English, I played along and spoke English as well. If I didn’t believe someone was German (however, if someone told me they are, I would probably not keep telling them “no you’re not”), I would simply start speaking German to see if they speak German at all and see if they have an accent. By the way, while her English was definitely American-English, she had a German accent that was pretty easy to hear. I guess since she had a stronger accent than I do, she couldn’t hear mine.

She then got bored and told some other random people (in German) how she is half-Arab and half-German, and how she is currently blonde, but her hair is actually black, and how her eyes change color. Iiiinteresting, I am sure these people were just dying to hear about that.

Totally made my day.

Well, getting an A in my Spanish Linguistics final might have helped, though, as well as surviving my last two finals, and seeing a super-cute movie, The Holiday. Jude Law has such a cute English accent; normally I am not very much into British English, but it can sound cute, and they have some funny words. (And yeah, I realize I just used the word cute three times in two sentences, and now I am all cuted out.)