The first weekend

It's Sunday evening here now. It was a pretty relaxed weekend.

Amy threw a 6-month birthday party yesterday for Audrey, so I got to meet some teachers from the school where she worked. A nice group. The theme of the party was 'half,' and I won a prize for drinking exactly half a glass of water with my eyes closed. I thought of letting someone else win, but you can't let these Berliners off easily, you know? I proudly represented the U S of O (-bama).

Speaking of which: people like Obama here - a lot. I had my first conversation-partner thing today, with a guy from a Lebanese family who grew up here in the city. He put up with an hour of my awful, awful German, and then we did about an hour and a half of English. We talked about politics for most of the time. It was very interesting - he said that most people over here don't really think of Americans separately from American politicians, so that Bush's unpopularity (if that's not too weak a word for it) affected how people in the Middle East saw American troops. I'm supposed to meet another conversation partner on Tuesday, and perhaps another next week. If I can keep three going each for a once-a-weekish schedule, I think I'd have a shot of moving from awful, awful German to just awful (or maybe even just bad!) German by the time Naomi comes over. That's the goal, anyway.

I'm going to go eat some leftover cake from the party and read some Kant.

I miss you all still terribly... maybe give each other hugs for me?