iRunning

Before coming over here, I bought an iPod shuffle. It's the sort of mainstream, consumerist, enjoyable thing I don't do very often, but Jeff and others convinced me that I might well want it while sitting around in Berlin waiting for Naomi to get here. It's really an amazing little box - stuffed with gnomes who play all sorts of instruments.

Part of the idea too was to use it for running, since I'm still telling myself I'm going to run a marathon next year. So yesterday I did my first run with it. I've never run before with music in my ears and it was... interesting. Not what I expected. I thought that Morbid Angel would give me a huge boost, but it sort of didn't - I felt more like I was trying to run through a swamp. And I had some Beetles on there, and that gave me a significant boost. The whole thing was weird, though... I'm not sure whether I'll do it again. Being cut off from the world like that is just, well, weird (it would be perfect for sitting on a machine in a gym, though).

Today I'm meeting up with Conversation Partner #2 for a bike ride, and Conversation Partner #4 for dinner. Yesterday was pretty productive philosophy-wise (volunteers to read a new version of a paper on Kant and composition? You don't need to be a philosopher...), but I didn't do enough German.

Last bit of news: DAAD, who's giving me my stipend here, transferred money into my new account. Which is great. But I don't yet know how to withdraw it, partly because the bank machine presented me with 8 options, each of which seemed like it could be a plausible enough candidate for 'withdraw.' I'll figure it out.

New words:

• 'verfuehren' - 'to seduce' (the third most common word in Nora Roberts translation, after 'der' and 'und').


• 'feig' - 'cowardly/chicken' (maybe this could be a replacement for pejorative uses of 'gay' in US slang?).


• 'abheben' - 'to lift up (e.g. a telephone) or to withdraw (money).