catching up

It's been a busy time since I got back to Stuttgart.
German classes started up again, with mostly the same class and the same teacher, but I have ended up missing a few even this early because of a competition I've been working on at the office.

We wrapped up the competition yesterday with me delivering the roll of plans to the office in Mannheim. This was kind of fun, actually. It's nice to be paid to go someplace different, although it was a scramble at the last minute to print out the final documents, seal the tube, and jump out of the office 20 minutes before my train left the station. It's a fast ten minute walk to the main station from my office, and then a quick 40 minutes to Mannheim on the slick ICE high speed trains.

In Mannheim, it took me fifteen minutes flat to deliver the tube and then I had about two hours to kill in the town. The third biggest city in the the state was not so interesting, despite it's location at the confluence of the Neckar and the Rhine rivers. The city is unique in Germany for its gridded city center, with each block roughly 100m long.

https://www.google.de/maps/@49.488057,8.4683271,15z

I spent most of my time roaming around the city on foot. Some really bad (or good) postmodern architecture. A big university in a giant palace. A high street with all the usual brands in Germany. Lots of Turkish food. I was back at the train station, perusing the bookstore, an hour before my train left.

To celebrate the end of the competition, I picked up a kilo and a half of mussels on sale and I cooked moules marineiere with crusty bread for dinner. Good stuff, although we both agreed we need to eat lighter generally at night.

The weekend I got back, Saori and I went shopping and I got a new wool coat, lighter than my heavy winter one. The weather here this last few weeks has hovered between freezing and a few degrees above, with snow flurries and rain.

Last weekend, I was in the office for a few hours saturday but afterwards went out to a party at a friend's house. Saori and I came early to help prepare the food with a few other friends. Assembly might be a better word since what we were doing was smearing different spreads on sliced bread and cutting them into neat squares and rectangles. The host and her boyfriend got into a small fight (both are architects) about the patterning created by the different spread breads. I was torn between thinking the whole production was type A to the extreme or an interesting and elegant way to present party food since it is about as far as you can get from opening a can of salsa and a bag of chips.

Anyway, we met a lot of new people that night, almost entirely German, and caught the last train back to town with two other friends who convinced us to grab one last late night drink at one of their favorite bars. It was a smoke-filled rock and roll dive bar, and packed at one o'clock in the morning. The ceiling was filled with shot glasses, and the four of us squeezed into a table we shared with some other guys. Saori explained that it was one of the few bars in town that play straight up rock and roll, which was its appeal. I ended up practicing my German with the guy next to me. The benefit of speaking German while a drunk is it considerably loosens your tongue, but the downside is you are not in the most 'learning receptive' mindset.