A few friends of mine picked out some pretty geeky costumes for us for Halloween this year. It’s kind of a group thing. We had a lot of fun building these things and wearing them. The most ironic of all was when we were walking along and ran into OSU Linux Guru Alex. There he is as Tux, the beloved Linux Penguin. That’s me, the Windows Logo.
A big thanks to Reed, Luke, Jacob, Micah and Karen for making this a memorable night!
Money can’t buy you love or happiness. But money can buy you a Bible and a Linux Box and that is all you need. 
It’s approaching way too fast. I woke up this morning and realized that today is my last day being 22 years old. This is kind of scary for me. That means that tomorrow I will wake up and be a year older. This kind of thing makes me reflect on life a little. Where has all the time gone? It seems like only yesterday I was graduating high school, or starting college, or learning how to drive. But judging by the date, those things happened a long time ago. Another year in the life of Jabba gone with the wind. What will tomorrow bring? Just a new number to memorize when someone asks me my age? Or is it a whole new chapter in the saga that is my life? Am I any more grown up than I was yesterday? Probably not. Will the guy at the door still ask to see my identification before he lets me into a bar? Will I still have to prove my age in order to order a beer with dinner? Probably. Do I look older? I am still working on growing those sideburns I’ve been longing for for the past ten years. I don’t feel any older, but this is how it goes. Next thing I know I’ll be 43 years old and still wondering where my life is going or what awaits me around the next turn. I guess it’s true when they say you never grow up, you just grow old. But it seems like I just turned 22. Now an entire year has passed and I don’t even know where all the time has gone. I guess if I take a step back, a lot has happened in the last year. I know I didn’t own an awesome toaster oven a year ago. I didn’t have a tiny batcheloresque apartment a year ago. But am I any closer to my goals? Graduation? Fame and Fortune? I don’t think so. But I know I’m getting older and things are just getting more and more confusing and unsure. My mother was my age now when I was born. She had already been married for over five years. My dad was working on a PhD by this age. I don’t know where I’m going to be in five years. Heck, I don’t even know where I’m going to be in one year. Who am I going to know two years from now? Am I even doing what I want to do with my life? I know I’ve been working on a few undergraduate degrees for way too long. This is that time of year when thousands of questions come up in my mind and I can’t find any answers. I always thought that the older you get, the clearer things become. That is turning out to be the biggest misconception ever.
I noticed something disturbing the other day. In past years, when my birthday would approach, I would ask my mom to buy me fun stuff. Anything from gift certificates to cool techie stores, to parts for my car, to a bottle of liquor or just cash. Well my birthday is approaching in a little over a week, and when my mom called me and asked me what I wanted this year, the first thing that came to mind was a toaster oven. I told her that other kitchen appliances or utensils would be helpful, also. She ended up giving me my present a little early this year, and sure enough it is a nice new toaster oven. And the really disturbing part is that I love the thing. I am probably more excited about this than most other presents I have received in the past. Does this mean that I am getting old and ready to settle down and become… domesticated?
I recently became aware that there is a label for people like me. In fact they say it is a whole culture that I belong to. I grew up as the son of an expatriate. And although I haven’t met many other people in this category, it turns out that my views on the world and life in general are indeed pretty normal, given the circumstances under which I was raised. Read this Wikipedia article for the full story. It’s like both the expatriate and the third culture kid articles have read my mind. Notice, also, that both articles mention that people under these circumstances are more likely to keep social blogs…
Well, all good things come to an end, I guess. The last day in Stuttgart didn’t yield much entertainment. We mostly relaxed and took long naps, since we had to be up at 4 the next morning to catch our respective trains. The flight home was pretty eventless, save for the annoying immigration, customs, baggage check, and security stuff they make you go through. But after a total of 14 hours of flying time, I was back in Oregon. After an additional three hours of traffic filled highways, I ended up at home and ate dinner and relaxed. Due to jet-lag, I didn’t actually get to sleep until around 6:30 the next morning, but hopefully that will pass in the next few days.
Classes and work start again on Monday, so I have two days to fully relax and get re-Americanized. I’m currently coping with the absence of Bavarian beer and European food. Perhaps I’ll make a quick stop down at the grocery store and see if I can’t fry up a Bratwurst or two. And I believe there is a store in town that sells some Munich beer. Maybe the good times don’t have to end right away…
I’ve been spending my last two days in the city of Stuttgart. This city is very beautiful with many sights to see, a beautiful downtown square, two castles, and it is the home of Daimler-Chrysler, so we’ll be checking out the museum there today.
The beer in this entire state (in my opinion) doesn’t quite compare to the beer in Bavaria, and Hefeweizen seems to be the beer of choice around some parts. Well, yesterday I was introduced to the Cola-Weizen. I can’t even explain the sensation. Who would have thought that mixing cola with Hefeweizen would yield such an amazingly good flavor? I’m definitely sold on this new concoction, and am no longer angry at the inferior beer over here. In fact, my first mission when I get home, is to try to make my very own Cola-Weizen. It’ll be interesting to see if Widmer’s Hefeweizen can hold up to the challenge.
In order to get a seat at one of the beer tents at Oktoberfest, one needs to get up pretty early in the morning. So after the night train from Prague, we made a quick pit stop at my dad’s house, to take showers and change clothes, etc. By 9 a.m., we were standing in front of the biggest beer festival in the world. I met some good friends at the designated meeting spot in front of one of the beer tents, and by 9:30, we had found one of the last remaining empty tables. It didn’t take long for that place to fill up. Some of the folks we were with, are from Baden-Württemberg, so we had to teach them how to properly hold the 1-liter beer mug. I guess Bavarians do things a little different. We all had a great time. Five hours, three liters of beer, and a half a chicken later, we decided to catch some fresh air, and go see some other parts of Munich. I took my friends to the Augustiner Keller Biergarten, where we had coffee and cake. It was a good day.
Something interesting to note about the Oktoberfest: Sitting in a beer tent with literally 10,000 other people, who are all drinking the same brand of beer and squished together on uncomfortable wooden benches, one really feels a connection to his fellow man. It is an amazing phenomenon to see so many different kinds of people all sitting together, drinking together, singing together, and just getting along. These same people could be enemies the rest of the year, but all differences get put aside, and everyone just has a good time together. On rare occasion, I’ve seen a “bar fight” almost break out, but usually a simple raising of the glass and a loud “Prost!” resolves all differences. That is a beautiful thing.
… Praga, Prague, Prag… Whatever you want to call it, the locals call it Praha, and it is indeed a beautiful city. I took a train from Munich to Prague, which took six hours, but the country side is pretty all the way there. I met my brother at the train station, and we walked down to his apartment. The next day, I spent relaxing, and fixing his computer, but in the evening he took me out to dinner. The food in Prague is amazingly good and amazingly inexpensive. I visited my brother at work, in a very nice business complex, called simply “The Park”. A very nice place. There is a mall there, too.
The last night I was there, my brother took me to a nice restaurant known as “Hell”, or whatever the Czech equivalent word is. It was actually a very nice place, set in kind of an underground cave. The food was excellent, and the atmosphere was definitely unique. The following day, my brother and I went to a flea market, and looked around at all the various stolen goods that the locals were trying to sell, but nothing really caught our eye. After that, we took our luggage for a long walk. We left his apartment, headed for the train station, so that we could get on a train back to Munich, and we missed the train by about two minutes, so we went back to his apartment. All the while carrying way too much weight on our shoulders. But it’s good to take your luggage for a walk every now and then. We finally got on the night train to Munich around 9:30pm, and shared one of those soviet era tiny train cabins with sleeping cots with four other people. Not a bad ride, except for the border patrol waking us up at 2 in the morning to check our passports and rummage through our luggage. At the train station in Munich, we were searched again by Munich police. I think there is some kind of smuggling problem between the Czech Republic and Germany, but for the most part, the American passports kind of made them lose interest in us. Well, that was the beautiful city of Prague. Now it’s off to Oktoberfest!
Today, I decided to take a walk in my beloved city of Munich. I started out my day, by taking the train downtown, stopping only to pick up a Döner on the way… After arriving downtown, I went straight to the Marienplatz, which is the pretty city square where the courthouse is located, among other pretty buildings. I went up the “Old Peter”, which is the tower of the oldest church in Munich. From the top, you can pretty much see the entire city, and it is indeed a beautiful view. On the way down, I counted the stairs… 396. Well, needless to say, after going up 396 stairs, and back down again, I was thirsty. I wandered over to the Hofbräuhaus. I had lunch there, along with a few Mass Bier. As usual, there were nothing but old Bavarians and Americans in there. I talked with an older lady from Philadelphia for quite some time. Or rather, she talked to me. I was trying to enjoy my lunch. After that, I had had enough Bavarianisms for a while, so I strolled across the little cobblestone street and walked into the Hard Rock Cafe München. This was a different atmosphere altogether. Very interesting place, indeed. So I stayed there for a few hours, enjoying old music videos on the TV, and admiring Roger Waters’ guitar hanging on the wall above me. Of course, as American as that place tries to be, I wasn’t about to order the Budweiser on the menu. I didn’t travel all the way from America to Germany to drink that stuff. I, of course, had a Bavarian beer. That, in itself, was quite an interesting culture clash. Nevertheless, a very enjoyable afternoon.