Eine Insel Namens Udo

I finally got to meet the other RISE participants today! We met up at the cinema and pretty much randomly chose a film based on the time. Initially, there was a miscommunication that some of the films would be shown in English with German subtitles, so I walked over to the theatre thinking that everything would be just fine. But I got over there and they were like...noooo...everything is in German! So I thought, ok...then you guys should watch X-men First Class since you haven't seen it yet. Since I've already seen it, I should be able to make my own subtitles and just watch everything for the action. Sadly, we missed the showing and were forced to randomly choose a movie to watch. Luckily, the movie we chose was a nice quirky romantic comedy.

The movie is about a man that is basically invisible to everybody since he was young. He's invisible to the point where he could get hit by a car, and the driver would not even know. People just didn't notice him regardless of what he did. I mean, he slept in a tent at the department store he works at and the security guards wouldn't even notice since he was "invisible". Anyways, long story short, he meets a girl who can actually see him and they fall in love :P. It was very cute and apparently (according to the people who were translating the film for me as we watched it) it's a very typical German comedy movie (Black humor as one of them put it). It was a really nice experience even though I didn't understand all of the dialogue. Just knowing the gist of it was enough for me :)

I also have to mention that I ordered a "medium" drink, which I ordered in German (Mittel Pepsi was what I said, and then the vendor asked me if I wanted anything else and I didn't understand so my friend had to step in and tell them no. So much for trying to be German >.< . She was probably wondering why the heck I was in a German cinema without knowing any German. How was I going to understand anything?!? Good thing I had some nice translators :) ) The drink was definitely far from medium though. When I saw the drink, I was like...wow. It was a freakin 1 litre! That thing was massive. It had to be like 3-4 inches in diameter man. Apparently the large is 1.5 litres. Dude, I drank half a bottle of pepsi today, that's how crazy it is (and yes, it's all fountain soda. They didn't add any ice at all).

After the movie, we trekked over to the brewery and I had my first German meal. I ordered turkey and mushroom gravy over rice because..well...it has rice in it and I love mushroom :P. It was pretty big and I decided I should probably control my portions so I only ate half of it. I also ordered my first beer in Germany. I had no idea what it was but it was "light" as opposed to....dark draft? I don't know beer too well as you can see. It was pretty good. I feel like it tasted kinda sweet sometimes but it also had the bitter taste of beer. My taste buds were pretty darn confused. But it was pretty good :)

My first beer in Germany :) Apparently it tasted a little bit like Guinness according to one of the other participants.

Here's my turkey mushroom over rice dish. It was really good and it had a good amount of sauce enough flavor :)

I could only finish half of it though, I had to take it to go. I think they put it in a styrofoam box wrapped in foil (why the foil? I don't know)

Here's a pretty bad shot of the brewery I was at. I was totally too lazy to step back 20 metres, so this is all you get.

The other RISE participants (left to right: Kurtis, Karen, Sarah). Kurtis and Sarah learned German in high school so they helped translate the film for me :)

So far, the only German word I feel sorta confident enough to say is "Danke" which means "thank you". It's kinda necessary to say, or else you just seem plain rude, and you know I don't want to be labeled "the rude one". Hopefully as I get more used to German, I'll say more key phrases :P

I finally start work tomorrow! Let's hope everything goes alright and I don't screw up too badly :P