There isn’t a whole lot going on here. I finished the book I was reading about the American west and now I’m reading the fifth book from The Vampire Chronicles. That’s the last book I have and I’m hoping it will at least last me until I go to England so I can buy a couple of new books in English while I’m there, but I’m not sure it will.
The internet has only been partially working here which is quite annoying. We are behind a proxy server here which is a computer that goes out and caches webpages making it supposedly faster to browse the internet. Secure websites, such as my e-mail, my bank, etc go past the proxy server which means they aren’t cached. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, just know that for whatever reason secure sites aren’t working. That means I can’t check my e-mail, I can’t look at my bank accounts, I can’t get on Skype or any of my instant messengers, I can’t even get on Facebook. It has been like this for the past several days and I’m getting extremely sick of it. E-mails are probably just piling up in my inbox, so if you’ve sent me an e-mail and I haven’t replied, that’s why.
I went to go talk to the internet guy about it today, but apparently he’s on vacation or something, so I left a large sign on his door that says “Please fix the internet!!” (except in German: “Bitte das Internet reparieren!!”). I did that earlier today. When I went by his door just a few minutes ago, there were about 3 more signs on the door agreeing with mine.
Other than the internet problems, things have been going alright. Yesterday and today I went to Bremen with Jonathan and Rieke. We went with the sole purpose of buying tickets for a Werder Bremen game (Werder Bremen is the soccer team that everyone supports here). We also decided that while we were there, we would take a tour of the Beck’s beer brewery in Bremen. We did that at around 2 in the afternoon and it was interesting. At the end we all got 2 free rounds of beer and had a taste contest to see if we could guess which beer was the original Beck’s and which one was a different kind of Beck’s (such as Haake-Beck’s or alcohol-free Beck’s). It was fun, although I really dislike Beck’s.
Afterwards, we went to find something to eat because we didn’t have lunch. We ate at a place in the middle of Bremen. I had a döner. Then from there, we walked around for quite a while trying to figure out which S-bahn (the trains in the middle of the streets) to take to get to the Werder Bremen stadium. After we finally figured it out, we got to the stadium and realized they had closed 10 minutes before we got there. Jonathan managed to get in and he tried to get tickets, but they just told him they were closed and that we couldn’t get tickets then.
So, we went back to Bremen today since we can get there for free with our semester tickets and went directly to the stadium. We bought tickets to the Werder Bremen vs Glasgow Rangers game which is part of the UEFA cup. That means it’s going to be a very big game and should be a good game, although Werder Bremen will have to score at least 2 goals to avoid being knocked out — but that’s besides the point. The game is next Thursday (March 13th) at 8:45 pm German time. After buying tickets, we came directly back to Oldenburg and that’s been my day up to now.
Next Tuesday Jonathan and I are planning on going to Hamburg just to see the city and take advantage of our semester tickets (which we can use to ride the trains for free).
Just as a reminder, if you’ve sent me an e-mail and I haven’t replied, just be patient. I will get to it as soon as I can actually access my e-mail.
