Germany: Serious work and goofing around. May 16, 2004

Well, I haven't posted in a while, so I think I'll post again.
I will have pictures very soon, maybe later tonight. Some of them are really great. Some of them have great stories to go with them, but I'm not going to post the stories until I post the pictures, so you'd better come back later!!

Well, I think I might be starting to make some headway in Differential Geometry. Basically, the other students have had about a billion credit hours of abstract math, and I've had 9 hours. (A billion is closer to 20 or 30). My homework sheet is due Friday. I still didn't have it done Thursday, so I promised myself that I would buy me a Doener Kebap if I got my homework done before 8. I finished at 5:-). I was sitting in the math library with about 3 books, tuns of sheets of paper, and my laptop computer, which had about 20 math related sites open. I hope to have all my homework apart from math homework finished later today (Sunday), then I can spend the rest of the week in the math library. I wish they had wireless access in the math library.

Hey, I said wireless access... Yes, I have wireless Internet access at the University! I bought myself a 35 Euro wireless network card, and now I have Internet access on MY computer!! Finally! Some of you may have noticed that my old screen name is back online. That is the reason. I can get Internet in the Library, in the Geography building (where a math class meets) and in the Informatik (Computer Science) department. Yay.

Anyway, after church today I caught up with Nadja (the German version of "Nadia", and it's pronunced almost identical) and a few other Freaks (Inge, Oliver, and Susanne, I think). We went into the city park, and played kids games like the German version of "Duck-Duck-Goose". Then we did some acrobatics, which mainly involved Inge and Nadja making cool graceful movements, and then me and Oliver falling over. After that we headed back toward the city center, and there was a street performer playing a violin, so we stopped and just started Waltzing in the middle of the city center. Tourists were taking pictures. I can't dance Waltz (or anything for that matter... More dancing in the next post), but I danced anyway.

Hmmmm. I think for more stories, I need pictures.

Just some quick language updates. Well, as I said before, my ability to understand in the classroom is nearly 100%. It's amazing what a limited vocabulary is used for lecturing in a specific topic. The same words are used over and over again. So, the main project now is speaking, and still learning the everyday language. I found a German TTS SDK (Text-To-Speech Software-Development-Kit), so I am going to integrate that into my vocab training software. So every time I type a word, it will read it outload to me. Hopefully that will help my pronunciation. I really need to work on my "r".

Anyway, more later. Now I gotta clean the kitchen.

Tschuess!

-Mikel