Odds and Ends

Mostly these are just random happenings of today, but some random thoughts are mixed in as well.

Today after lunch there was this big give-away thing. Apparently on a semi-regular basis these people show up with dozens of boxes filled with bags and any student who walks up gets a bag full of freebies. Now like any good college student I have a built-in radar for free stuff, but generally at USC, freebies are usually flyers, chapsticks, key chains, the ever-popular coozie, etc. Oh no, this is different. They actually get free samples. From real companies. Now, there's a lot of little coupon-flyer things in the bag too but among the free stuff I got: one load's worth of Spee Black laundry detergent, BeBe "happy" body lotion sample, Loreal soft bronzing lotion, Calvin Klein "one" perfume sample, Garnier Fructis Glanz-Shampoo sample, a packet of french salad dressing, a travel size bottle of Nivea showel gel, and the March 2011 issue of Maxi magazine. Neat, huh? After we all got our bags and got back to the lab we sat around the common room going through our stuff like little kids taking inventory of their Halloween candy. Someone came across a sample for a home-waxing product. I'm not sure how he ended up getting volunteered for this but the next thing you knew, Christian (the one who picked me up from the airport) was sitting in a chair with two waxing strips on his leg. All I will say is that I can personally vouch for the effectiveness of this product. And I hope his hair grows back soon or he's going to have  a funny tan. We also each got a different flavor of this carbonated juice drink and it's terrible.

Yesterday the fire alarm went off in the chemistry building. No worries, it turned out that someone had spilled something on a heater which created a lot of steam which set off the alarm. It still took 3 fire trucks, an ambulance, and 2 police cars two hours to fix everything so we could go back in. Dr. Tiemann was cold and tired of waiting outside so we followed him into his office next door and watched everything from there.

You know how everyone says that Germans are tall? Well I've decided that I'll never know. Why? It's simple. At home in the US, everyone is taller than me. Here in Germany, everyone is taller than me. I have no basis for comparison.

Carbonated water ("Sparkling Water") is the norm here. I've been warned to be careful if I buy a bottle of water because most of the time the companies don't bother to specify that it's sparkling. If I want "distilled" water, I'm going to have to drink tap, or find specifically labelled "Distilled" bottled water. The group members who haven't visited the US were surprised to hear that a) I don't like sparkling water, b) most people don't like sparkling water in the US, and c) sparkling water would be harder to find in the US. The reason all this came up was that the group has a bunch of crates of sparkling water bottles for group use. I did take one because I wanted the bottle to fill up with regular water. It's huge and more than worth the 30 cents. Isn't it weird how tastes are sometimes reversed in different cultures?

My internet works! It's slow but that's ok. I've definitely put up with worse. I had to buy a wireless stick and a prepaid simcard for it. I probably could have gotten a cheaper stick somewhere else but the Aldi had the cheapest service so as a whole it was cheapest there. Only 15 euros a month and you buy a month at a time so it's not like I'll be paying for service after I've stopped needing it. Plus I can reuse the stick again and again,  so in the long run I think it'll pay off. Definitely a good option for anyone needing internet in a foreign country.

Also, I got Kinder bars at the grocery store today. I love them; I've missed them. I'm trying to figure out what it will take to get them sold in the US. If you're curious what I'm talking about google search Kinder Bueno. It was first released in Germany but it's actually made by Ferrero, the Italian chocolate company. Mmmmm yummy.