Monday's are bad, even when I'm not there.

Apparently, missing one day of work can bring lots of surprises. I come in to work and one colleague tells me I'm going to Hamburg when I'm not even in the country, and another one tells me I have to confirm an account online for an experiment session I didn't even realize I had for experiments I didn't know I could do. But after dealing with this during the first half of the day, my advisor came in and cleared things up, and while I won't be going to Hamburg (although my samples will), I will be doing some pretty neat supplementary in-situ stuff :-)

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For the Englischer Stammtisch today, Bohnengold, the bar on Reichenbergerstrasse 153 in Kreuzberg that doesn't in fact have a sign (maybe we just call it Bohnengold when it's really something else) has closed for refurbishing. It seems everything is closing for refurbishing. The local (and perhaps only one in Berlin) hot pot restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg and Volksbuehne are also currently revamping.

I was thinking of ordering a peppermint tea today, which in fact consists of peppermint leaves soaking in hot water, with a touch of honey, but figured that with everything that I seem to have to catch up with in one day, I should probably go for something more sugary.

The bar the Stammtisch moved over to a bar around the corner with the sign Bier aus eigener Produktion, or "Beer from one's own production" roughly translated. I don't drink beer to begin with, but instead went for a (schwarze) Johannisbeereschorle (black currant juice + sparkling mineral water). Ah yes, it did the trick when it finally kicked in about an hour later. Until then, I was feeling pretty hirntot, and while conversing with a friend in German, I kept getting distracted by the nearby English conversations and losing my train of thought. In my last post, you may see that I haven't been having much luck with trains of any sort this week (and it's only Tuesday...or Wednesday if you want to be nitpicky).

What was quite neat and made me happy, in addition to seeing a lot of new people, was that I finally got to meet the new girlfriend of a friend of mine! We tried to meet up twice, once on Walpurgisnacht and then later on May 1st, but both times failed. But at last, an encounter! And she's cute! She's born and raised in China and came over to Germany since she figured that if she's going to study German literature, she might as well do it here. It was my first Stammtisch where I ended up conversing in three languages, and while my German vocab is far superior, I could concentrate more easily on speaking Mandarin. I don't know, but this whole encounter just simply made me happy :-) Or maybe it was just the juice. (Or perhaps even the coffee I had earlier. I don't usually drink that stuff, but today I needed it quite badly. Joseph argues that it's the placebo effect, to which I replied by mentioning that I dumped more than the amount of sugar legally allowed in coffee, and that placebos are sugar pills anyway.)

Eventually we all moved into the bar as it was pretty cold, and it was quite pleasant. Joseph and I wanted to stay out initially because of the smoking indoors, but we eventually gave in due to the cold, and I think everyone was about done with the cigarettes at this point. The interior, albeit small, is quite cozy, and I particularly liked the movie-theater-style seats towards the back. That, and there was no background music, which was great. It seemed to be the first time in a while that my throat hasn't started hurting from talking over some foreign acoustic drone, and while I am still fond of Bohnengold (they'd better be refurbishing the place with new cushy seats), I really kind of liked the new locale.