I got a guitar today!!!

Any of you who know me at all know that I love to play guitar.  I really wanted to have one to play while I was here, even if it was a cheap one.  So today I went to a random thrift store on the east side of the city with my next-door-roommate Petra.  She has a friend who lives in Hamburg and who showed her the store last week.  We had to take the train a short way and then the bus for a few miles (it was the 171 bus, the same number of the one I take at home!), but it was worth the trip because they had a few guitars!  They were all really beat up, but one of them was in okay condition aside from the missing strings and it cost 28 Euro.  I figured that was probably the best price I would get on a used guitar anywhere, so I decided to buy it.  They had a lot of cool old stuff for super cheap (we're talking 20 Euro cents for a small kitchen knife and 50 Euro cents for china teacups).  I found a few other random little things I needed, like notepads, a soap dish, and a loaf pan, and we went up to the counter.  I hadn't gone to the bank since last week and I wasn't sure if I had enough money on me.  But the lady at the counter was super awesome!  She gave me half price on all the little things, and she let me have the guitar for 20 Euros instead of 28!  I'd say that's a steal to beat all steals!

We went to Poco, the discount version of IKEA, while we were in that neighborhood too, so it was after 2 pm by the time we got home.  I went to the bank, the optician (for contact lens solution) and Rewe, which is the closest supermarket.  By the time I got back, it was getting late and I had to hurry to get started on my dish for the international students' Welcome Potluck.  I was making Mexican rice, (which is technically not American but is definitely something we eat in SoCal because of the Mexican influence).  It was hard at first because we didn't have measuring cups or spoons like we have in the States.  I looked for them at the store, but I couldn't find any.  All we had were regular spoons, little cups and bowls, and a plastic pitcher with grams and milliliters on it.  So it took me a while to figure out how to measure the right amounts.  Petra and her friends Dani and Lauren, who are also from Alberta, were in the kitchen too, making an Italian-style veggie salad.  It was chaos in there for a while, and we made a decent mess: chopped onions and grains of rice on the floor, dozens of dishes and utensils, every counter space filled up.  The rice took a while to finish, and we ended up leaving kind of late for the potluck.  But--clap for me--I did NOT fail!  The rice actually tasted like it was supposed to, and it had enough flavor!  Success!

We got to the potluck, which was at the main campus, right as everybody was being dismissed to get their food.  The words "feeding frenzy" would be inadequate to describe the next half hour or so.  It was the hugest traffic jam I had ever seen at food tables.  There were probably 20 tables, some in a big line end-to-end, and then other ones sort of at random in the middle, all of them covered with international dishes of every kind.  It was a pretty awesome experience.  There was every kind of bread, salad, and dessert you could imagine, plus all kinds of dishes with meat, cheese, or both.  There was absolutely no way to try it all, but I sampled as many tiny bits as I could of what looked good to me.  I tried French quiche, Polish and Russian salads (which had meat), Finnish sweet bread, real Swiss cheese, some kind of German fish salad (a little weird), Greek spanikopita, classic American cornbread,  Australian "fairy bread," some sort of little cheese dumplings that looked like donut holes, and some kind of AMAZING pancake-crepe things that I didn't get the name of, but were really delicious.  It was super neat to try so many new and different foods at once!

A lot of people went out to party afterwards.  Not me.  How do they do it, I wonder?  I've been so busy during the day that I can't imagine going out and partying, even if I wanted to . . . I'd rather have my sleep!