An awesome rainy day with friends

Today really was awesome.  I spent most of it hanging out with one friend or another, which was so fun.  And we had a good summer thunderstorm this afternoon too, which made it more interesting.

Me and Tiina outside Saturn

This morning after breakfast I was in my room getting ready to go to school to scan all my grocery and art school receipts from the semester.  (I kept them so I could keep track of how much I spent, but I didn't want to have to take all the scraps of paper home.)  Petra, who got back from Ireland yesterday, came out of her room, and I told her about the Abmeldung and how we have to fill it out before we go home and mail it to the office downtown.  Since I was already going to the computer lab at school, I asked if she wanted to come with me so we could print and fill out the form for her, and then I could mail both of ours at once.  So we walked to school together and did that, and then she went back home to meet another friend and I went to Hamburger Meile down the street to meet my Finnish friend Tiina.  She had to go home a few weeks early due to a family emergency, but she came back to Hamburg for the weekend because she and her friend Siru (also from Finland) got tickets to a Hugh Laurie concert at the Laieszhalle this weekend.  (And yes, I never would have guessed he would do any kind of music, but he has a band and plays jazz and blues, apparently!)  So anyway, I wanted to see Tiina before she went back home to Finland, so we met at Hamburger Meile to get (guess!) ice cream.  She wanted to go downtown to Saturn, the giant electronics store, and then go browsing for clothes at Mönckebergstraße, and Indra wasn't going to be back home until midafternoon, so I decided to go with her in order to hang out for a while longer.  We took the train downtown and headed to Saturn.  Tiina is a Library Science major, so she is into information and technology stuff.  She had found an external hard drive there earlier in the semester and wanted to buy another one before going back home.  Being in Saturn for her was like being in an art store is for Marni and me.  We found the hard drive and then she said, "We'd better hurry up and leave before I spend all my money!"

Stormy weather over the Rathausmarkt (those are the
St. Jacobi and St. Petri church spires, by the way)

When we came out of Saturn it was pouring rain!  I had noticed some rather dark and stormy-looking clouds when we were getting on the train a while earlier, and they had rolled in and were now producing a nice hot-weather shower.  I am still so thrilled by these summer storms--they are a phenomenon virtually unknown in California, so I'm always super excited when we have one.  Neither of us had an umbrella, and even if we had, the rain was blowing sideways and we would have gotten soaked, so we had to wait under the overhang outside the store until the shower had passed.  Thankfully it didn't last long, and soon we were on our way down Mönckebergstraße to Europa Passage.  We went to Desigual, and they were having a sale, but after looking at the "sale" prices Tiina quickly decided that even at 50 percent off they were way more than she wanted to pay.  (Shopping in Europa Passage, and in downtown Hamburg in general, is really expensive--they jack up all the prices at the chain businesses, and they also have a lot of the fancy designer brands like Chanel, Hugo Boss, and A&F.)  So we ended up leaving Europa Passage and walking to the Rathausmarkt, where Tiina was going to meet Siru and another friend.

Tiina and Siru aren't sisters, just friends, but they look and dress
uncannily alike.  I think their brains must be fused . . .

The tank-top trio . . . Tiina, me, and Siru (whom I think the camera
caught at the wrong moment, because she looks way serious)

We were surprised to see some kind of a food-and-wine event set up in the square.  It had lots of tables set up under canopies and wooden food booths selling pretzels, wurst, and other similar "fancy snacking" foods to go with the various wines that were being offered.  It reminded me of the Easter market in Kraków.  I had only had one scoop of ice cream at Hamburger Meile and the pretzels were a tad expensive there, so I just got another scoop of ice cream at the Rathausmarkt gelato place.  (I've got less than a week left in Hamburg, so I'm maxing out my European gelato experience, one small scoop at a time.)  We sat on a bench while we waited for the others to show up, and then I saw a lightning bolt and some more thunder rumbled across the sky.  Tiina's friend came walking across the square right then, and at that point the first big fat drops started coming down, so we beelined it to a Balzac Coffee down the street and waited for Siru there.  (Balzac was founded in Hamburg and is kind of the Starbucks of northern Germany, I think.  Their prices are as atrocious as Starbucks', too.)  The rain kind of let up for a few minutes, but after Siru got there it started to really pour buckets and it came down pretty heavily for a while.  We stayed at the coffee shop for at least an hour, just talking, since the weather was not suitable for going back out.  I really enjoyed the time with them.  I can't for the life of me remember their friend's name, but he is an Information/Library Science major like Tiina and Siru are, and they knew him from their classes at HAW.  He lives in Hamburg.  It was classic talking to the three of them, because the conversation was so different.  Nothing philosophical, like my conversations with Indra, Marni, or Petra would be.  Not much reference to music either.  Instead it was a lot of talk about grammar and computer-related stuff, and the jokes were information-major jokes rather than art-major jokes.  (It reminded me of the night we played Warhammer with Indra's friends and, although they tried their best to minimize the physics- and law-student comments, Johannes made a joke about the Kelvin temperature scale.)  It was just so fun to hang out with students who were studying something so completely different from me.  Incredible how your brain adjusts to your field of study to the point that your conversations begin to reflect it.  Anyway, we had a great time.  Ninni (my friend from the Berlin trip) was going to come meet Tiina and Siru at 4, but Indra would be getting back from Hanerau around then so I decided to leave.  I gave Tiina and Siru goodbye hugs and told them I was so glad to have met them both.  Between them and Ninni, I really want to visit Finland now!  I like the Finns!

Their friend had to leave too, so we walked out of Balzac together and he went to catch the bus.  I went down into the subway and actually happened to pass Ninni!  She was on her way to meet the other girls.  We talked for a minute.  I didn't keep her long, though, because we are planning to make another attempt at the summer Hamburger Dom on Monday (since our trip to the spring one back in April was a fail) and I will get to see her one last time then.

Indra wasn't home yet when I got back, and neither was Petra.  I had never had a real lunch aside from the ice cream, so I munched an apple while I was standing at the window listening to the thunder far away.  The storm was done, but the sky was so rumbly.  The thunder would sort of roll on and on for thirty seconds at a time.

Just after I had gone to my room and sat down to work on the painting of the couple I had met at the USA-Deutschland public viewing, someone rang the doorbell downstairs.  I answered it on the intercom and they were asking for me, so I buzzed them in.  It was a girl and a guy, and they were Jehovah's Witnesses.  Indra had talked to them twice before because they had come looking for me and I wasn't home either time.  (Apparently they asked for me because I have an American name.)  Anyway, even though I know my interpretation of the Bible is not the same as the JWs, I invited them in and we talked for a bit.  It was cool--they were both super nice, of course, because JWs generally are really nice--and we didn't ever end up getting into any deep theological discussions, really, because Indra came home at that point.  They were mostly telling me about their program of Bible discussion small groups.  When I told them that I try to read my Bible every day, they both seemed really surprised.  They said that hardly anyone they ever meet does that.  I guess it's become so much a habit for me now that I don't think about it much, but I really do read something out of the Bible almost every day (the only times I occasionally skip are when I am for some reason too exhausted to read before bed, which is very seldom since I'm a night owl).  I guess that is a rather rare thing among the general population, though, even among people who claim Christianity . . . still, I was kind of surprised at how surprised they were, if that makes sense.

This is how tiramisù was meant to be done, baby!

Anyway, after they left, Indra and I got changed and went to Il Pavone (the place with the amazing crème brûlée) to have a nice dinner, since Der König der Löwen never worked out.  Indra wore her pretty new skirt, and she loaned me one of her shirts to wear because my fancy shirt didn't look right with my earrings.  It was a nice royal blue, which she said suited me really well.  By then the rain was done, so we walked down the street to the restaurant and we were able to sit outside.  I think we were the only people in the whole place for most of the time.  Indra had a pizza margherita and I had bruschetta, and for dessert she ordered (of course, because it's her absolute favorite) the crème brûlée and I ordered the tiramisù, which was a nice big square and absolutely AMAZING.  Il Pavone is one of those gems of a restaurant where the chef really knows what he's doing and everything they make is incredible.  I didn't regret one bit that I didn't order the crème brûlée, because that tiramisù was off the chart.  Even the berries in lemon cream served with it for garnish were perfect.

When we got home, Petra came back and we watched a movie Indra had been telling me about.  It was called Sissi and it was one of those cheesy-and-romanticized-but-still-good films from the early 1950s.  The story was basically about the meeting and marriage of Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria and Kaiser Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary in 1853.  Of course it was predictable, and definitely cheesy like those old films are, but the three of us still enjoyed it a lot--the production was good, for the time period at least, and the sets and costumes were really nice.  I never knew anything about Elisabeth (her childhood nickname was Sissi) and Franz Josef, really, so it was informative for me even if the details weren't historically accurate.  I also learned more German words and phrases because we were able to watch it with English subtitles, which helped me figure out what the characters were saying.  Indra told us that they made three Sissi movies total about Elisabeth and Franz Josef, and apparently Romy Schneider, the Austrian actress who played Elisabeth, was sort of like the Grace Kelly of German film.  She was very pretty and played a lot of roles, but died before the age of 50 (except her death was thought to be a suicide, not an accident like Grace Kelly's).  By the way, Germany is not known for its filmmaking like France, Italy, Britain, and the U.S. are--in general its films are really awful, according to Indra, and so the Germans make up for it by doing really excellent audio dubbing for all the English- and French-speaking films.

Anyway, it's late and I have to sleep now.  But it was an awesome day!  Petra decided to not go to Amsterdam, so she'll be here for the weekend too, which will be nice.  Even though I'm now officially in my last week, it's shaping up to be a good last week.