Their damn keyboards swap y and z

News article of the day - enjoz!

OK, so I'm in Germany now. My typing speed has slowed to a crawl because of keyboard weirdness, and I'm trying to think of a way to compose posts offline. It's not like I need ümläüts or anything.

I got in yesterday at noon; flight was hellish and they lost one of my bags. Well, technically it got left behind in Munich so that customs officials could stomp through it. It showed up at 4pm or so at the house, so that's pretty decent, I suppose. The Philadelphia airport confiscated my fucking screwdriver bits because if you need to take a tool longer than seven inches onto a plane, you're with Al CIAda, I mean Al Qaeda. Oh, but I can take the actual screwdriver. Just not the bits. Did I mention that the hijackers were trained at top US spy schools?

The jet lag has been the worst part - thanks to Herculean efforts yesterday, I'm already over it, but it was difficult. I had to stay up for like 28 hours yesterday, ultimately going to bed at 8:30. (Did I mention that it stays light here as late as 10:30pm?) I actually don't remember a whole lot after seven o' clock; entire sections of my brain went on strike. Including, apparently, the part of my brain responsible for distinguishing reality from a 5th generation copy of a VHS tape.

Today I got up at eight or so and had a large (for me) breakfast; Nutella on kickass German bread (predictably) and a bunch of meat (predictably). In fact, everything about the food I've had so far is pretty stereotypical except for the fact that it's actually enjoyable. Last time I came here, I hated the food.

Most of today was spent doing an impromptu job shadow with Armin. He has two companies (a florist and a landscaping business) so he's got some damn schedules. Today he had to get up at 4:15 to buy flowers from some crazy bulk flower dealer. We made some deliveries, bought some more flowers, he got into an argument with some Mitarbeiter, gave a bunch of orders, it was pretty cool. Then we had lunch (late), I played some video games, and now here I am. By the way, here's the mapping from German meals to American meals:

Breakfast -> Thanksgiving
Lunch -> Dinner
Dinner -> Lunch

I'd think of more to type, but I'm using IE on some sort of pre-cambrian dialup connection and I'm afraid of losing everything I've written, so I'm just gonna publish what I've got so far and then go eat some chocolate.