An American Furry in Germany

    I ran out of reading material last week, so I stopped into a bookstore and happened to find a neat, affordable copy of The Catcher In the Rye in German. I glanced through it really quick and came to the conclusion that I would be able to understand it, so I bought it. Now I have some reading material for a while--in fact, it'll probably last me almost a month, at the rate I'm going. And not only that, but I'm going to keep it--it's a book I wouldn't mind owning, and it's quite the conversation piece. I can finally convince myself that I know German.
    I've read the book like three times already in English, but I don't think I've read it in years. I'm surprised how much of it I remember... I guess I did first read it at a pretty impressionable age. I really like the book. I think it's probably better in English, but I certainly can't argue that I understand it equally well in both languages. It's a pretty American book, though, isn't it? Oh well, it suits me fine. Now I just have to stop mixing up "blöd" and "bloß". Both are used with surprising frequency. Almost as much as "verfluchte". :P

    Well, I'm learning Java in German now. This first class session was entirely in German, but it was mostly background stuff that I had already learned from C++. Polymorphism, overloading function names, etc. Although "final" was new.
    The strange thing is that I understood almost all of it. I guess it's mostly procedural, and I can just follow the code to see what it does, and a lot of the keywords are based off English. But even if she'll speak some English for me in the following sessions, the function names are always going to be in German, and the comments... not to mention the keyboards. :P This is going to be a new experience...

I was trying to figure out how to say that in German on the way to the bank just a moment ago. On the way back to the bank, that is. I had gone to the bank previously, and they said that I couldn't get an EC-Card (check card, basically, but better), because I would be here less than 6 months. I asked at Sparkasse Bremen and Deutsche Bank, and received the same response. But because I already have 600-odd Euros in Paypal, I need some kind of account here, even if it wouldn't be optimally convenient. So I went back to the Sparkasse, the one branch out of all fifteen-thousand in Bremen that was closest to where I live, and this time they said that it would be no problem! So, I'm happy.
Except that shortly after I returned, I got a phone call from them, saying that I had left my Semesterticket there. They didn't need it for anything--it had just fallen out of my pocket. So I had to head right back. It's these terrible pants--the pockets are like an inch deep, and only hold stuff when I'm standing up. I lost my comb today, too. But I need my Semesterticket a whole lot more. So from now on I need to be a lot more careful, and stop wearing these pants.
And then when I was walking back, I ran into a pole. I think I should really try not to leave the house again today...