Elbow.

I took it out of the cast for a second. It's pretty big and purple.

I hurt myself.

I went to a French hospital and it was really funny. I'll write more about it later.

The New Shanghai.

This is the view from our apartment. If you look down to the bottom left you can see the storefront of a restaurant called New Shanghai. When we moved into our apartment the landlady was pretty relaxed about most things and casually explained all of the logistical aspects of the apartment rather nonchalantly. Then she got really dramatic and serious and said "You guys, there is one thing, you must NEVER, EVER eat at the New Shanghai across the street." She was more emphatic about this than about any other aspect of our apartment. She then put forth some hypothetical situations where we might think it's a good idea to go to the New Shanghai and she insisted that we must "Never, EVER go." She reminded us not to go at least two more times before she left that day.

Naturally, we eat there every day. We love it.

The Ideal Shop.

It's about time I told everyone about "The Ideal Shop." The Ideal Shop is an urban clothing store located just below the window to our apartment. Every day some of the funniest shit I have ever seen happens at the Ideal Shop and it gets more ridiculous each time. In the picture on the left, on this particular day, those five black men were borrowing the photographic talents of the white guy in the sweater. Basically he was walking down the street and they asked him to take their picture with their camera phone. The guy ended up taking so many pictures of the guys in different poses in front of and inside the Ideal Shop. After each picture, all of the guys would break out of their pose and walk to the white guy and look at the picture and laugh and demand another. The guy was taking pictures for over ten minutes.

As I type this the Ideal Shop is blasting the "Mortal Kombat" theme song and there is one guy doing the robot at the entrance to the store. I'm four floors up and I can hear the song clearly even with the windows closed. I love the Ideal Shop.

Maybe one day I will actually go inside...

Men in Uniforms?

Lynnsy and I were getting on the metro at around 3:00 PM earlier today and this relatively normal looking yet obviously frazzled guy came up to us and asked us a question in French. I didn't quite understand what he said and I told him, in French, that I didn't understand. Then he said "English?" and proceeded to ask us the same question in English. He said: "Are there men in uniform, police, upstairs looking for someone?" We said no and he said thanks and he ran off up the stairs.

Cool guy!

Looking for an Apartment.

I am currently living in an apartment with Lynnsy but in November we are moving out and going our separate ways. That means I have been busy looking for a room to live in, hopefully with French roommates. I have been talking to various people on apparteger.com which is the French version of roommates.com which seems to have a lot of rooms available.

I got in touch with a guy named Phil earlier this weekend. In his profile he says that he is gay and that his preferred roommate is a gay man, but in his description he just says that he wants someone who is “gay friendly.” I figured this meant that he didn’t want to live with any raging homophobes and not that he only wanted to live with another gay man. I was wrong.

We were planning on meeting today and yesterday he sends me a text message with directions to his place. He signs the text message “See you kiss Phil” which is definitely kind of strange but I just put it down to his loose grasp on the English language.

I meet him at his apartment today and it is in kind of a sketchy neighborhood but I wasn’t very concerned about that. We go inside and to the right is a small but harmless (and clean) looking kitchen. Next to that is a bathroom with similar qualities. Looking to the left, however, revealed the filthy “living room.”

I wouldn’t really call it a “living room” as much as I would call it a “dying room.” It was a tiny room full of trash and books and paper stacked everywhere and I don’t know how he had so much shit. Then there was a tiny fold out futon couch. He told me that it was the “living room” and that it was also “his room” and that he would be sleeping there.

The he showed me the “bedroom,” which wasn’t so much a bedroom as much as it was a bed-less closet full of trash. Seriously, it was just trash everywhere and there was no bed. I think I am taller than the “bedroom” was wide.

He proceeded to tell me that the bedroom “was not ready yet” and that in the meantime I could sleep on the tiny futon with him. As he said that he looked up and gave me a strange kind of “notice how small the futon is?” smile.

I said that I was looking at other places and that I’d get in touch with him sometime in the next couple of days to tell him what I thought.

Let’s hope the next apartment is just as good!

Two Things.

On the way to the skatepark I saw a man who looked homeless and was asleep lying on the ground. Not too rare a site, but I definitely noticed him. On the way back from the skatepark, the same haggard looking man was still lying down, although this time his head was up. He was saying something and there was noone around so it looked like he was talking to himself. As I took a closer look I could see that he was talking into a cell-phone earpiece thing.

Either the homeless have cell phones or regular people sometimes lie on the sidewalk for hours at a time and sleep.

Right after this I saw two Asian people who had matching sweatshirts (different colors) that both said "IT WILL KEEP STARTING OVER AND OVER" in huge letters.

Height.

I am a pretty tall person but definitely not super tall. I am 6'2". I am considered tall in America but there are definitely a lot of people who are as tall or taller than me.

I have seen less than 10 people in my 3 days here (and I have seen a shitload of people) who are as tall or taller than me. I went to a concert last night and I was the tallest fucking person in the room. It's strange. (And funny...?)

Passport.

At the Portland Airport the Lufthansa check-in guy asked us to sign our passports. He said we might be arrested upon arriving in Germany if we didn't sign them. As we were in a rush to get onto the plane, we weren't paying very much attention to anything going on around us. He handed us our passports and we signed them. It turned out he handed us the wrong passports. For the next ten years my passport will be signed "Lynnsy Corrorubia." They didn't seem to notice when we arrived in Germany but it might present a problem sometime down the line.