Portuguese Musicals and Mexican Bugs

It all started when I found this video of the Polish cast of Les Miserables flash-mobbing a mall:

Naturally, I posted it on my sister's Facebook wall.  Because Polish sounds funny.

Somehow, this devolved into a conversation in which I posted this song in various languages and we alternatively praised its merits or tore it apart.  The German version, for the record, sounds like shit.  However, all that came to a stop when I found this piece of pricelessness:

Yes, that is correct.  At about the 1:10 mark, a ragtag band of what I can only assume to be tone-deaf  hobos working for bacalhau burst into One More Day on national Portuguese television.  It is both awful and HILARIOUS because, naturally, they do it in English.  My sister pointed out that this is exactly what this song would sound like if we did it at Portuguese-American Thanksgiving.  As a result, two hours of Facebook hilarity ensued, in which we re-wrote Les Mis for a Portuguese audience and cast our extended family it.  

Our version contains numerous future hits: the beautiful "A Pasteis Full of Egg," in which Maria and love interest Manuel fall in love over her good portuguese baking skills, "A Little Fall of Fists," when spurned Inês gets trampled during the soccer brawl scene, the poignant "All My Friends Are Dead," sung by Manuel when being sad about this turn of events, and of course, the rousing "Do You Hear The Porkchops Yell And Throw Things At The Television?" sung by João val João and the entire ensemble while they're attempting to overthrow Ronaldo as the King of Soccer.  Sadly, our version is probably only entertaining if you are both Portuguese and a Les Mis fan, which, according to this handy dandy Venn Diagramm, means...

Nah, let's be honest, this probably isn't funny to anyone that's not me, my sister, and whichever of the bacalhau-eating hobos in the corner over there speak English.

In other news, today my adviser spent a good amount of time telling me all about the times in rural Mexico he ran into bird spiders, black widow spiders, fire ants, baby black widow spiders, flying cockroaches, termites, and ONE TIME, IT WAS HILARIOUS, I WOKE UP WITH SCORPIONS ON MY PILLOW.  

Considers "flying cockroaches" a better excuse to back out of Adventuretime Mexicoland than "drug cartels"?

Yep.

A cockroach will not fly up my pants.  A cockroach will not fly up my pants.  A cockroach will not fly up my pants.

Mother of God, if a cockroach flies up my pants, I will actually die.

Ah! Life.

Hey all,

Sorry for the supreme lack of blogging this month.  Life has been pretty hectic with the end of the semester coming up and me jumping from one presentation to another like a kangaroo on hallucinogenic mushrooms.  I've also been trying to work on my sister's challenge.  When I was home over Christmas, my sister and I agreed to do a Youtube channel of her picking songs and me butchering them, but the mash-up she is making me do is actually killing me.  Ah well, at least it's fun!

In other news, it's snowed every day for the past week and a half and I've discovered my bike isn't nearly as good a snowmobile as it is a bike.  Getting anywhere is taking a long time, and it's COLD.  Supposedly it's going to get warmer and sunnier in the next couple days, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Since I have legit nothing else to tell you, here, have some photos out of the album my sister and I gave our parents for Christmas.

Adios!

Decision: Not to intern.

Hey all.

Well, I have officially decided not to intern, and here's why.  Today, Real Job came to me and told me they wanted to train me in a particular skill that would make me highly, highly marketable in Europe.  So highly marketable that afterwards I could more or less walk out on my one (soon-to-be-two) degrees and just go get a job making a LOT of money while lamenting the fact that I ever wasted time going to school at all. Said job would not be in something my soul wanted to do, obviously, but it's a career to fall back on.  Also, the skill set looks amazing on my resume.  And when do they want to train me?  February, the month of my internship.  I've decided to take them up on it and back out of the internship for a couple reasons:

--First, the whole highly-marketable thing.  I like the idea of having something on my resume that actually makes me useful.  "Shrewd wielding of sarcasm" doesn't have the same ring to it.

--Second, since Real Job is the one doing the training, I won't have to take off to accomplish it, thereby saving all my vacations days for my fieldwork.

--Third, now I have time to take Spanish over the break. QUE GRANDE!

Since my last post, I've been searching really hard for the middle road, preferably a yellow brick one in which I could have my cake (chocolate, cheese, or chocolate cheese) and happily eat it while skipping along with my friends, all of whom are searching for vital organs on the black market.  I think I've finally found that road, minus the missing organs--I beef up my resume with awesome skillz, while still having enough time to finish all my papers and keep working towards Mexico.

You know what I call that?

To intern or not to intern.

To intern or not to intern? That is the question.
Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of unpaid servitude
Or to take arms against a sea of boredom
And, by opposing...
Do cooler shit.
     --William Shakespeare
         The Student of Göttingen
         Act III Scene 107.

Hey all!

I have absolutely nothing interesting to tell you.  This past week has been a mixture of proofreading various theses for euros, working my normal job, prepping for a presentation, and debating whether or not to go through with the internship I have lined up for February.

Pros:
--It's an internship, and I don't have one of those on my resume yet.
--It'll mean a weekend trip to Denmark.

Cons:
--I'm not emotionally invested in it at all.
--I hate the concept of internships.  If I'm doing forty hours of an actual job for you, I want to get paid like I'm doing an actual job for you.  I realize this sounds very "you have to walk before you run" or "you can't have your cake and eat it too" depending on your personal stance on the matter, but this is how I feel.  I want to eat my cake while running.
--It's in the middle of nowhere, or, as they say in German, it's on the "ass of the world."
--The vacation days I would have to take off from real job to complete it would force me to shorten my field research, because I'd have less time to take off.
--I've got three papers and an essay to write during that month, and working a full-time internship on top would kill me.  Plus I'd probably have to go to either Hamburg or Copenhagen for a decent library, and those are both really far away.
--I don't actually need it, since I more than make up for the lack of internship on my CV by racking up epic crap-tons of work and study abroad.
--I figure life is short and I don't want to spend a month working on an English-language website, which I am fairly certain I will hate, just to say I did it.  "Just to say I did it" is a category I reserve for fun things, like biking across Ireland or teaching a photography class in a Bolivian slum.

Hmm.  Well, I haven't made any decisions yet, but my, that is an awfully short "pro" list.

What do you guys think? Does it sound worth it?

I haven't done one of these in a while, but here's my new favorite song of the day!  Starts around 0:35.

Adios!

Oh hey, internet! (Or, Things a Black Hawk helicopter would not survive a fight with)

Hello, internet!  I am back in Germany and back to blogging in my little awkward corner of the net that very few people are interested in.  YAY!

Let me begin this story by saying I have five boxes of Kraft Mac and Cheese (Phineas and Ferb shaped) that I am saving for emergencies, like when my day is sad and I hate more things than usual.  Because everyone knows Kraft Mac and Cheese (with shapes) is the ultimate comfort food.

Moving on.  So, America was amazing.  I saw 95% of the people I wanted to see (although not nearly often enough), did 95% of the things I wanted to do (dammit, I forgot to get Amish pretzels!), and enjoyed myself thoroughly.  Here are some fun things Al and I did over the break:

--No school work.
--Saw Phantom of the Opera on Broadway.
--Went to the Hershey's store multiple times to keep getting the free samples that they give you when you walk in.
--hung out in Lancaster county, where the Amish live.
--discovered they understand every word if you speak German.  You, however, barely understand anything when they speak Pennsylvania Dutch.
--won three games of Trivial Pursuit (just me).
--made fun of my sister mercilessly for thinking that "The Iron Lady's" real name was "The Statue of Liberty."
--challenged Sam to a pretty epic game of Iron Chef Breakfast in which the secret ingredient was...cranberry sauce.
--got my nails painted polka dots by my sister.
--sat on a lot of horses, only a few of which tried to kill me.
--successfully acted out "Michelle Obama's Mom's Favorite Dress" in Claire's version of Death Charades.
--ate a LOT of awesome American/Portuguese food.
--finally found boots that fit my Asian-drag-queen-sized calves.
--laughed our way to hernias watching Twilight
--cried over Les Mis and marveled at Eddie Redmayne's sheer hotness.
--spent a hilarious New Year's in Morristown and got a comedian to rag on Al for being German.

There were a lot of other things but they've all sort of jumbled together in my mind into one long string of awesomeness.

In short, I had the greatest greatest greatest Christmas ever.  It was approximately nine bazillion times better than last Christmas, when I was trapped in a house for five days with my au pair family who at that point I knew hated me, but I wasn't sure why. Although to be fair, I could have spent this Christmas buried alive with only Jesus, Mitt Romney, and a squirrel carcass for company, and it still would have been a more enjoyable experience.

And now I'm back.  I was super sad to come back and was a horrible miserable bitch on the plane.  My poor boyfriend had to sit next to me the whole way (although in all fairness, I did warn him I would be a horrible miserable bitch),  and then I was a horrible miserable bitch all through our nine-hour layover.  My misery was further compounded by sheer exhaustion, but at that point we had already decided to spend a few hours running around London proper and I was not backing out.  This meant I spent a solid portion of our 5 hour sightseeing tour passing out sprawled across my boyfriend's lap in front of various famous buildings and drooling all over his jacket. When I woke up in front of Buckingham Palace, his response was "Good morning, starshine!  Everyone who has passed by us in the last twenty minutes thought you were giving me a blow job."

Fail.

Today was my first day back to class.  I meant to go yesterday, but then I slept until two-thirty in the afternoon (yay, jetlag!) so that didn't quite work out.  After my first class, I decided to go get some work done in the student center, so I sat down at a table,  plugged my computer in, and got started.  At one point a wonderfully polite German girl knelt down next to my chair and minus a "Could you please, " or "would you please," or "would it be alright if," bodily lifted my chair, shoved me two feet over, plugged her phone into the outlet, and then set her phone down to charge on top of my books.  Ah, German politeness.  Didn't miss you in the least.

Half an hour later in class, I got to listen to what was probably the most fucked-up discussion of American foreign policy I've ever heard in my life, including one kid who blabbered on for ten minutes about how American soldiers didn't grasp that Black Hawk Down was actually a disaster until said Black Hawk got shot down.  According to this guy's logic, our soldiers were under the impression that a Black Hawk helicopter was the nineties version of the Titanic (i.e., unsinkable).  Newsflash asshole, not even Americans are dumb enough to think that a helicopter can win against a rocket propelled grenade.  In fact, I don't even think it would survive a head-on collision with an iceberg.  But to help you out, I made you a short list of things I'm pretty sure a Black Hawk would survive a fight with:

--a pedestrian
--an Ipad
--a lamp
--a small garden shed
--a desk chair from Ikea
--a television
--a corgi

Please note that neither RPGs nor icebergs are on that list.

To make a long story short, I'm happy to be back to my Göttingen friends and fun times on one hand, sad to be back to my life and writing papers on the other.  To make a long blog post short, I declare today an emergency worthy of Phineas and Ferb Mac and Cheese.  I call it, "gently weaning myself off American food."