Weekend side hustle

Man. This weekend was pretty intense.

I decided to go out (I know, right?) and ended up waiting in line, getting hit on by a French chick that said she liked "brown sugars", found twenty Euro while waiting, danced until 5 in the morning and then went home and slept for like 6 hours. It was wild.

Also, this Saturday I worked the coat check for a friend's party randomly. It was exactly as hard as you imagine it would be: not very. Except for when people get all uppity because they don't want to pay a Euro fifty to have someone watch their stuff. Or when people want to get something out of their bag but then have me put it back. Or when people have like 10 layers, their girlfriend's purse, a fanny pack, and two-and-a-half scarves and only want to pay for one thing. But, other than that it's mostly just sitting around and whatnot.

Now, my weekend is coming to a close. I should probably do something but, that would require energy that I spent being a young person doing young people things. 

This just in!

First video post from Berlin! I made it back and have thus far successfully managed to feed myself and not sleep on the street. 

I'm back!

A lot has happened since my last post. I flew back from New Delhi at the end of May, through Qatar, back to Heidelberg. Qatar was interesting, even if it was just for two hours. The loud speaker announcements were in Arabic and it was gratifying/depressing to catch a couple of words that I understood every now and then. I definitely want to return to an Arabic-speaking country at some point. 

Then I was in Heidelberg! It was so great to see all of the friends that I made while I was living there. I stayed with an awesome friend of mine who was gracious enough to let me crash on his floor for an entire week. It was a nice relaxing transition back into Germany






Since then, I've come back to Berlin and have been trying to get settled and stable....well...as stable as it gets with me, I guess. I found a place to live starting in august until next august. Right now I'm living at another awesome person's place while they are away. I'm doing a paid internship for a digital media production company (workin for the man 9 to 6) and enjoying my time on the weekends. I'm only moderately stressed about my slowly declining bank account, the 8 million bureaucratic things I have to do to live here, and thinking about forming concrete plans after I'm done (!) with my masters.

I also managed to get out to Vienna on a perfectly unnecessary splurge that was completely wonderful. Here's the obligatory selfie in front of the Mozart house.





Sooooo yep. That's what's going on with my life. I managed to make it back to Berlin! After not being sure about my ability to do it, after a fair number of "what the fuck am I going to do?" moments, after stomach churning stress and grades and three continents: I'm back

Last Indian Vlog

Agra

I've been sitting in my room for the past week and half, contemplating sickness, final exams being over and my inability to leave campus because I'm am, in fact, 70 years old. I've been telling myself "I really should travel." But, being the curmudgeonly malcontent that I am, I was always able to rationalize with "ummm...but I don't wanna" Still, my plan was to do SOMETHING in the last week and because the Taj Mahal is so close to Delhi, that was kind of it.

So when a couple of friends let me know that they happened to have an extra ticket going to Agra, I took it as a sign.

The trip there was a more or less pleasant journey on the train at 7 in the morning. Waking up early is kinda my thing here so it wasn't too much of a problem getting to the train station. 

Our first destination in Agra was the "Baby Taj", a smaller monument similar to (yet older than) the Taj Mahal. The day itself was short but sweet. We managed to see a fair amount of stuff in the six hours we were there. 

We bought our tickets to the Taj Mahal at the baby Taj to avoid waiting in line. Despite the assurance of many people that I could possibly get a 20 Rupee Indian ticket as opposed to  the 750 Foreigner ticket  (because I "look" Indian), I ended up getting what the called the "High value" ticket which meant separate and admittedly faster lines. 

The Taj mahal was beautiful and HUGE. I hadn't really thought that it would be so big. When standing here, you actually think it's a lot closer but the size plays tricks with your perception

I keep my selfie game strong. 

We also managed to get to the Agra fort, which was cool because it gave us a nice view of the Taj Mahal from afar. 

After a minor snag with our train being an hour late, we managed to get home around 10 or 11 (I can't remember because my brain was not functioning properly) I was so tired that I didn't even eat!  

bleh sick

It was inevitable.
After the compounded stress of finals and preparing for my transition back to Germany, my body finally gave up its valiant effort to keep me healthy. At the end of last week, I was feeling strange but not strange enough to stop me from going about my normal routine. Then this weekend BOOM. aaaaallll kindsa stomach issues that are probably not appropriate to post in a blog read by young and impressionable readers. I've been eating nothing but bread and bananas and drinking a lot of water but it still hasn't gone away. Despite this unpleasant cloud over my life, I've managed to secure an internship at a media production company in Berlin. This goes (somewhat) with the other internship that I did during the first semester so this could be considered career building. Not sure exactly how all that works but I guess we'll see.
Basically, all I've been doing the last few days is reading things that I want (!), playing video games, trying to get my German affairs in order and resting up while trying to get healthy. It's not so bad. 

May the fourth....be easy

Three down and one to go. I am in the home stretch of exams. This last semester has made me think about university and education and knowledge and morals and subjectivity and grades and self-worth more than any other semester in recent memory.

It's a lot of thoughts.

I took an exam yesterday. I thought I did okay but I've come to realize that it doesn't really matter what I think when it comes to grading. The whole scale is quite subjective. Especially when there are two (or three, technically) scales involved. The Indian teachers are grading a student raised in the American grading system whose grades will be translated into a German GPA. It's all very tiring. Oh well, there's not much I can do besides wait and see what happens.

In other news, I haven't been doing much besides studying, eating, yoga and working out. Oh, and looking for a job in Berlin. That is one thing that I'm (surprisingly) not worried about. I just have to be proactive and something will come up. One thing that I KNOW that I'm good at: hustlin and makin it work. In comparison to almost all other things where I'm not quite sure of my own competence, haha. I have less than three weeks and then back to Deutschland!