Date: Thu, 18 Mar 1999 17:04:49 +0100
Subject: "The Periodic Adventures and the Adventurous Periodical of Marleigh," Issue 5

Hi All,

It was a fairly good week, and next week should be even better.

The high point this week was going to Ivan's for dinner (Ivan is the guy
from IAESTE, who I had dinner with a couple weeks back).  Two of his
Indian friends were making dinner as part of a going away party for one
of them, who's graduating or something.  I was never quite clear on
where he was going.  There was this total mob present: Kartic was the
guy who was leaving, and Sanji was the other cook.  Also we had Ivan and
his mom, both Croatian, Anna from Toronto (though she was born in
Beijing), Christian from Russia, and Wolfgang, who I think is
Christian's brother.  Quite the international gathering.

The food was tasty, had this rice with vegetables and a yogurt sauce,
with kheer for dessert.  Also had some Croatian cookies Frau Perisa had
made and Croatian liquor.  Apparantly it's a Croatian custom to have a
little drink of liquor before the meal, to help with digestion.  I
wussed and didn't have any.  In fact, only a few of us drank it, which I
think confused Frau Perisa, but she got over it.  I don't think she's
used to people our age not drinking.

The language situation was sort of funny.  We mostly spoke English,
which everyone knew except Frau Persia, who spoke German and Croatian. 
Sanji speaks German better than English, everyone was good at German
except me and Kartic, and Ivan also speaks Croatian fluently.  I think
Ivan was starting to get overworked, though.  He'd speak English most of
the time, except when his mother asked him to translate something, which
she'd do in Croatian, and he'd speak German when addressing Sanji (and
then usually have to repeat himself in English for Kartic and me).  Just
to make things more exciting, Sanji and Kartic would call the
ingredients by their Indian names, so the culture clash was amazing to
behold.  I was surprised Ivan's head didn't explode from remembering
which language went with which person.  There was this amusing moment
where Kartic and Sanji were trying to discuss ingredients, and neither
could remember the word in a common language 

Sanji:  How much do you need of... Kartoffel?
Kartic:  Kartoffel?  What's that?  Potatoes?
Sanji:  Umm... I don't know... those things.  Aloo.
Kartic:  I have enough aloo, what about Kartoffel?

(kartoffel = potato = aloo)

I had a good time, though.  Anna and I hit it off well, so I hope to
hang out with her some more.  There's this theater by where Ivan lives
that shows movies in English once a week, I'm going to ask her to one
when the Week of Too Much Travel is over.

Speaking of which...  I don't think it made it into my periodical yet,
but I'm going on a bunch of mini trips next week, starting tomorrow. 
Friday I go to Munich, to meet up with Ted, Gabriel,
and Nick.  We hang out there for the weekend, then all come back
to Ulm on Sunday, where they crash with me for an unspecified period of
time.  Tuesday I go to CeBIT, the world's largest computer trade fair,
in Hannover for work.  Should be fun, I've looked at the schedule, it's
positively huge.  I get back from that Wednesday night, and then on
Tuesday I fly off to Vienna to meet up with a bunch of EThetans who are
going to be there with the MIT Concert Choir, like Jan-Willem,
Joung-Mo, and other less hyphenated people, like Ingrid and
Eric.  The Ted/Gabriel/Nick mob will hopefully be there as
well.  On Sunday I return and probably take a long nap.

German Word of the Week:
der Fehler = mistake, error

Many of you my recall my complaints about flaky network connections at
work.  When my network connection goes down, the message one sees is:
FEHLER    Der angeforderte URL konnte nicht geholt werden
(ERROR    The requested URL can not be found)
Happily, my network connection seems to be fixed, though I keep getting
these errors.  I guess the German networks are just too slow half the
time.

Honor and Glory...
        to Tom, who sent me a postcard!
        to color printers at work (my walls are now quite decorated)
Dishonor and Notoriety...
        to new plants which get slug infested and have to be thrown out
        to Lotus Notes and inadequate help pages in German.

Tscheuss!
Marleigh