Partying Partying woo!

Germans like. to. party. For basically any reason (and apparently, quite often, no reason at all) they will celebrate. Which explains why I had such a difficult time finding all the Germans in my dorm. They were all out. At parties.

However, today I managed to find them. Following the invitation of one of my floormates, I climbed up to the roof, to find the largest gathering I have ever seen in the building. Just grilling and chilling on the roof.

Surprisingly for me at least, was that there was such a range of international students. Although the University is international, the dorms are not. I think if we were to count up all the foreign students in the dorm, we'd be about equal with the native Germans.

Naturally, I felt quite unnatural at the beginning. I mean, me, parties, lots of fast German language thrown around.. well I get lost. Probably also didn't help that I hadn't seen anyone before, and there was for some reason a wide spread assumption that I wouldn't be able to speak any German at all.

The nice thing is though, that once you decide this must mean they're more shy than you are (which it took me quite a while to get to), they were very happy to have you initiating the conversation. Once you accidentally butcher some sentence, they'll figure eh, my English is better than your German and switch. But you see, they had to hold back in case you really did speak fluent German, because then it would be wrong or something for them to make a mistake in English.. I dunno. Someone else will have to figure out the psychology behind that.

After the grill and chill on the roof I made to my first college party. Ever. And I'm not even at my own school. I actually think that not speaking the native language made it easier. The loud atmosphere inhibited most conversations even between native speakers, so I didn't feel so bad when I couldn't understand something the first time. Also, since you don't know people and are unlikely to ever see them again, it's a bit easier to stop worrying about looking like a fool or doing something weird. You can totally claim the "I'm a foreigner, I didn't know" or "well, that's how we do it in <insert country>."

The live band was local- the members had gone to the university

Along with never haven been to a college party, I don't drink. I don't really have anything against drinking or people who want to (whether before or after legal age), I just personally don't want to. This was not a concept my German floor mates could understand. One guy kept asking all his friends to ask me if I wanted a drink, just to see their reactions. Funnily enough, he seemed to be the one most upset (on behalf of his country, he says).

So besides partying, there's also this thing known as work. Which actually went fairly well today. Dusting off some CADing skills I never had, I worked on creating a model of the hexapod, and correctly psuedocode connecting the parts so that it reacts to forces in a logical way. (I also got to make it look nice.. yay graphics!)

When I first got the model to move like it was supposed to, I'm pretty sure I was grinning like I had just received a 100 on a test for any class at MIT. I was also totally having a party in my head. It wasn't even interesting motion, just elevating the platform. BUT IT MOVED!! Now if I can only get it do that for every single type of directed force... I feel like I'm training a dog.