this will be totally random

There will be no continuity in this blog post. Let your mind skip about from topic to topic...and just breathe. We got back from Berlin at 1:30 am and I am tired tired.

Let's see. BERLIN ROCKS. I could totally live in Berlin in a heartbeat. Just do yourself a favor and go. Between the nice (really friendly!) people, the awesome transportation, the amazing food (ich liebe Deutsches essen) and the shopping, it's as close to nirvana as it gets for this girl.

This trip can be characterized by three things for me: Beer. Shoes. Mushrooms.

1. Beer. Lots of it and all good.
2. Shoes. Some girls buy Manolos, I buy Trippens. I bought some sandals made out of elk leather. Have you ever felt elk leather? Like butta. And then I got this other pair of shoes as well. Seriously, if Brad Pitt or some other hottie walked up to me and offered me my every explicit sexual fantasty while I was shopping at Trippen, I would basically spend the whole proposition looking past him at the shoes and then say, "What? Did you say something?"
3. Pfifferling. It was Pfifferling Zeit. Everywhere we went, Pfifferlings* were on the menu. Sauteed, made into soup. Roasted. With cream. It was AWESOME. I loves me the Pfifferlings. Especially with a nice wienerschitzel and some pommes frites, and a large dunkelweisse. heaven.

We did some other stuff, of course. I mean, it wasn't ONLY shoes, beer and shrooms. I bought a kick ass purse as well.

Ok I'm being facetious. We also saw some palaces and did a boat tour and a bus tour and spent the day at Sanssoucci. Sanssouci takes more than a day to see, so we missed alot, and it was raining like crazy, but it was still an incredible day out. We ended up walking more than 10 miles a day.

I did ok speaking German. Whenever I try to speak Norwegian one of two things happens: The person I am trying to speak to looks pained at my attempts and so starts speaking English to me, or I forget the Norwegian and use a German word instead. In Germany this word transference was not a problem, obviously, and my German accent is actually good enough that people think I am more fluent in it than I am, which is good for my learning but bad when they get past me in speaking to me and I end up saying "huh?". But I learned alot and I think if I had a few months I could be well on the way to fluency.

Now I am back here in Norway and I keep trying to speak German and I am getting really confused.

Today I started my belly dancing class. Det ar pa Norske, men jeg forstar bra. I mean, honestly, how hard is it to understand "move your hips this way and your shoulders like this"? Even I can understand what a "rumpe" is. It's a very fun class, the folks are all nice, and we can just be women, no matter our background, shaking it and laughing at ourselves. I will tell you, it's a big benefit to have some junk in the trunk and some lady lumps up front, those skinny girls just didn't look right shaking it like us more meaty ones.......

I've got pictures of shoes, palaces and beer, give me a few days to get organized and caught up and I'll post.

Oh! I also meant to leave you with the link to this interesting article about traveling through Heathrow in the recent travel horrors. I still can't fathom not having a book on a plane....and then this article points out that even though you were stuck in Heathrow, a veritable mall, for like, HOURS, you still couldn't shop because they won't let you bring it on the plane? Ugh. That has got to be my version of purgatory....nothing to read, bookstores and shops everywhere and I can buy anything, but I just can't take it with me.

*Pfifferling = chanterelle mushrooms. I had to look it up.