I beat the doener man at his own game.

Pictures from my five-hour bike ride yesterday.

So, I'm really sore from my long bike ride yesterday, with the result that I stayed home most of the day. However, around 2 or so I decided that I needed some more English-language books, so I ventured out to find Internationale Buecher, which apparently has a great selection of books in English (it's true!). Things were fairly uneventful there. I picked up four Jane Austen books at 3,10 each. Jane Austen is basically emotional comfort food - witty romances that generally turn out well. I also got a Stephen King book, and Atlas Shrugged, and Die unendliche Geschichte (just because I've been looking for that and finally found it).

So, then I left and had a complete emotional breakdown in the middle of Altmarkt. There was some street musician playing an acoustic guitar and singing "Hey, You've Got to Hide Your Love Away," and all I could think about was listening to Charlie play that ages ago, and I was so homesick, and almost sat down crying in the middle of the square. So that was kind of depressing. By the way, Charlie, you should join Facebook so I can recruit you to my pirate crew. :P

So, I made my way blurrily back to the tram stop, and made myself feel better by completely besting the doener guy. By "besting," of course, I mean "communicating with." See, I stop at the Prager Strasse doener stand a couple times a week probably, and every time I think to myself, "Dammit, self! Why don't I know how to say 'onions' so I can tell him I don't want any?" I'm too proud to say "Uhhh, das Stuff zwischen die rote Sosse und die Rotkraut." So anyway, I finally remembered to look it up, and was finally able to ask for "keine Zwiebeln" and to have it to go ("mitnehmen") without any trouble. So I'm proud of myself.

On the way back, I finally joined the orderly German hordes. See, at the intersections, you're supposed to wait for the walk signal to walk, just like in America. The only difference is that in Germany people actually do wait. If you go while it's still red, even if there are clearly no cars for miles, they'll all glare at you like you've just shot their firstborn. It's even worse if you do that when there are little kids there, because they hate people setting a bad example for kids.

So anyway, today I was standing there with a group of others waiting for the light to turn green, and these touristy types starting crossing while it was still red, and I stood on the curb and looked disapproving with the rest of the Dresdners. Self-righteous disapproval feels awesome, people! I'm such a conformist...