Thanksgiving in Berlin!

It's been about a month, so I'd say it's time for my next update. This time from Berlin! Over the past few weeks, we've gotten some snow in St. Gallen, so winter seems to have begun. Unfortunately, I'm pretty bad at remembering to take pictures, so you'll just have to use your imagination in some parts.

I've been super busy in the past few weeks - went to Longbridge in Basel to teach English to Swiss kids twice, and now I'm up north in Berlin. Here are some assorted pictures of everything!

These pictures are from Langenbruck, which is where we have the Longbridge English camp.








Blake, a friend from high school, and his cousin Angie were on vacation in Germany, so we met up in Zürich for a day. It happened to be the first day of Fastnacht, which was quite a surprise and a neat coincidence.










Berlin is super cool. They even have an NPR station, and we're listening to Garrison Keillor. On Friday, there was a get-together of some random assorted Waldsee people, which was a lot of fun. We went out to some tiny village in Brandenburg, and had some really good food. Lots of fun.




I've been saying with Antonia (real name: Christina), a friend of mine from Waldsee, who also sheerly randomly happened to be in Hamburg and London the same summers that I was there. She's got a neat group of friends, with a lot of people who grew up bilingual and/or are half-American. We went to see some of them (some of whom I had even met before!) and had my second Thanksgiving of the weekend, and third this year.

I also visited Ronny, another counselor from way back, and saw his kids. Thorsten (Chris), a Waldsee counselor from Rochester, is the godfather for Julius, the older one. It was fun to run around with a 2 year old for a bit.





As I saw most of the "must-see" attractions when I first came to Berlin 5 years ago, it's not too frantic and I've been able to enjoy myself without worrying about what I might have missed. We're going to head out now to see an exhibit about the Berlin Wall - should be exciting!

FC Basel vs FS St. Gallen

Eleanore, my Swiss-born British roommate, invited me to come with her and some of her friends to my first live European soccer game - FC Basel vs FC St. Gallen. Basel's team seems to be rather good, and that's where Eleanore and her friends were from, so we were all Basel fans today. It was a pretty exciting game, and Basel ended up winning 3 - 1. However, the most hilarious part of the game was the Basel fans. There was a special "dedicated fan" section, which is what I took a lot of pictures of. Fireworks inside the stadium, crazy flags, super loud and enthusiastic crowd-leaders with megaphones, funny songs / cheers, they had it all!


Here are some pictures:

OLMA - Pig races!

On Saturday, I went to the OLMA. It's sort of like the state-fair, but it's Swiss, so it's smaller. The most exciting part of the OLMA was the pig races. Yes, pig races. I took a video of them, but I have to convert it so that it can be uploaded.


After the pig races, Christian and I wandered around the various halls, and got some free cheese samples.

Oktoberfest!

It's that time of year! Having just arrived back in Switzerland from my summer in London, I decided I was due for a quick vacation, and headed up to Munich last weekend to visit Brian Holmes. Which just happened to coincide with Oktoberfest's 200 year anniversary. Brian just got a new roommate, Cy, who grew up in Germany but graduated from Wayzata in 06, and he also had another friend visiting, Ben, who also came from Wayzata.

Friday night was pretty easy going, I made it to Brian's apartment around 9 PM, and then we went and got some Vietnamese / Thai food, which made for a pretty easy start to the weekend.

On Saturday morning, we got up early and trekked to Oktoberfest, so that we could try to get into one of the famed tents, which open at 9 AM. Of course, by the time we got there, they were all full. Since it was sort of raining, and all of the remaining seats were outside, we headed back to Brian's apartment. A bit later, we decided to head off to the Viktualienmarkt, which is an area near the middle of town with a lot of bratwurst and beer shops. Nothing like a good Bavarian bratwurst at 10 AM! We decided to give the real Oktoberfest another shot around 3 PM, as the rain had started to let up. We were able to get a table, and hung out there for a bit. Sunday morning, we slept in a bit, but were still able to wander around some of the different tents.

I think the pictures speak for themselves!

Got the job!

I got a job offer from Barclays! I'll be working here in London, and it starts next August. That gives me a bit of time to finish my degree in St. Gallen, and do some traveling through Europe first. I'll be working in what's called Loan Capital Markets in the Investment Bank. Basically, companies need ridiculous amounts of money just to pay for day to day operations and also to do things like buy other companies, so they come to us, and we get together with 10 other banks and lend them 8 billion euros, or something. So, that's what I'll be doing, with a focus on continental European countries, probably Germany, Switzerland and Austria b/c of the whole German speaking thing.

Here are some pictures of my little excursion last weekend to Greenwich. As in, Greenwich Mean Time. That one.