Friday the 13th?

Today, despite being Friday the 13th, was a pretty good day.  Herr Schmidt has a birthday today, so he brought some kuchen.  A lot of people have had birthdays lately, which has meant a lot of pie and cake in the office.  A few of us went to a little restaurant / cafe sort of a deal down the street for lunch with Herrn Schmidt, which was fun.  After being moved to the trading office, work has gotten more interesting, since the traders and Frau Heiden are closer to my age.

After work, I was able to get ahold of Antonia (a fellow Waldsee counselor), and we toured around the city a bit.  She's also new in Hamburg, and is doing an internship at Google for the summer.  Pretty cool, huh?  Anyway, we went and explored a bit.  After wandering around for a while, we ended up at the public viewing area for the EM, or Europameisterschaft, which is the European soccer tournament going on right now.  

Here's a picture of the big screen.  It's neat, because entrance is free, and there are a ton of little places to get food or something to drink inside of the area.  We caught the last half of the Netherlands vs France game, which ended in an epic Dutch victory.  We arrived and the score was 2 - 0, and then the French scored after a few minutes.  After the French goal, we turned around to go check out some of the stuff behind us, and suddenly everyone roared out "TOR!", meaning that somehow in the 20 or 30 seconds since the last goal when we turned around, the Dutch had scored on the French.  The game ended up with a final score of 4 - 1, and was pretty fun to watch.  The Germans really like their Fußball, and even announce the scores on their electronic subway schedules.  In the picture, you can sort of see them announcing the final score of 4 - 1 for the "Niederlände - Frankreich" game.

After the game, we headed out, and hopped on train.  On the Reeperbahn, we found a little place that sells 2€ pizzas.  They were small and not outstanding quality, but definitely not bad for 2€.  We decided that none of the places over there were really what we were looking for as far as sitting down to eat or get something to drink, so we headed over to the Alster.  Here, we went to a little restaurant / cafe on the lake, and sat around for a while.

On our way to Alex's, the name of the place we stopped at, the strangest thing happened.  Now, Antonia is one of the few, if not the only, German who I'll speak English with as the main language (since it's pretty much her 2nd native language).  So as we were walking along, this one guy started making some not so pleasant comments to his wife and child, as he heard us speaking.  I think we surprised him a bit when we snapped back at him in German as we passed him.  It was sort of a weird experience, since neither of us have ever really heard of Germans having such a problem with hearing English.

Anyway, after we parted our ways, I managed to catch the train back.  Luckily, it runs all night on the weekends.  I did miss the last bus though, by about 30 seconds.  Oh well.  

On a finishing note, I should learn how to use my camera and all of its settings.  I tried to take some pictures of the Rathaus (you can see them in my photo album), but due to the funny lighting situations, they didn't really turn out.