Katy Perry You Ain't

Hello again! The weekend passed pretty uneventfully, though I did wander around the town a little, and saw for myself just how beautiful a town it really is. But all in all the weekend passed rather dully, mostly just catching up on sleep. I have a feeling that will not be the norm for me as the year progresses.

On Tuesday night I had a picnic with four other teachers at the MLS: Romy, Tilo, Timo, and Annett. Annett I hadn't met before, but the others I had eaten with last week. It was a great picnic; Romy brought bread and cheese and wine, though the wine actually didn't get opened. Timo brought various other drinks, and I brought strawberries and cookies and a couple fresh tomatoes to slice. Tilo brought vegetables and dip, and Annett left with presents, because it was near her birthday! It was really a great evening, and on it I made a somewhat hilarious discovery: There are Canadian geese in Germany. There were a large number of them on the pond we sat by, and Timo decided to feed some of them, so we ended up with a crowd of about seven in the water by us. Noisy geese aside, it was a great evening.

Yesterday I was in Benshammer, a nearby town, for a music festival called Vogel in der Nacht, or Bird in the Night. Annett had called me and asked if I wanted to go with, and then Timo and Tilo both said they couldn't, so it ended up being just the two of us, but was still great fun. We chatted quite a bit, and had a great time. I was rather surprised to hear the first band start up playing and recognized the melody immediately. I didn't know what it was at first, as it was a sort of folk-rock ish band, and with a bearded man singing, and so it wasn't until I heard the first line that I started laughing at their choice of song. The first line goes a little something like this...."Wake up in the morning feeling like P.Diddy...."

That's right. Picture that. A rather nondescript German man singing Katy Perry, and not for karaoke. They later followed up that one with Poker Face, among others. It was amusing. They weren't all that great a band, and the singer didn't exactly exercise his vocal range any more than was strictly necessary (and sometimes not even that much...), but it was a fun night. The next band was better, a three-person group with a female lead, and they did a little bit more interesting things, musically. There was a comedy singer, who I literally understood absolutely nothing of, and then a rather odd last combination with a guy who played the flute and insisted on singing, though he really should have stuck to the flute. He sounded pretty good on it, actually. They were the last act we stayed for, and we didn't actually stay for the whole thing, but it was late, and I, for one, had to get up at 6:30 for school. But Annett and I did dance a little bit, though she didn't have much experience. She followed pretty well, though. Mostly I'm feeling a little dance-deprived, but Annett told me there's a dance school in Mörlenbach (a very nearby town), which I didn't know about, so hopefully that will change.

Today I'm staying the night in Heidelberg with some friends from the F+U Language Akademie, and then tomorrow we have the teacher conference for MLS, and school starts on Monday! Saturday it sounds like Annett and Timo and perhaps some of the others will also be going to another music event, perhaps the same festival (it goes on for a week, almost).