Woke up exhausted
I woke up feeling tired and rundown, like in the Call of Duty “easy difficulty” description. I took a shower, had a yogurt and a snack bar and a hot tea, and ran to class. The exhaustion was still there.
Our teacher gave us a summary of the deals in Zurich she wished she’d known about. For some reason, pricing schemes in der Schweitz share some sort of discount pass system and terrible upfront prices. That was cool! There’s a bike market coming up I plan to attend.
Then more vocab, and a deeper dive into numbers, question words, and words around time.
Lunch
Full crew for lunch! We all head to the Untere Mensa; I get bratwurst + hashbrowns (odd!). I add an apple and two free slices of bread plus 50 Rp. (cents) of by-weight cheese, nom!
It’s delicious! Good conversation with Christel and Navi about EU politics and Brexit, with some Trump-bashing.
The Nap that Wasn’t
Got home after lessons, started chatting with Gaya and Trevor and got all energized, so instead of taking a nap as planned, I decided to head to a secondhand store mentioned in class for fun, and maybe to get a laundry basket or wall hanging. Right outside Culmann I met Janna and Juyoung coming back. Juyoung wanted to come. We set out down the stairs, across the river, and around the main HB, down some very pretty roads:
And finally to the secondhand store, the Brockenhaus, which turned out to be nearly all furniture, and pretty expensive furniture at that (although they had a legit record collection). After that, we went to some outlet clothing stores in the area. They were.., well, um,
: D jaw-dropping, eh? This was an outlet store. And there was another store like it, equally non-outlet.
Gaudete Albi!
But then we found the oasis in the desert. Our teacher had told us about a cheap grocery store called Albi, which happened to be in the same area as the Brockenhaus. And, man, it felt like I’d just stepped across a portal into the land of frugal plenty. Everything was extremely cheap. I got 5 big 50 cent tall boys of different beers (which were amazing, I had a few with dinner), some pancetta and salami (meat at US prices around 5.- (fünf Punkt Stricht, or five Franken) per pound) a laundry basket, two giant figs for 0.80 Rp., a Swiss chocolate bar for 1.-, some cheap cheese, a really delicious rustic loaf of bread, a big bag of oranges… you get the idea, I went crazy! At the end, it was 35.- What a deal!
Walked back with Juyoung talking about Korean family names. At Culmann, fried some pancetta with onion and ate it on the delicious bread with cheese and beer. :D :D :D
Also, I bought Juyoung a fig! She’d never had one before.
Tripping on a Whim
Found out while eating dinner that Daniel and Suraj and other bros had just booked passage to Munich for Oktoberfest. Daniel invited me excitedly, and I quickly became convinced–they booked with a company offering a cheap camp-out setup outside Munich, 30 minutes by all-night tram. I went with it and booked the bus to Munich and the campsite setup, a total of around 200.-. Now I’ve spent 500.- in the past two days, with the Halbtax and Gleis 7 :P Crazy! Oktoberfest will be awesome though–we’re going next weekend!
Had a good chat with Deo, wrote this log, and crashed! Finally, a nap :P