FREE TIBETan flag

So I finally got internet working in my dorm today which means I can finally blog regularly and upload a slew of new videos of Potsdam and Berlin. I'm finally getting settled in and I've met all the other CA students and we're getting along very well (they're all great people). It's not like the cumbersome task of meeting new people and trying to prove yourself to them since we're a bunch of foreigners and friendship is entirely built upon necessity of getting to know your fellow Americans who are in the same boat. So making friends was purely mechanical and connections with the other students were established pretty much in an instant.

This past week is the week before instruction begins at Uni-Potsdam and we've been doing these seminars that would help get us better acquainted living in Germany. One of my favorite exercises that were assigned to us was this scavenger hunt in which we had to go to downtown Potsdam and interview locals with selected questions on a list. We were also given an apple and an egg in which we had to trade with Potsdamers and this trading would continue until we acquired objects of increasing value. In short we bartered the apple and the egg through several stages of trades which included a brochure, a diaper, a pen, a tin flying pig, etc. The final objects we ended up getting were this Tibetan flag and a huge bottle of wine which we took care of later that night. I felt really good about trading to make something outta nothing, it was a really good hustle, which got me to thinking... I could very much well do this in the states and turn over something really good.

A little backgorund about my campus, which I must say is OMGWTFwayMFcool!! My campus is located in a huge park called Park Sanssoucci (which in French means 'without a care'), but for future reference I will refer to it as DGAF Park. The park is the location of three palaces which served as the summer residences for Prussian kings. My campus is located in Neues Palais:

For future reference, I will refer to this as the Noise Palace. I had an opportunity to check out the residence and everything inside is INSANE. It was like everything that was inside my book for my baroque-to-modern art history class was right here before my eyes. The entire place was stylized in Frederician Rococo and everything was crafted meticulously. Entire rooms were made out of marble, seashells and crystals. The rest of the park also contains gardens and other monuments - everything is very, very green. If I ever get bored of reading or using the internet there's always an abundance of things to do around here.

I feel like I'm in the early stages of a 5 month summer vacation but being abroad for four months I gotta really curb my spending because I'm deathly scared of going broke here. Despite how VISA is supposed to be accepted in millions of locations worldwide, for the most part German vendors only take cash and the exchange rate often slips my mind when I buy things appear to be cheap. I bought plane tickets to London on 4th of July weekend to see my cousin and to catch a blur concert. And if you know me, you know that I am a blur fan as well as Damon Albarn fan. For those of you who don't know, Damon Albarn is the frontman in blur as well as the creator of Gorillaz and the Good the Bad and the Queen.

Blur is having a reunion show in London after being broken up for several years. I figured since I don't see any future posted shows beyond this one, I decided whythefucknot if I was in Germany anyways. For those of you who are thinking, "What is the big deal, who the fuck is blur?" You probably know them for their song - Song 2; if you still haven't got a clue, you probably know the song as the 'Woohoo' song; if that doesn't ring a bell, it was the Starship Troopers theme song way back in the day; and if that doesn't help:

This song is really atypical their style and I'm sure if anyone gave them a listen they'd find a few songs they'd like. But as for me Iamthemostanxiousofthebabies...

Tchuss!

-Solomon


PS - My Skype address is solomon.vu

I wanna fold the world in Hamburger-style

Hey all, I'm currently in Hamburg right now. It's about 325 kilometers or so from where I'm staying at currently in Potsdam. I originally intended to start this blog at the beginning of my trip but not having a proper means of internet kinda makes it hard for me to do so( I have to go to campus a few miles away or leech off the Best Western wi-fi).

Hamburg is the place to be, I'd say cleaner than Berlin but all that doesn't really bother me much. It's a port-city so everything here is geared to to maritime culture. The atmosphere here and German city-centers in general is something I don't see everyday in California. There is as much activity going on during the day as there is at night. People would just go out and sit leisurely doing nothing; lotta bike riding, lotta old buildings, etc. Hamburg, as well as Berlin, seems to attract a lot of expats and there are a lot of non-natives everywhere you go. So there's always an abundance of people from America as well as other English-speaking countries.

These past two days or so I've been exploring all the historical sites, doing a really interesting (and free) tour of Hamburg. I also strolled down the Reeperbahn which is like a mini Vegas-Strip here. It had a very huge carnival that I think operates every night. Very large, very bright, and how a proper carnival should be in my opinion - a lot of rides, very cheap, and a shit ton more activity than throwing a ball in a cup to win a stupid goldfish that will die a week later.

Hamburg is also known to be the birthplace of the Beatles. They formed here and wrote a lot of their music, produced an album in German, and played in here prior to traveling back to England and becoming big. Scattered all around the city, especially on the Reeperbahn are various landmarks and small monuments commemorating the Beatles.

For those of you St. Pauli Girl drinkers, I just made a connection in my head the other night when I realized the Reeperbahn was located in the St. Pauli District. Aside from the numerous strip bars, sex shops, and other various night-life locales in St. Pauli, the place is known for it's red-light district (which I will check out tonight(because I'm curious(not because I want to buy sex))) which is not unlike the ones in Amsterdam where they have nakey grrrls in shopping windows. The beer is brewed in Bremen which is nearby Hamburg. So if you drink or have drank St. Pauli Girl, then you pretty much indirectly promote and sponsor prostitution in Hamburg. Cheers!

This is a hooker.

Sushi is an expensive habit to maintain

I'm at my aunt and uncles place in Irvine and we're all watching a really shitty movie on television and I am not having a better time. I cannot remember the last time my family sat down and watched TV together, let alone do things as a family together in a while. Every single moment I spend here is like vacation. I took a train and biked my way over because the train station is kinda far from where they live. I ended up taking a 3 hour long bike ride around Irvine.

I will not have my license for a year hence why the increased number of bike rides. I've been on a string of bad days following me losing my car but I've been able to keep busy. I'm currently taking a screenwriting class and I'm developing a script about solipsism although my professor is trying to change up integral points to my story. He's really big on big-budget narratives and confining shit to a 3-act format. I also have an acting class with Eric Barr, he's the head of the theatre department and I hope to learn a lot. My other class is Classical Theatre with Hornby aka ditch-every-class-session. I swear I'm the worst theatre student ever.

For the most part a new school year begins, friends leave and new friends come; I love em all and I'm looking forward to what this year will bring (especially now that I won't have my car).

On a COMPLETELY unrelated note, I would like to express the deepest contempt for my uncle who opens my mail without my consent and fails to tell me when delicate information passes through. I know you're reading this because you're a big snooper, too. Uncle, you are the biggest little girl I've ever met who incessantly gossips, spies and tattles.

Waiting for the Real Thing

During a nature hike in Riverside me, Bailey, Tasha and Jesse came across two scorpions and a huge huge huge centipede. We brought tupperware containers with us so we would be able to catch them. We brought them back to my house, here's what they look like:



Since then, the centipede lunged on one of the scorpions and ate it. RIP

Last Thursday was the day of the Art-walk and we were rolling pretty deep that night. Holly came over with Bock and her boyfriend. I felt like it was gonna be the last time I'm gonna see her since she's gonna be moving off to Oregon come the end of the month. August's art-walk was kind of a downer; we kinda glossed through not really looking at anything. Some guy at the Division 9 gallery had an installation with toys and Styrofoam and PVC piping. He kinda had it all over the place to the point where me and Bock bumped into it and the guy threw a fit. After a good 30 minutes there, we all decided to go back to my house. After an hour or so of being bored, I decided to get my taser out and we all played 'spin-the-taser' and might I tell ya Bailey takes it likes a champ! I'll upload a video of it later.

After all that madness, half of us went to the drive-in movie theater on Van Buren. It was my very first time at one and I had a lot of fun. We watched Pineapple Express but I think at this point in the night, the bulk of our group was half-conscious, so none of us really talked about it afterwards. I saw several shooting stars that night because the Perseid's meteor shower is going on(and up until the 24th of this month if you still wanna scope it out).

I spent the following week in Burbank where I just slothed around inside to watch the Games. I also played scrabble for the first time with Liz, Aaron and Lacy and I think I did pretty well: cube, cubes, then icecubes. Liz, Lacy and I aso went to Angeles Crest to check out the meteor shower during its peak. For some reason I was more able to catch the better ones at the drive-in. My brother is visiting from Kansas for a few weeks so I'm gonna spend a good amount of time with family. Me and my bros are gonna head to SF tomorrow to hang with my cousin Jimmy before we drive him down to LA.

Last night I headed back to Riverside to look for a job and go clubbing with everyone. This time around we went with a butt-load of people and whenever there's a lot of people, it's kinda hard to round them up to get them into one place. We'd often get sidetracked and this happens:





David and I decided that we should put money on a battle between Seabiscuit(scorpion) and Benji(centipede). David's bet was that Benji would subdue Seabiscuit within five minutes of being inside the same container. We have video coverage here. The light kicks in around a minute and a half in but it's an awesome video so try watching it the whole way through.




Don't question my ethics. As far as your interests are concerned, all the events captured in the video took place on a yacht 40 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, you ain't got shit on me.

Romancing the bone

Ross, Jesse and I were watching a few episodes of To Catch a Predator on Youtube. After watching Chris Hansen conduct a few sting operations on a some potential predators, I kinda felt irked at the ethical bounds they were pushing. Yeah I suppose they're doing a great thing by stopping predatory acts before they happen but it seems like the whole MO of swindling-in lonely guys seems to be more helpful towards creating predators than catching them.

This gave way to an idea that we should take it upon ourselves to catch a 'predator catcher', to see what extent of coercion they would try to employ on us "lonely" guys. We created a Yahoo! alias, romancingthebone288 (thank Ross and Jesse for that one), and we trolled on various personals chats and finally stuck to the 'roleplay' room. Our fast track method into finding a predator or potential predator catcher was to flat-out express our love for the 'touch of the younger kind'. We did so by quoting an Oingo Boingo song called Little Girls; if you click the link, you'll know why. Subsequently, we got barraged with mass replies but one that caught our attention was this guy from Ohio. This guy was trying to pimp out his 12 yr old step-daughter out to us, telling us how he gets off to watching someone else bad-touching her. We felt like we were opening up a huge huge HUGE can of worms and decided that we should stop before it got excessively worse. Afterwards, we saved the entire text of the conversation to my computer. I'm still deliberating on what course of action to take since I didn't anticipate on the whole thing snowballing out of control. This man said some serious shit that can't really be swept under the carpet.

How do I reconcile this with my previous thesis about Chris Hansen? Friends, I have reached a moral impasse. What started out as a laughable Oingo Boingo lyric has now turned into something dead serial. Thinking about it more, this interest kinda spawned out of listening to Oingo Boingo repeatedly for the past week in conjunction with "My Sharona" by the Knack. The 80s were very big into little girls, evidently. For those of you wondering who Sharona is, she is an under-aged girl that was dating one of the guys from the Knack. Wonder what she's doing now? She is a real estate agent in Los Angeles, who is still riding the coattails of Knack fame to slang houses; check here out here. She kinda looks like Alanis Morissette.

To coincide with today's blog's theme, I would like to give a shoutout to my cousin Drew from A.U. who had "My Sharona" playing at her wedding. Forever let it be known that she promotes sex with minors.




PS:
If you guys wanna see the Knack for free, they'll be playing on the 17th of August in the Woodland Hills Valley Cultural Center. Admission is an $8 donation for parking.

Concerts in the Park
Warner Center Park
5800 Topanga Canyon Blvd.
Woodland Hills, CA 91367

If you any of you are down to carpool with me, just let me know.

How did you make my rectum start quoting Garden State? Because I know ghost magic.

Today marks the day that I've finished finals so now I got two months of summer. I now have a bunch of free time in my hands so I might look for a temp job in Burbank so I can pay rent. I now have the time to start painting and reading books that I don't have to write papers about.

Mike came over yesterday so we cold brainstorm on a new project. We were gonna do a Ray Romano movie but I suppose things fell through. What we were able to do was salvage a script that I abandoned. We fleshed out the main character pretty well and we're taking the rest of this week to develop her story arc. Next Sunday we're gonna go to the Scientology celebrity center for brunch and research. I'm feeling pretty good on getting this thing rolling now that I reliable input.

An interesting piece of news for those of you who like video games; aside from watching a whole helluva lotta movies, I spend a considerable part of my time on my xbox. I caught wind that Netflix will be releasing their entire streaming library and will make it available for rent via xbox live in September. I really liked this idea because I even felt the effortless concept of pre-paid envelopes proved to be too laboring; walking to the nearest USPS dropbox was just too much for me.

Other news:

• Activist attempts to glue himself to the Prime Minister, but fails.
• Naked baby of the Nirvana album cover is now a teen and stresses how he can't live a normal life due to the fact that millions world-wide have seen his dick.
• Darren Aronofsky (yes, him) is directing the new Robocop reboot.

P.S. I don't think I can ever stop listening to Wowee Zowee

It's been a business doing pleasure with you

Today marks the first official day that everything in my house works. The guy came to turn on the gas today; and just like the internet guy yesterday, they were too quick to peace out from my house after they hastily finished their work. I felt really foolish to have my hand extended for a handshake (on both occasions) as they left WITHOUT SAYIN' A WORD TO ANYONE. It's a damn shame I have to miss so much class this week to wait on house duties.

I went to the grocery store yesterday and funny thing... I did not come home with a single item on my shopping list. My cart mainly comprised of things I could put into a blender. Pffft

Bailey and Natasha came to visit me twice this week and it makes me feel really good that they are so down to bike a few miles to see me! The other night we went to this wilderness trail on Central that I never knew existed. Keep in mind that it was 11PM and we were only guided by a single bicycle light. I saw 5 scorpions on our hike (all of which I stepped on, yep I'm so cool), a ton of stink bugs, a centipede and lots of animal poop (potentially human poop). They also came over again last night and we watched 'From Dusk till Dawn'. I don't know what to think of the movie because it looks like a load of cornball. I loved it up until the vampires (not because of the vampires specifically, but because it was a load of cornball). Another note of movies, it's taking too long in between for me to see something new and I'm getting pretty jaded with art-housey shit. So what I've decided to do is work backwards with old movies I never got a chance to see. On my queue is Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Rosemary's Baby, and some Hitchcock stuff!

I'm coming back to Burbank tonight for another fun-filled weekend. Mayhaps Ratatat, on the condition I find someone to go with me.

And for this post's piece of media, my friend sent me this and I absolutely fell in love with it:




really talented people