Sprechen Sie?

I'm just back from this crazy Language Exchange night, something a friend-of-a-friend told me about. It's held every Monday at Belushi's, a faux-American bar in Mitte where the English barmaids give you sass and the booze-hounds will crack onto you in Australian. Climb up the stairs and you're greeted by the babble of forty people speaking English, Spanish, Dutch and German - EXTREMELY badly. But willingly, and bravely! It's great. As well as ironing out the 'Strine from my Deutsch, I've met some top-class people there. People are open and friendly. Hopefully it becomes a weekly fixture in my diary - a single, solitary social certainty alone in a sea of unstructured time.

The U-Bahn 8 takes me back from Mitte to Kottbusser Tor. Kotbusser Tor station is known for its heroin addicts, crazy drunks and sleazy men with persistence and pockets full of pickup lines. The winner of the best German Person tonight was the punk with the rat snuffling through her black and green hair who was pointing at her girlfriend (with quintessential black fingernails) and shouting.

I'm trying to stay off the trains - the daily ticket is a whopping 6 euro and, as those who know me will attest, I am a tight arse. I also like to excuse myself from the more strenuous forms of exercise by cycling, and in this vein I have recently bought a beautiful orange bike. I literally stepped outside my door and there she was, being wheeled past by an old man on the way to the Turkish Market. I swooned and the deal was done.

In the cold light of day, I realise that I have been swindled - the brakes work some of the time, the pedals clunk and the seat, although deceivingly broad, is unsupportive in the arse regions. I got it repaired at this place for almost-free and it goes a little better now. It probably won't take me the 15 kilometres to my university every day though. I'm leaving that problem for another day.

I've been having the most devastating, embarrassing hangovers recently. I'm blaming it on my approach to currency. The Euro still seems like toy money. I have trouble taking it seriously and hence find it horribly easy to hand over a twenty and not care about the change. This accordingly makes me more likely to splurge on cocktails, a drink that I'd never touch in Australia due to its hole-in-pocket burning capacity. And once you have two 3 euro ($6 Australian) cocktails in your system, all the bad ideas suddenly seem like good ideas.

But otherwise, the nightlife in Berlin is completely and totally satisfying, mind body and soul. I thought Brunswick Street was good, but there's hundreds of streets in Berlin that trump it in both variety and quality. The drinks are cheap, the music is great, the couches are comfortable and the dancefloors are full. It's very tempting to throw caution/my education to the wind and spend my nights prowling around with a good-looking entourage (as yet to be fully established). At present education is still king and it will undoubtedly remain there (Mum, Dad?) but I'm looking forward to a semester of a carefully-struck balance.

On that note, I also received an extremely important bit of news last night. I've been offered a graduate job with the Victorian government as a trainee lawyer, to start in March 2010. I have been giddy all day, smiling at pretty much everyone which probably makes my fellow countrymen a little nervous. This means that I'll have a full-time job in what's likely to be a very bad year, employment-wise. It means that I will be coming back to Australia for 2010. It means I'll be doing exactly what I wanted to with my law degree. And it means that I can be a bit more liberal with my credit card. Sverige, here I come!