Good bye Deutscheland

I shall miss your smaller everything, your non sugary food, your Euros, your clean air, your Coca Cola Light, and your truly diverse airport. Hopefully I will be back soon.

Do you think?

The Spice Girls are finally reuniting. Do you think I'm going to try for tickets? Let's take a look at my current top 25 most played, shall we? I wonder if any Spice Girls songs or songs by members of the Spice Girls are in there...


3. Let Your Head Go (Radio Mix) - Victoria Beckham

5. Free Me (Dr. Octavo Seduction Radio Edit) - Emma Bunton

9. Holler - Spice Girls

15. Ride It - Geri Halliwell


Damn right I'm trying for tickets. In two different cities!

This post comes to you from the German version of Blogger!

Am I just tired?

Why does the Hotel Hamburger Hof sound so funny?

Cloudy but pretty

My last supper

Chinese! I haven't eaten it yet... Do you know what the German word for pork is? Schweinfleisch (pig flesh). I don't know why I find that funny.

Did you know...

Supposedly you will get fined if you drive on the sidewalk in Germany but I see it all the time. This view is outside my current work location.

This is a...

Very nice water fountain in the same area.

Where is this?

Who knows. Somewhere in Frankfurt though. A great long street with shops and restaurants. A nice walk after seeing Shrek 3 (in English).

This morning...

I was in Eischborn but now I am back in Frankfurt. Here is a view from the desk of the user I am currently helping.

Day Two - Those Pink Germans

I mean, Germans LOVE Pink! Especially her song Dear Mr. President. It's currently #2. Here is the video...



Some more observations...

T-Mobile is THE phone carrier here. You can tell by the large number of phone booths with pink phones!
They have good Apple Streudel where I'm working.
Full-length doors can be opened for some air all around the office on every floor. Amazing.
Flying here on Saturday/Sunday I flew right over the tip of Greenland, near Iceland, Belfast, Ireland, Manchester, England, . I don't know why I thought we'd just fly straight here. Due to the flight pattern, you could see sun the entire trip!
I'm used to reading The Washington Post online every morning but now I can't read it until nighttime.
There is good Thai food here!

I had to go to Eschborn for work yesterday morning and for the first time, I had a taxi driver that didn't speak good English. I write down the addresses so I can show the taxi driver where to take me but this taxi driver couldn't find the address in Eschborn so there I was in the middle of a strange city with no idea where to go! I asked a few people but none of them had any idea where my address was. Luckily I had my contact's phone number and she came and met me.

What's new?

Well I've been in Germany for almost a day now.

So here are some observations...

I thought I was getting a break from Manhattan, so I come here and find out Frankfurt is known as the German "Manhattan". Wonderful.
I have never seen a major city with so much green. Grass, trees, big big parks, etc. It's great.
Evidently the city is boring so people leave the city for the weekend. France is only 2 hours away by train.
Vietnamese food is good here too.
Even though the guides I read said you should tip for a cab ride, when you do they act like you gave them a million bucks!
I wandered into a street fair that went on for at least 15 blocks. At fairs in America you can get all kinds of foreign foods. Not so here. German food, german food, german food as far as the eye can see. When walking around the city, except for the very occasional Vietnamese restaurant, the only foreign restaurants seem to be Italian (with a strange version of pizza) and Thai.
A lot of "restaurants" only serve at a window like at the boardwalk.
I didn't see even one SUV yesterday. Or a non-German car for that matter. And they are small cars. And they park on the sidewalk or partially on the sidewalk or whatever it takes.
Maybe I don't go to the right places in Manhattan but I have seen more people diversity here so far than in the last months in Manhattan.

More later... Time to get ready for work.

I am here...

I am tired, I am staying next door to what looks like the Harry Potter train station/mall and I will write more when I figure out how to get back to the hotel from my Vietnamese dinner. Seriously. No one speaks English, no cabs to be found anywhere. It's like I'm in a frigging foreign country.

Here I go!

Well, I wasn't particularly excited about this trip. More annoyed that my short weekend would be cut even shorter. But now that I'm here at the airport, I get to be in a different concourse from every other week of the year, I have my Euros and I just saw twenty(!) flight attendants get on my plane I am excited. Officially.

Of course I lost my headset battery and forgot my adaptor for the psp, so I had to take a quick trip to Concourse B but I have my snacks and magazines and power converter for the plane (my seat has a plug) so see you on the other side!

MORE news

Just when I thought my life was exciting enough, I find out tonight that I'm going to Frankfurt, Germany next week for work. I've had a passport for about seven years now and now I finally get to use it.

If anyone has any tips about travelling to Europe and dealing with jet lag, please let me know. The farthest I've been out of the country is Windsor, Canada.

Talk about fancy

A group of us ate at The Prime Grill for lunch. Amazing food and incredibly high prices. Good thing I didn't have to pay!

I love me some Rosie

And I love Beth Ditto from The Gossip. I only wish they had both been at the Denver concert.

Many firsts

Michael Moore's Sicko premiered across the street from my hotel tonight. But right now I am in Radio City Music Hall seeing the True Colors tour again! In a few minutes I'll see my Rosie for the first time! Sigh.

Getting better

At least it isn't blurry this time. Chef Bobby Flay sat two rows in front of me in first class on my way to LaGuardia tonight.

And why have I been catching up with Season Two of Lost on the plane?

Big News

Skippy and I are trying to buy our first house together. Neither of us has owned a house before. We actually have one under contract so we're just waiting for the financing to come through. We hope to close by June 29th so we can do a lot of work the week of July 4th, which will be my first week home in months.

Here are two videos showing what the house looks like now.

This one shows the outside...



and this one shows the inside...

Some day I will take a good picture...

But for now here is Ted from Queer Eye (2nd from right) who will be on my flight!

My latest creation

Direct from Dave and Busters in Times Square

I gasped

Not to brag, but I have met a lot of famous people from my days as a performing arts sign language interpreter. So while it's fun to see famous people here in NYC, it's more like "oh, there's so and so".

So this morning after I hit the gym I left the hotel to walk around the city a bit. I noticed that there was going to be a movie premiere tonight across the street, the same place that had the Georgia Rules premiere. I didn't know what premiere yet as they hadn't posted the sign, but I did see that the red carpet was a lot longer than the last premiere.

I get back from my walk, turn the corner and gasped out loud. The movie premiere is A Mighty Heart with Angelina Jolie. Love, love, love, love her. The sad thing is I was excited about Angelina, my Mom was excited about Brad Pitt. What's wrong with this picture?

I am old

Red Rocks is truly the most amazing venue to see a concert. Of course you have to walk up so many steps to get to it that if you survive the climb you deserve a good concert. And that we got. We were in the 42nd row and it was LOUD. I can't imagine being much closer.

Evidently the lineup changes concert to concert, ours was:

The Cliks (sp?)

The Dresden Dolls

Debbie Harry

Erasure

Cyndi Lauper

Margaret Cho was the MC. I've seen her several times in concert before. She's always raunchy but dang, put her in front of a bunch of gay people and she doesn't hold back at ALL! I now know much more than I ever wanted to about female things.

The Cliks were interesting. There are four and I thought two were guys and two were girls but it turns out that they were all girls! Their sound wasn't the greatest so I couldn't understand many of the words.

The Dresden Dolls were very good. I had never heard of them before but they had quite the fan base. Skippy even liked them.

Deborah Harry wore the smallest miniskirt. The only song she sang that I recognized was French Kissing in the USA and even that I had only heard part of before.

Erasure, on the other hand, poured on the hits. It was like being in the clubs again!

Now Cyndi, I have seen at least five times before. She has one of the most amazing voices, much better than even shines through on her recordings. But by that time we were so tired and we had to be up at 3:30 am, so we left during her first song. The road to Red Rocks is one lane each way so the drive out would have taken way tooo long.

All in all a great night.

Oh and by the way we put in a bid on our first house.

Can you tell...

How beautiful Red Rocks is from this picture? We are walking up an amazing amount of steps to get to the ampitheatre to see Cyndi Lauper in the True Colors tour.

Justice has been served

Finally, Isaiah Washington has been fired for making multiple anti-gay slurs against T.R. Knight. I love that show and every time he showed up on the screen it would just make me mad. Now I can actually just watch the show again.

Why oh why

Does there have to be a huge Coldstone across the street from my hotel on 42nd Street? And why did they get rid of banana ice cream? And why is their Cake Shake such a tasty treat?

A first

I've never flown on a plane with a Business Class section before. Basically the first 14 rows have leather seats. The rest of the plane is Economy Plus so everyone has leg room but being in row 15 I have even more! See you in NYC!

So close....

I have been wanting to get back into San Francisco and see the sights. After work I went straight to my hotel only to find out that I had driven to the wrong Hilton Garden Inn! Luckily they just let me switch to that one.

My trusty GPS told me that I was only 8 miles from downtown San Francisco but I was tired and had room service and was asleep by 7:30 pm. Maybe next time.

Back in cloudy California

Only until tomorrow morning. Here is a shot from my vine of San Mateo.

Wiis!

Every morning NintendoWorld in NYC gets in a shipment of Wiis and sells out of them in an hour or so. I went to pick up Mario Party 8 today and every person in line and at the register was buying a wii but me.