fri night lights. or dinner

my first friday night out in berlin! and it was fun!

my classmates decided to go out to dinner as a group. i'm not sure why or who organized it, but we decided to meet at 7:30 on fri in front of the school. a few couldn't make it to dinner (including nigeria, which i have to admit i didn't mind), so our group ended up being myself, south carolina (the young, immature, conservative), luisa, rasetto (italian woman in germany for her husband's work) and her hubby, granola girl (my new canadian friend who i'll talk about later) and sexy smoker from colombia. oh, and bagaria. herr bagaria is probably one of my favorite people in class, and unfortunately, fri was his last day in class - he flies back to barcelona this weekend to start classes (future engineer) on mon. i think the dinner might've had something to do with his leaving, but not sure. despite being the youngest in our group, he took charge - found the resto, got them to give us english menus, forced them to let us sit outside, etc. i was really impressed. usually i'm the one doing that sort of thing, but i'm happy to let someone else do it. if he were this age and i were 10 years older, prime cougar territory, i would be all over him. (jk - kind of)

anyway, south carolina turns out to be rather nice, but dumb. he is living with his girlfriend's family 2.5 hours outside of berlin. he takes a 1.5 hour train from berlin to some small town where he then has to wait 15+ min for another train to take him to this other town. THEN he has to walk a half hour through the WOODS to this family's house. ???? he's saving 200 euros a month, yet he told me has tons of money to travel and hasn't traveled anywhere because he doesn't like to go alone. that is not worth 200 euro to me, but his unnecessarily long commute isn't what makes him dumb. he says stupid things all the time. e.g. at dinner, he's telling everyone that he thinks its weird that germans wear slippers so much, "American's don't wear slippers," he tells everyone. i said, "well, i think thats because you're from the south. i never go anywhere without slippers." and then he realized he generalizes all americans to be exactly like him from the south. yet, he doesn't change... he says things like this all the time. he's nice enough, but very naive.

we had proper german food and i took some pictures. it wasn't bad, but not spicy enough for me.

yes, that is fish above - i ordered hering. the red things are beats and the other thing was some sort of pickled salad. i only ate the fish. apparently they pickle everything in germany.

here is a picture of our group: (sexy smoker, rasetto, me, luisa, south carolina, bagaria, mr. rasetto, and granola girl)
we had a good time and talked about politics, the differences between us all, etc. we weren't out late since half of the group had to catch trains. the three spanish-speakers (bagaria, sexy smoker, and granola girl) went to some club after dinner, but i had to get home to pack for my SIX AM train to poland...