Marija

I should have posted before, but I guess I needed some time to let last week’s events sink in. I only got to see Marija for one day, which pisses me off, but at the same time I’m glad I had that day with her. I only have one good picture of Marija ’cause my camera started acting really weird and then ran out of batteries.

She’s actually looking at her camera in the picture (she hasn’t sent me the ones she took yet). That scary looking dude sitting next to her is her dad. He has quite the kung fu grip in his handshake. Very intimidating man. It also didn’t help that he spoke no english, or any other language I know for that matter.

Since Marija’s sister, Antonija, was there too I would frequently switch to italian when speaking to Marija. At one point the conversation went something like this:

Me: Aspetta. Tuo padre sapeva chi ero io prima di oggi?

Marija: Si. Anche la mia mamma sa chi sei.

Me: Ohhhh, va bene…

You guys can figure out what the above means on your own.

We didn’t do anything out of the ordinary during the little time we hung out. We just walked around Central Park and then Midtown. They kept asking me where stuff was, stuff I didn’t actually know the location of. Always frustrating…

I left them at Penn Station at the end of the day. She said she might make a trip to Los Angeles to see some cousins. A layover in New York perhaps? I don’t know yet. Let’s hope so.

Hanging around New York

A little update on the kamikaze. After no sleep on Saturday and a failed attempt at sleeping on the flight to New York yesterday, I ended up shutting down while Katalina went to work. She was nice enough to let me sleep on her bed, if only after she went to the wrong airport to pick me up (I got in through JFK, she went to Laguardia).

After she got out of work we went to hang out with David, a friend of hers, and smoke from his hookah:

David filled up the hookah with pomegranate flavored tobacco. It went down very smooth. I highly recommend it.

Here David and Katalina are trying to decide what movie we’re going to watch from his extensive DVD collection. We ended up watching a really weird dark comedy in which one of the characters ends up being a pedophile and a rapist. The scenes with his son are prety funny, in a disgusting sense that is.

Today I ended up wandering around Brighton Beach scouting for some vodka. I found this liquor store called L’Chaim (which apparently means “to life” in Hebrew) around Brighton Beach Avenue. They had a huge selection of vodka. I’ll have to visit this place again in the near future.

Anyways, tomorrow I’m going to see Marija. Good night everyone.

Drink and be merry

Last night was a very weird but interesting night. We were originally going to the Loreley, but they were carding so that was out of the question. We ended up buying some wine and beer (bad combination…) and heading to Amir’s apartment.

Here’s Chad (another grad student in the german department) imparting his wisdom:

Some listen attently.

Amir lounges around after I don’t know how many cigarettes.

And Beth and I play at who can take a picture faster.

The highlight of the night was, amazingly, a discussion about circumcision. Said discussion was followed by several weird and hillarious events I will not mention here in order to protect the people involved