Aggravation and Unaggravation

A couple new photos in the Germans using English album.  Are you going?  Get going!  Come on, click the link!  Go!

-------

So I just got an email from French department informing me that I was not admitted to the French course I signed up for because of my score on the placement test.  This is pretty okay, because I have also received an e-mail from the Russian Dept. informing me that, if I can't read the course description, I probably shouldn't be in the course.  I will therefore be retaking third-semestre Russian, which is pretty okay, because I don't recall learning much of anything when I took third-semestre Russian.

Speaking of classes where I didn't learn much of anything, I am considering re-taking Introduction to Semantics.  I really would like to have some understanding of semantics, and I don't think that, in my current state of knowledge, it would be at all wise to enroll in any more-advanced semantics course.

-------

On Monday, which was a big holiday here, some of us international types decided to go to the beach.  We elected to take the train to Berlin Wannsee, which is pretty famous.  According to Wikipedia:

Wannsee lake is well-known as the number-one bathing and recreation spot for western Berlin, especially from a 1951 Schlager hit by teen idol Cornelia Froboess. The Strandbad Wannsee, an open-air lido with one of the longest inland beaches in Europe and a popular nudist area, was built in 1920-1930 after a concept by architect Richard Ermisch. Situated on the eastern shore of the lake it is officially part of the Nikolassee locality.

It turns out that the Strandbad is something you have to pay for (and, I'm almost certain, no longer a popular nudist area), so we didn't visit it.  Instead, we lay on the grass by the train station and read things.  Fun.  Here we are, about to leave because it was boring.

-------

I had two very important things to do to-day: get my rent-paying worked out and correct my address at the bank.  The bank is an especially annoying case, as I quite specially pointed out that my address had the wrong PLZ (Zip code) on the forms, and the person who opened my account quite specially went and changed it, and had me sign a thing.  Somehow, most (but not all) of my mail still manages to go to the wrong PLZ, meaning that, although I have my telephone banking PIN and my online banking TAN-codes (don't ask), I have neither received my online banking PIN nor my debit card PIN.  So I made a trip into the city.  It turns out that the dorm people are not in on Tuesdays, and that the bank closes at 2:30 on Tuesdays.

-------

German words of the day:  Shrimps: Germans inevitably bring some Shrimps to their Grillpartys.  It always makes me want to laugh.

Zweieiig: "fraternal," in the sense of "fraternal twins."  Literally "two-egg-ish."  This word is a perfectly normal German compound that just happens to produce a train wreck of vowels.