I’ve been way un-good about telling people about it, but on Friday I’m flying with meine Freundin to Berlin, then we’re riding with her family to Dresden for Christmas! I’m really excited about it, it should be really interesting; I’ve been learning German for the last 5 months or so on-and-off and I’m getting fairly decent at simple things, considering I’ve taken exactly zero classes and learned from MP3s and books (and my girlfriend of course!) We’re making two trips as far as I know, one to Munich to visit her sister whom I met earlier this year when she came to Columbus, and one cross-country road trip with her mom and step-dad to Colmar in Alsace, France. We were also considering a trip to Toulouse but it was a bit too much to do in three weeks (plus, it ends up being somewhat costly and travel’y, you have to do Dresden->Berlin->Paris->Toulouse the cheapest way and it’s annoying). I also plan to get some programming done that I’ve been working on lately, namely my port of Filelight as well as finishing up the language detection patch to Beagle I’ve been writing, which should eventually make Beagle much smarter at dealing with documents written in other languages.

I’ll be there from December 9th to late January 2nd, so I may be slow to respond to things like Email and what; I will have a cell phone there though, as well as a headset that I can use with Skype, and for some reason incoming calls to German cell phones are free for me so people can call me with Skype for like $0.10/min or something. It’s a +5 hour time difference though, so keep that in mind (ie. if it’s 10PM here, it’s (22+5) Mod 24 == 3:00 AM).

Update: Evidently it’s a 6 hour difference and evidently Uli has told me a thousand times, mensch!