Hello

Hi,

I have to apologise first of all for getting a little behind with this. Second, I'd like to thank you all for the birthday wishes. It was a little weird with the time difference, I wasn't sure whether I should start celebrating midday the day before or what. Birthdays are a big deal here, with solemn handshakes and heartfelt "happy birthday"s. It's also really (REALLY) bad luck/rude to wish someone happy birthday before it's actually the day. I made a banana cake with lemon icing to take to work, and it got polished off pretty quick, and had nachos for dinner.

Not too much else to report for the last couple of weeks, been working pretty hard, but still managing to fit in a bit more exploring of potsdam - here are some pictures of Ruinenberg, a water reservoir some king built in the 1700s. It's designed to look like ancient Roman ruins, but it isn't actually that old. I found it a little ironic that they are now restoring some of the structures, after deliberately making them look old in the first place.

My German's still getting better, still pretty slow though. I'm finding that I keep learning things about English in the German lessons. For example, Kunst is art in German, kunstlich is artificial - I'd never noticed that the root word of artificial was art until I learnt the German. Germans always apologise to me about how hard German must be to learn because of all the different genders and endings and things, but at least it's reasonably logical, and even though I'm sure I get the gender right less than 33% of the time, it's still understandable.

Happy Waitangi day for Friday, I'm a little jealous of the "perfect bbq weather" the Herald predicted for the weekend, so I hope you made the most of it!

Adam