Business Plan

I have a new business plan.

It involves free lunch.

This weekend I hosted my first couch surfer. He is from Italy. His name is Alfredo. He is from around Venice, and is a biology teacher.

On Friday night, I was appalled to come home to discover that my roommate had started to prepare our standard fare of cheap noodles for our Italian guest. I was planning on taking him to get some more traditional Berlin currywurst for dinner because we didn't have any decent food at out house besides cheap noodles, cheap sauce, and frozen veggies (which we eat for our moms).

Unfortunately, the thought off feeding an Italian 30-cent pasta wasn't embarrassing for Jordan, and I came home to find him boiling 30 cent noodles to go with the fresh parmasan cheese brought from Italy by Alfredo.

Whatever.

"Do you think the noodles are done?" I asked Alfredo.

"The what?"

"The noodles" I said, pointing to the noodles.

"Oooh. In Italy, we call them 'penne'"

The next morning when I was walking to church with Jordan. He told me he had had almost the same conversation with Alfredo. "We call that 'penne'"

I wondered whether he was trying to teach us the name of the specific type of noodle (which was printed on the bag), or whether they really don't have the word for noodle or pasta in Italian.

Anyway, we ate penne that night while Alfredo shared his passion for baroque opera with us via youtube.


I agreed to take Alfredo to Potsdam to see the Sans Souci palace on Tuesday, when I didn't have class. So I dragged myself out of bed to meet him at the Suedkreuz train station at 10. We then took the train towards Potsdam. On the way down I caught some English conversation from some passengers. Clutching their map and Germany guide book, they commented on the fact that the houses were smaller as we drove further and further out of Berlin. When they also got out of the train at Potsdam, I knew they were heading to Sans Suci, too.

"Where are you guys from?"

"Oh! You speak English! We're from Maine."

I asked if the older man and woman were heading to San Souci. I told them we were also heading there, and asked if they wanted to come with us. They did.

On the way, I impressed them with what I thought was a very deep knowledge of Maine.

"When I think of Maine, I think of 'Blueberries for Sal' and another book about a child who looses her tooth while looking for clams".

Evidently they get that a lot.

Linda went on to explain that she came from a very small city. The last night, they had gone to a movie screening as part of the Berlinale film festival. She was impressed at how many people fit in the theater, and found out the next day that the theater could hold 2000 people. That was more people than all the people in her little town in Maine. Although she felt safe about leaving her keys in her car and her house unlocked, she said that her little town had a high unemployment rate, and some alcohol and drug problems. She noted that the small town was known for blueberries and intricate balsam Christmas wreathes. Most of the workers in her town were employed in businesses dealing with one of those exports. She made and sold pies.

The man, whose name I forgot, worked as a scientist. I asked if he worked at the Jackson labs. Surprised, he told me that he did. I told him I had worked on a project where we had used some Jackson lab mice. I didn't tell him that we had problems with the experiment because they weren't completely inbred.

We wandered through the Sans Souci park for a while, and I showed them some of my favorite sights, which they probably would have missed if I hadn't been there.



We all had to be back in Berlin at 4, so I showed them the inner city and main cathedral, the Nikolai church, rounding off the tour in a cafe next to the medieval-looking Nauener Tor in the middle of the city. At the cafe, I got a got lemon drink called "hot lemon" and some cake. The apple cake was also super. I think they were all pleased.

At the end of the lunch, I was pleased to observe a heated debate over who would buy me lunch.

In the end, my couch surfer won, but hey, free lunch for 3 hours of walking around in the cold. Not bad.

So, this summer, I'm going to get free lunch a lot. I'll take Jordan down on the train to Potsdam, looking for tourists speaking English. When I hear them I'll be like "Where are you from?". Then I'll impress them with random facts about their state, after which I will show them around Potsdam, ending at a lunch place. Then, with puppydog eyes and a tearjerking starving student story, I'll coerce them into paying for my lunch. Great plan huh?