finishing

Have I mentioned that my wisdom teeth have been slowly surfacing this entire time? Immediately after my family left me in Vienna I noticed it. It usually doesn't hurt, but it's kind of weird to have two more teeth in the right-back of my mouth than there were two months ago. A souvenir from Europe? Okay.

Yesterday I printed my books! I barely finished before the museum closed, and the prints are definitely far from perfect, but it's fine because I think it will make it more obvious that I did the WHOLE THING BY HAND. I'm pretty proud that I managed to get the whole thing done, especially only being able to communicate in German with the staff. I'm going to add illuminations and the binding later, but all the text stuff is finished. yaaaay

 Just putting the letters into the blocks ("textcolumnen") took about 8 hours, and I only have 11 pages with a few lines of text on them each. It really puts printing stuff like bibles into perspective, which was the point of this whole trip!!!

soooo many hours standing in front of this thing... Interestingly, I ran out of Ys and As in my chosen typeface (Garamond 10) since the ratios of letters in German and English are different. Where the letters were located in the shelf was also sometimes counter-intuitive.

And all the spacing characters. After you make a line of text you have to fill in the extra space as tight as you can by finding the right size (width and length)! Sometimes fun, sometimes terrible.

The German word for "to print" (Drucken) extremely similar as "to push" (Drücken), and the word for letters (Buchstaben) is Buch (book) + Stab (rod or bar), maybe like the movable-type characters???


ANyway. Leipzig is nice, but I haven't gotten the chance to see a lot of it because I've been at the museum from 9:30 - 5:00 for the last three days. Today is my last day here AND IN EUROPE and I am going to go see a few things, buy a few things, and hopefully go out later tonight. My hostel is adjacent to a road with a tram line, so starting at 6:30 AM they come THUNDERING down the road and wake everyone up. It's so loud it feels like they are driving through my room! On another side, it's also adjacent to a head shop.

Last night I went out for a beer with three of my roommates -- three girls from France, Germany, and Spain, respectively. We talked for a really long time about language, especially German. An Important Thing that I've learned in these last three weeks is how crazy different German dialects are from each other, which is why I couldn't understand anything people were saying in Hamburg (since they speak Hochdeutsch, the "proper German", such as British is supposedly the "proper" English). The difference in accents is significantly more than, say, an American to Scottish. So when you only know a bit of the language and it's suddenly extremely different it's almost impossible to follow. I've finally gotten used to the change, and because I'm much more south the dialect is more similar to Wien-Deutsch. Germany is smaller than California, so in comparison, it's like someone from LA barely being able to understand someone from San Francisco. Also, since my German is really basic, I actually can't tell the difference in accents except that I can't understand them.  From another perspective, obviously I can immediately tell which English speakers are American because of the accent, but people who aren't fluent have no idea (a lot assume Americans are actually Australian for some reason). Language is definitely something I've taken for granted up until now, and I wonder how it'll be to be back in America (TOMORROW???) now that I think about verbal communication so differently.

I could go on and on about how these last two months have Changed Me, but maybe later, since my last European day is slipping away and the internet is not.