St Nicholas

Today is St Nicholas's day, and in Germany they celebrate it by making children clean their shoes the night before and the next morning there are supposed to be presents inside. Apparently it used to just be nuts or chocolate or oranges but these days, of course, you're more likely to find cds or an mp3 player.

And so, to make a little St Nicholas happiness, one of the more active members of couchsurfing here in Dresden held a little 'spread the love' event, making little parcels of lollies and chocolate and fruit and giving them to nurses and firemen and even to people who I assume must be social workers, working at an amazing playground and petting zoo and counselling place in the Neustadt called Panama. It was great, and really fun to do, even though most of the time I didn't understand what was going on because German really isn't what I know.

So, learned things - couchsurfing with actual strangers rather than sort-of-kind-of ones is a good way to meet people and have fun, German would be an awesome language to speak, it's legal to graffitti in the Neustadt and people have become really creative in doing so, I would love to have had a Panama near me when I was growing up.