Gruß Gott

Let me walk backwards through time for this one.

I just finished playing football - the European meaning of the word. Every time I play it is more and more apparent that I'm terrible. But will I let that stop me? I think not!

I went to the doctor today to get prescriptions. I believe it might me the longest I've ever waited for a doctor. It wasn't so bad, though, because I brought my book, Rant, with me and I finished it. The doctor, Wolfgang Molnár, was pretty cool. He recommended to go to a club called Flex which is the club Harry and I couldn't find when I was almost pickpocketed. I've heard good things about the place, though, and I might go there at some point. Afterwards, I went to the British Bookshop and bought The Third Man. It's by Graham Greene and set in Vienna so it seems appropriate to read. As soon as I get back, I plan on seeing the movie since the book was meant as a sketch of the movie. By the way, I highly recommend Rant. Palahniuk is brilliant.

I had the International Development and World Monetary System class today. This is the one with the overhead tossing prof. He seemed a little calmer today, but he did give us some work to do. During his lecture, he was speaking about how in the truncated Keynesian model the marginal propensity to consume must be strictly between 0 and 1. I can see why this must be mathematically true in the model but in the model I've learned, we assumed the MPC to be 1, for simplicity. Not having a multiplier makes life incredibly more simple. He said that it couldn't be 1 because obviously people save money. If they didn't, the system would be indeterminite (which, working with that model, makes sense). But assuming the MPC to be 1 doesn't mean that there's no saving, it just means that if your income rises (permanently), then you will increase your consumption by the amount your income rises. That doesn't mean you haven't set an amount you save out of your income - it's just not a percentage of your income. So a MPC of 1 isn't necessarily a bad thing. It might not be great, but it's not bad. He also said that Zimbabwe's problem was that their MPC is greater than 1, causing aggregate demand to be too low (or something like that, I'm not too sure with this model). I thought it was just that Zimbabwe printing money, a lot of money. He showed us some graph called the "Keynesian Cross" which he assumed we all knew. The only time I've heard Keynes' name in a class was when my professor was making fun of the theory. That and there was something to do with animal spirits. I guess the economy is being run by a bunch of drunken teens. The nice thing was, the guys I know in there were also baffled by this Keynesian Cross thing.

And now to yesterday.

There's this jazz club called Tunnel I went to with Sam. The first band was really mellow, but they weren't bad. They were good background music. We had a pizza and a couple beers while discussing travel plans. Sam was wanting to go to Bucharest the last weekend in March. Unfortunately, I can't go because the flight we'd take would cause me to miss the last section of one of my courses. That's probably a final of some sort and I can't risk missing that. The last two bands were more fusiony. They're were really rockin' up there. It was a lot of fun to listen to - almost like listening to Mike Stern in 55 Bar, but Stern is better by a number of orders of magnitude.

I went for a run with Slobodan before I left for Tunnel. We went to a park and jogged around the 19th district. The 19th district is a very rich neighborhood. If you have money, you live in the 1st or the 19th. I'd prefer the 19th because the houses are much larger and they have yards. It's not that far from the first, either, so you don't lose the incentive to go out to concerts and whatnot. We talked about WWI. About how Austria started it by attacking Serbia. Slobodan told me the Austrians probably paid the anarchist to kill Franz Ferdinand just for an excuse to go to war. Apparently, the Austrians just took Bosnia and wanted Serbia as well. Slobodan also told me that Belgrade, his hometown, has been completely destroyed 45 times and rebuilt everytime. Belgrade is located where the Danube and Sava meet - an important place for trade - so I can understand why they rebuild. Forty five times destroyed is the most of any European city.

My first German class of the regular semester was Monday. During class, there was an exercise where one person would have to go to the front of the room, read and memorize a phrase or two of a paragraph in German, and go repeat what they memorized to their partner. The partner would then write the sentence down. My partner, Mustafa, and I did pretty well. The teacher, Ursula, gave us an assignment to write a short paragraph about ourself in German. Once I finish mine, I'm posting it. I know about half of the class, too, from the previous German course, which is nice. I know at least two people in all of my classes so far due to that German course.

By the way, Gruß Gott is hello in Austria and only in Austria. Germans just say Guten Tag, which makes more sense to me. When you walk into a store and go to the kassa, the cashier greats you with Gruß Gott. They say it so fast, though. Until today (which means Monday), I thought they were saying biscuit.

I think this is long enough for one night. 'Tchuss!