Learned the basics of playing the oriental game of Go, and played some games at Gokgs, where I was promptly trampled. Knowing the rules does not equal knowing strategy!

Unfortunately, wasn't able to find a bar that was showing the Tour de France. I was already behind schedule when I asked the staff of the cafe I was in.

Ken had me eat "Something Round" for dinner. I went for the obvious and had Anchovy pizza on the corner.

My first left turn

This alley looked promising, but found no newspapers and got some strange looks from workers in the back.

So on to the next left

Found some free magazines outside of an organic grocery store

And counted the number of grammatical articles (the, an, a, etc.., but in german: die, der, das, den, etc) per the instructions.
Vowels in Headline (Value A): 7
Articles in headline story (Value B): 74

Then found a nice cafe where people were reading. This guy seemed pretty absorbed in his paper

...so I instead talked to the barista, who was reading this book when I walked in:

I was lucky to remember the German word "Schnitzeljagd" (Fillet-of-meat-hunt), which roughly corresponds to an English "Scavenger Hunt". Once I explained that I was playing a game, showed her Ben's instructions, she stopped thinking I was insane and thought it sounded like a lot of fun.

For those of you who enjoy hearing bad German, here is an audio recording of that conversation.

Book: Das Tibetische Buch vom Leben und Sterben,
(The Tibettan Book of Life and Death, by Segyal Rinpoche)

Number of pages in book: 511
Random page chosen by accomplice: 268

Word 74 on the page 268
"alle". Not so interesting, so we go with the next word: "Daseinsbereiche". : Turned out that this landed us straight in the middle of a Buddhist poem, and "Dasiensberieche" is a very obscure word that doesn't show up in any dictionaries I could find. My accomplice described it as "different ways of being".

Full text of the poem in question:

Und bis sie nicht vom Schmerz geschieden sind,
möge ich der Lebensquell
für alle Daseinsbereiche der verschiedenen Wesen sein,
die bis zum Ende des Universums reichen

Google gives this translation:

And not until they are divorced from the pain,
I let the source of life
for all the different realms of nature,
until the end of the universe

My next instruction was to do a local Google search for the word. This was a prettty random collection of results! The first result was a police station. But [Value A] "number of vowels in headline" was 7. The 7th result was Ver.di.

"Its approximately 2.3 million members make ver.di one of the largest independent, individual trade union in the world. As a multi-service trade union we look after people employed in over 1.000 different trades and professions, making us fit for the challenges of the 21st century.

Truly random!

I hopped on the train to get their, and followed Google's instructions to a T, but...alas!...could not find the place! Instead, I found a cute little park, and in the middle of this park, a small island that is home to a single black bear.

I failed to get a photo before the bear was taken inside for feeding time, but here is his island:

(When I got home, a little further sleuthing revealed that Google had me going to the completely wrong place. Ah well.)

By this point I was already running behind schedule, so ducked into the first shop I could fine to buy some postcards. Per Ken's instructions, I sat down in the nearest Café and wrote out postcards to everyone who gave me their address last week. Hope you get them soon.

And the last event of the day was a sneaky one by Laura. It's the SimStan equivalent of asking the magic Genie for 10 more wishes! She instructed me to plan a trip to happen *after* the SimStan trial week. Well, I looked into flight prices and rideshares, and emailed some friends about making a trip to Basel. We'll see!

Tuesday

Tuesday I woke up feeling a little sick, so slept in and started late with Rob's instructions to "write about the last few days." I worked for an hour downloading and uploading photos and composing the first parts of this entry but, again, ran out of time. "Thinking about Birthday presents" happened while I showered.

I was ready to head out the door when my neighbors and flatmate announced that they were cooking dinner that I *had* to join them for. I must admit, days of running around the city by myself left me hungry for conversation. And days of eating on the run had left me simply hungry. The meal turned out to be a bigger affair than I expected, of fresh lamb cooked wiht basil and cream sauce.

So I had a very late start off to the Altes Museum to see Nefertiti. Further compounded by me making a wrong subway transfer along the way. Nevertheless, here is me with the amazing Nefertiti:

And here, I must admit that Josh's event of "Be A Street Musician" had me nervous when I saw it that morning. I don't have a guitar and didn't know where to get one in time. Would I have done it if I had a guitar with me? I hope I would have. Josh: consider this a rain check for me to be a proper street musician later this summer.

So as I left the Altes Museum about 6pm, I sat down on worked on Roberts event of "Write a Letter to yourself 10 years from now." This was a deeply moving experience, more than I expected. Robert gave me only half an hours, but I got sucked into it and wrote 4 pages over the course of an hour or more with the setting sun falling on the Dome Cathedral behind me. To add to the surreal effect, a Hula-dancing class started behind me in the grass, filling the air with German-accented Hawaiian chants and swaying yellow skirts.

Phew! And so ended the first test run of SimStan.

And as you've certainly noticed, I wasn't very good about giving feedback on events as the days were passing. :(

I'll analyze this, and other lessons learned, in another post shortly.