Virtually Home

Last Christmas season, I had undertaken a fabulous holiday journey that started at my friend Tom's house in Poole, Dorset, England. After a horrendous number of setbacks that made me believe I would never make it to Tom's, he picked me up at the train station. We had some great times, in a house full of kittens and new friends. We drank a lot of cider, and walked to the grocery store in the freezing rain singing Tilly & the Wall at the top of our lungs. A year ago today, I left Tom's house to meet Rachel in Geneva, Switzerland, where everything was cold, beautiful, and expensive. We traveled to Lauterbrunnen and Zurich, too, and encountered such difficulties as coin-operated showers and respiratory illness. We met up with Hunter in Paris and spent several days in a shuffle of hostels and holiday crowds. We saw an anniversary light show at the Eiffel Tower and met an excellent Danish couple under the Arc de Triomphe at midnight. Hunter and I went on to Berlin and c...

I'm not sure exactly when this side-adventure took place, but at some point we took the U-Bahn out to the Olympic stadium that had been built for the 1936 summer games.  You know, the games where Jess Owens claims Hitler "didn't snub him". It was interesting to see, and imagine all the things that were starting to happen in Germany at the time -- and what all the droves of tourists around for the Games might have felt about it. There wasn't really anywhere to go in, but I was interested to see the grounds. Some of them had been knocked down and other things built over them, so that was kind of sad. But then, there were gold mines like this attractive, modern bathroom structure! This was one of the several moments during the trip I thought to myself "What the hell, Germany?" I mean, I thought Germans were all about tact. Or something. I guess that brings us to the part of the program where we return to a chronological account of matters. The mornin...

Berlin was cool. And by that I mostly mean cold. Freezing cold. It was -5 Celsius the first few days we were there (and all you Americans change windows to convert to Fahrenheit), and the ground was covered in snow. The first thing that happened on arrival was that the crew played Monsters of Folk's "Dear God" on the airplane's speakers. I was amused. The shuttle from the airplane to the terminal had a set of crazy doors that opened and closed and opened and closed for about a minute and a half, often seeming to spasm, or to close almost entirely and, at the last second, spring open again. I compared the sight to some kind of crab mating dance, to Hunter's vast amusement. I wish we'd gotten it, and the reactions of the people around us, on tape. We managed to get the right bus from the airport to our hostel, and left our stuff in the luggage room while we went wandering around the city in search of something to eat. We found nothing that looked remote...

Today, France decided to let me catch a break. I was told Auchan might come sometime today. My phone rang at 10 a.m., and I, having been awake until five, struggled to be awake enough to understand French through the phone. For some reason it's a lot harder than in person. The guy on the other end said he'd be at my house somewhere between right that instant and 11, so I scrambled to get dressed and go get cash from the ATM to pay him with. When he arrived, he started tinkering with the washing machine and asked me if I still had the estimate. Awkward, because we never got the estimate and no, I didn't even have the bill that the first guy left me when he came to make the estimate. There was a sinking feeling in my stomach when I realized he might decide not to do the work, lacking that damned signature on the form. To my surprise, he kept working. He called the company to get the price of the part, installed it, and was in and out in fifteen minutes -- the total cost...