Virtually Home

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...

Last night we went out with our friends Carley and Danielle to celebrate the end of their finals week. It was still sort of surreal to me, maybe because I really only had about two weeks of actual work during the whole semester, and most of that was me procrastinating my paper rather than just getting it done. Still, it was a good celebratory outing. Vianney and Benjamin ended up meeting up with us. Somewhere near the park at Gambetta at around midnight we encountered the only group of violent people I've yet run across in France, who, after asking us if we had any cigarettes, for some reason I couldn't understand, hit Alex and then pushed Benjamin over twice before disappearing into the night. Everyone was okay, if a little confused. We hurried home. This morning was its own trial. I had alerted our landlady to the possibility that Something Was Very Wrong with our kitchen plumbing. Every couple of hours there's this tremendous gurgling and water sort of shoots out of...