Virtually Home

Grace decided to come visit me on her spring break. And so she arrived, after having missed her international connection in Atlanta due to weather and about five hours late, for a pretty calm evening. We walked around the city a little. We ate delicious crêpes (galettes, really) at a place very near my house. We drank cider. And then we slept until she no longer felt tired. Her resiliency to jetlag, on a first time abroad, was to be commended. That afternoon, we had a lunch of thoroughly French cheeses (some of which were growing Penicillium) and bread, and Vianney met us, complete with rollerblades, at my place. He brought a milk bottle full of canelé dough, which was delicious and which inspired us to get some canelés while we were in Bordeaux. We climbed the 231 stairs of the Tour de Pey-Berland, which is associated with the cathedral right next to my apartment. The view was spectacular, though there was some considerable haze obscuring the horizon line. We walked to Place des Q...

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...