nostalgia

i don't act like coming to germany was hard or easy and instead avoid talking about it altogether.

i've been in germany for almost three years (as of may 13, 2008) and it's hard to remember a lot.

i remember that i said goodbye to my dad at home. he couldn't go with us to the airport because he had to work. i said goodbye to my mom, aunt and uncle at the cleveland airport. i took my next steps alone (shoed in flats to get through security easier) and thrust my passport and boarding passes at the next person who looked interested, who in this case was TSA.

the TSA guy made a mark on my boarding pass with a red magic marker.
"next." he said blandly. i flounced on. it was an adventure! "going through security" always sounded like such a glamourous thing only rich people do.

i took my laptop out of my chrome bag and set it inside a plastic bin. wow! this is incredible! i thought. i walked through the metal detector without incident and was left to hobble to some benches to organize my things. i couldn't see anyone anymore, not one family member, so i walked on and to my gate. it was only moderately crowded with people and i could distinguish the germans by their red passports. i listened to a couple people speaking german and realized how much i didn't know. unless of course i just hadn't learned those particular words. which was fine. right? right?

i followed lines for the next 24 hours. a line onto the plane, a line to my seat, a line off the plane in detroit, a line to the next gate, a line into the next plane, a line to my seat, which was between an old german guy who would proceed to drink beer after beer and fall asleep snoring loudly, and a girl who wouldn't stop talking.

"oh my god. europe. well like, you know, after we get out of frankfurt."
"germany's in europe too," her boyfriend-or-boy-next-to-her pointed out.
"well yeah i know that. but you don't think germany when you hear europe."
"you don't?" her boyfriend asked and i wondered.
"you think italy. spain. greece. france. amsterdam."
"that's a city, not a country."
"but it's in europe, right?"

so i wasn't going to real europe, at least not the kind of europe that people automatically think of. perhaps i was going to some kind of fake europe that doesn't really exist. perhaps the reason i never did well in german was because it's a fake language from a fake country and everyone just likes fooling gullible americans.

"WHAT MAKES GERMANY SO TERRIBLE?!" i wanted to scream to the girl next to me. instead, i listened to architecture in helsinki on my ipod and avoided liquids to avoid going to the bathroom on the plane. i ate the airplane meal that doesn't make you any less hungry and only serves to strengthen your skills in unwrapping a tiny bread roll while between other people's elbows. i watched everyone else sleep and envied everyone for being able to do so.

when we landed in frankfurt, i was a dehydrated, exhausted mess. the man who'd drank beer and promptly passed out looked rejuvenated and i made my first cultural note: beer+beer+beer+beer+snoring=good health.

i went to the passport check. i didn't know what was going to happen. i hefted my chrome bag on my shoulder and watched pale, angular passport controllers expertly slide passports to themselves and stamp. i looked at my passport. it seemed pretty stampable. agreeably stampable. who wouldn't want to stamp this passport?

"die nächste, bitte," one man said, gesturing. i stepped forward and handed my passport to him. he turned to the guy next to him and said something, the other man laughed, he laughed, ho ho ho, stamp. i took my passport back and stood there. he stared at me, his smile fading.

"danke. schön."

he nodded. "bitte." he turned his face to the line. "die nächste, bitte."

cultural note #2: it's easy to make friends.

i walked to the next gate and waited. i contemplated buying a water but ended up waiting, waiting, until the next flight

stormy weather, just can't get my poor self together

i'm probably the only person around who isn't impressed by sunny weather.

"loooook at all this sun!" bastian says, prancing around on his 2 meter-long legs and throwing open the curtains.

"uh huh," i say, pulling the covers over my head.

"isn't it great? and we can ride our bikes and sit in the park and go for walks and everything!"

"yeah," i say, "listen. i'm hungry."

perhaps ohio's 90% humidity spoils my penchant for summer. in germany when it's sunny, everyone closes their eyes and throws their faces into the sun. in ohio, people sigh and turn on the fan. in germany, no sidewalk goes uncrowded, no park is un-sat-in, everyone breaks out t-shirts and sit in the sun and (my personal favorite) men roll their pants up into instant capri pants.

i have a pretty careless relationship with the sun. i don't burn so i don't hate it but i get weird tan lines after a couple minutes so i don't love it. it makes me uncomfortable by forcing me to wear less clothing. i'm a cardigan-and-tights kind of person. the sun turns me into a "go on without me" kind of person who will spend inordinate amounts of time on the internet with a 2 liter bottle of water next to me.

i'm always amazed by the level of amazement the germans have for the sun. i just think, well it happens every year, so yeah...

and of course, in party-spoiler fashion, i like fall and rain and storms and hiking-plans-ruining weather like that.

all you need

(one of the first times i ever told him)
me: i love you.
Bastian: oh.

source

we're so busy that even though we work within 100 m of each other most of the time, we barely spend quality time together. the mister is writing his master's thesis (one of these days i WILL understand what he's doing, but as far as i can tell, it's something about algorithms and 13 dimensions...) and i'm teaching in a million different places and studying my master's. yesterday for example we cleared time in our calendars to go to the einwohnermeldeamt. nothing gets the old blood pumping like registering your new address with the city.

tomorrow (or in 34 minutes if we're going by german time) is 13 months together and roughly five months of being engaged. i wonder when we'll get fat and domestic.

reign of rain

daylight

today my alarm went off at 5:48 and interrupted a panicky dream. i've been having a lot of panicky dreams lately. bastian always says something terribly logical like the time i told him about a dream where this car i was driving bent in half because the back wheel got caught on a pothole and he said, "see, that's the point i'd realize it was a dream." THAT'S what i have to deal with, honestly.

the strange thing about teaching in the first period is you get done and it's 9:00a and god, you can get a lot of things done.

right now our building's being painted so we have scaffolding all around and our windows are covered with green plastic so everything has a green tinge to it. i imagine it's not terribly flattering, but luckily for now (i guess) we're only home at night.

i really want to take a vacation somewhere. what great timing, the second week of the semester and i'm stir-crazy. but then of course i see things like this:

source

and i want to visit the ocean. i've never been a big ocean person mostly because it terrifies me, but i love watching documentaries of the ocean and dear god, if i miss shark week this year while in the US i'm going to freak out. 

one of my students said how student life is different from work life because you don't wake up regularly. today i had to get up at 6, but tomorrow i don't have to be at campus until 11:10. wth is that? of course i'm going to wake up by 7 anyhow, but you really notice in your mid-twenties that you can't mess around with sleep patterns anymore. 

speaking of which, i'm already mentally referring to myself as a 26 year old. it's not true! i still have a month of 25 left! ok i promised not to overtly mention my white-people's problems. and i still get told on a very regular basis how young and prepubescent i look. 

good old-fashioned nightmare

B surprises me all the time by the different ways we become a little family more and more. it's really adorable and i don't recommend hanging out with us unless you're really secure in your happiness.

i really want an airedale terrier mix. i've always wanted a wiry-haired dog that looks like a mess, pretty much since i saw "the lady and the tramp" when i was about idk four. i also admire a dog with a mustache and i told Bastian when we first met that i wanted a dog that looked like his name was scruffles, but wasn't.

our friend christian said we had to name our dog madness and he would name his dog sparta so we could say "this is madness!" and "this is sparta!"

sigh. teaching at 7:30 tomorrow.

oh and,

i'm not one for regret, really i'm not, but i can't believe i really shaved the side of my head. bastian's mom asked for some pictures from the summer, and as i looked through iphoto, damn.

who did i think i was? some dude off lookbook.nu?

i don't regret it or anything and in some strange ways i'm glad i did it but damn?

HUGE SIGH IN CAPS LOCK

i don't know where anything is.

i wonder how long it will take until we are done unpacking boxes.

so far all we're doing is digging around in boxes, taking out things and leaving them on the floor in case we need them later, until we find what we're actually looking for.

that is exactly how i found:
my black overknee socks
a map of the university
our bedclothes
the wind-up bird chronicles by murakami, which i started rereading before the move
spoons

now we have nearly 55 sq. m of space and before we were living in one room with all our belongings inside. it's strange having a wall between us sometimes. there's scaffolding around our whole apartment windows because they're replacing or fixing up or doing something with the facade, so men can very well look through our gossamer curtains and quite possibly find us watching ''the big bang theory'' or something like that.

thanks, stomach

didn't go to work because of last minute stomach issues. however.

i don't even have time to be sick because.

we're moving. 

crap.