La Entropista

for Christmas. And I don’t want to. After living out of a suitcase for the better part of the year and feeling like a vagabond in between (sleeping on a borrowed futon never feels settled), this place is the closest thing to a home I’ve had in a long time. I miss my friends and I miss netflix, but that’s about all. When I get to my parent’s place I will suck the information out of every single newsweek and scientific american from the past year, try to see scattered friends, but then I will get restless and want to go home. In Cali there will be friends and grandmoms and cabins in the woods, but I will want to be where the snow blows sideways and a glass of water costs three dollars. Can’t I just import the girlfriends here?

Gendarmarkt “Christmas Magic,” Berlin

What do you want for Christmas? It has to be little and light and preferably inexpensive. I can get you something kitchy- a one shot flask with “Muenchen” on the side. An ornament from the Christmas market . Tea from Dallmayr. Uno. As for me, you can check my amazon wishlist, or buy me a ticket back here.

What for? Its dark and cold and the snow is falling horizontally. The trash has been taken out and the stores are closed (p.s. Europe closed on Sunday) and there’s hot chocolate waiting to be made. Somehow folding laundry seems way more exciting than writing about stuff like this.

My wrist still hurts from bowling and I’m strangely sore as if I am holding a golfball in my armpit (not a lump. I checked. Obsessively). I won one game against the germans and one australian, but only because they were getting progressively drunker: in the end, half-french Charly refusing to put down his beer/ wine/ jagermeister/ cigarette as he threw his ball down the lane, the hot-to-trot office manager sidling up to the newly-single director, the young australian sweetness following the other boys off into the darkness and not showing up for work the next day, Desyl, not understanding that after 2 am they turned the lanes off, decides to continue, the hall completely silent, only the thunk thunk thunk of her heavy unbalanced ball methodically rolling down the lane.

Post-shower and now off to Sangam for dinner. Only one block from the apartment, so I hope it’s good. Looking forward to spinach and lentils and all the other things I’m not supposed to eat. IUD cramps making me nauseous. Hearing horse-drawn carriages on the street below. Must blowdry hair.

We moved into the apartment the other day which was a total fucking nightmare as moving always is with all the books and papers and cables and laundry and food-that-might-spill-in-the-taxi and yet I’m so immediately glad we did it as it is so cozy and so warm and so ours that I don’t want to ever go back. Anywhere. Ever.

Highlights: fourth floor under-the-roof with high ceilings and skylight and eyeball window in the living room. Mechanical exterior metal blinds that retract with a push of a button. Blond hardwood  floors that are heated, which is lovely as it is very cold and windy here and the heated floors that warm the tootsies make it so much more bearable. A bed with one contiguous mattress, and not two little ones pushed together, which has been the standard in every hotel we’ve been in here. Very 50’s. Very funktional. Very good night, over there. Washing machine. InStyle magazines in German. A fruit bowl.  A cleaning lady. DISHWASHER! Elevator! Oven! Having breakfast together at a proper dinner table. Fuck, yeah.

Issues: no electric kettle, which has become indispensible in euroKitchen, washing machine typical german kind, ie, it takes about three hours to go through one cycle, and then you have to hang stuff all over the kitchen, no dryer. No espresso machine, which means I am bringing my $1.25 Ikea one back with me, along with my 50 cent foamer, cause I’m too cheap to buy one (although I’m not too cheap tp go to H&M on a regular basis). Stealing internet (DSL being installed for the return). NO CNN or BBC in english, which was awfully nice and extremely addictive. How can you not love watching “radical Korean farmers” protesting the WTO? The Korean farmers, they are radical. Fucking rivetting.

To christen the space: I took one of those pointy cabbages and chopped it up with some bio-karrotten (that taste so carroty that I’m going to start calling them crack carrots) and half an onion, and braised them in butter and browned little pieces of bacon and white wine, s&p, and something else I forget. Would have been better with just a little kummel, more german, I think, although I was already pretending I was making some sort of Alsacian (sp?) masterpiece without it. Also made very crispy garlicky potato pancakes with sort of greek-ish yogurt sauce (small container plain yogurt, shredded cucumber, two garlic cloves, minced, pepper, kraueter salt, fresh parmigiano, super lecker!). I restrained myself from eating all the latkes so that there were some for breakfast the next morning, with a fried egg on top.

Ah, kitchen.

Moved into apartment yesterday. More on that later. More pictures from Berlin, also. Yummy. Now getting ready to go Christmas party bowling with the office staff back in Munich. Take the skinheads bowling, take them bowling. Thank you.

a little bit retarded. 15 euro for taxi to have 15 euro dinner. Then, feeling guilty for the taxi:dinner ratio (as if spending 15 euro for 100 euro dinner is less guilt inducing), spent way too long missing trains at Nollendorfplatz. Got on the U3 to go one stop to catch the U2 when we could have gotten it at Nollendorf where we initally got on. Got off U3 to walk up stairs to get U2 direction Pankow then realizing that was the wrong direction and finding out as the train pulls away that the U2 Rueblen left from the same platform as the train we just got off.

You get the idea. More waiting, for like ten minutes. Which seems like an eternity when you are used to trains coming every two. Or used to taxis emerging from the fog at just the thought of a warm ride home. Where ever that might be.

Can you think of anything yummier than mushed up french fries covered in tahini sauce right now? Maybe time for kafee und kuchen?

He bought me a rose at dinner last night. It is sitting in a Pellegrino bottle on the breakfast table. It is enjoying a wonderful view of the Lietzensee.

is walking distance from the hotel

 

question: well, how was it?

  

answer: you know, mirrors, gold paint, portraits of dead people

after the tour, a walk in the backyard:

I wonder how many pictures I have of myself like this: cold and tired in front of something I ought to see

  

but then in the end, there was the light through the fog:

without the actual orchestra

Last night at Altes Europa: Tagliatelle with cranberries. Weird. And stories of scary U-Bahn patrol, who despite their army fatigues and shit-kicking boots have no right to touch you or even make you get off the train, let alone try to bully you into going to an atm. If I had known this I would have said something like “go to hell, all you agents of  America,”  instead of giving them my mailing address so they could bill me. Der.

No drinking for me, as I’ve been caught in this perpetual cycle of being excessively drunk/ having clean but stuporous hangovers, for the last week, which has been making me nauseous and spacey. Also, in Lederhosen Special’s defense, he got his tests back and the diagnosis is more “epstien-bar virus” and less “flaky bastard.” Sorry.

What a mess this all is. Do you think you could get away with pitching a fit and tossing papers around if you were accused of crimes against humanity? Maybe not if you were allowed to change your underwear every once in a while. Makes you appreciate due process, international tribunals and well established judicial systems in general. As much as we complain about it, it could be worse.

Is for old people, but it has a view of the funkturm, West Berlin’s equivalent of the Telespargel,

and a mural that evokes warmer climates. There is swimming pool here, but I forgot my suit.

The Leitzensee looks beautiful in the morning, although it’s more of a pond than a sea.

And german breakfast! COME ON. Just look at it!

is so much more encouraging when the recipient is friendly and willing to decipher my muddled attempts at communicating. This seems to be easier here in Munich than in Berlin, (where if you don’t move out of someone’s way fast enough and they bump into you, you get a withering f.u. glare instead of a s’cuse me) and when I am buying something from them… I am gently corrected (gaooooowda not goooewda, okay, with a little smirk) or asked to return, cause I really need to try the stollen klassisch instead of the one I just bought, bitte. All I need now is an Advent Calendar and hacked-off parts of pine trees hanging on the door, and euroChristmas is mine, ALL MINE.

sehr lecker mit gruener tee

American mama blogs “Going out, Falling in Love, and the Secret to a Happy Marriage” and passes along an interesting article about twitterpation, which I previously thought had more to do with dopamine than a nerve growth factor. I guess after a year its going to be “nice knowing you” if one isn’t careful… so interesting that you get just enough time to make life-altering decisions or get properly knocked up before it all comes crashing down.

Ah, Philadelphia.

is what he is for sure. But apparently he unbalances me, and I have lost myself since I have met him. Hmmm. Love is swirling around the western world, and fearlessness is the topic of the moment… will it come to happiness and fulfullment or send us back into the arms of our beloved friends after the long drop into despair?

Some people never change, as I relearned in Berlin: Lederhosen Special always with a head cold and drinking too much beer (“I’m from Munich, what do you expect???”). Very Tall Very Cuteness has found his very own Very Tall Very Sweetness, and dS unreachable somehow.

The Berlin I’ve returned to is not the one I knew, the western side of the city a different world from the east, and I really didn’t understand that the first time. The liebling pointing out 23 years worth of memories and its hard to keep it all straight. Will return for a week, in a couple of days. Write the thing and see the missing and stammtisch.

Pure delight: saw the apartment today- lots of light and a full kitchen in a beautiful building. Move in post-Berlin. Yay. Also, bought shoes.