my warmest regards

(july 1, 2008)

happy birthday canada! you don’t look a day over 125.

yes, i am still alive and haven’t been eaten by the germans.

it has been a whirlwind week where we unexpectedly had to stay in a hotel, got into our flat late, and punched each other in the wiener about a hundred times. that is why i affectionately refer to the Love Nest as the Wiener Punching Nest, but i am sure that will change soon. or whenever we get the internet working in our flat, whichever happens last.

here are my first observations of the little german town that i now call home:

the buildings are very pretty and very old. and are just like a fairy tale. according to my reading on the subject, this makes perfect sense as the brothers grimm were german and gathered up all the folk stories and combined them into what we now know as fairy tales. hameln, is the home of the pied piper, the creepy story of the man who drove all the rats out of the town then used his little creepy pipe to entice the children to chase him out of the town as well. pervert.

i love my new nest. love it. want to import the whole of it to canada in september (which is where i intend to live at the end of this little european adventure, if i have not mentioned it before). our third floor flat has got to have the squeakiest floor i have ever laid foot on and a little breakfast nook that i like to call Heaven (ok, no i don’t because that would be as creepy as the piper himself) – it is where i intend on eating lots of healthy breakfasts (once we find a table and chairs) of produce bought from the bitsy streetside markets. our bathroom is adorable (apart from the gross german style toilet) and i love the windows in european houses. who needs a screen?! just open the whole thing up and let the fresh air in.

there are some rather dark complexioned germans. i suppose that anyone who had been here would know that, but i was surprised. i still wished i looked less european in this setting, however, because then i could be forgiven for NOT HAVING A CLUE what anyone ever says to me. apart from giving directions to the german man in overalls (it begs to be mentioned) to the potato house restaurant when he asked me on the street.

boyfriends in camouflage uniforms are delightful, even if they live in gross and stinky army blocks with other gross and stinky soldiers. but that should all change once he is delicately plucked from the grips of that damned army. just need to get over this dumb army exercise that he is on for the next 9 days, playing soldiers.

beer is sort of like a food group of its own and it is also what i live to call Heaven. it is so delicious and all the kinds are so equally delicious that you just order a beer and it is always delicious. please remember the poor (german? greek?) server who spilled an entire delicious beer all over me in your prayers. the poor dear felt so bad, he brought us shots of ouzo then more beer and didn’t charge us for any of it. little did he know that i was just so happy to live in my new nest that day, you could have spilled the entire bottle of ouzo on me and i wouldn’t have minded.

although our little town is little, i love that there is a bakery around the corner, two pubs within spitting distance, and you can walk to get groceries (walking back is the tricky part, so i do things in shifts – i got nothing but time). i am not so in love with the church choir that is singing on a tuesday evening, but i am drowning them out with my new itunes playlist summering in europe tunes. rumour has it that there is an ikea down the road that has my name written all over (rumour about my name, not the existence of the ikea), so that should make my afternoons of housegirlfriend-dom a titch more exciting.

there are about a million and two other things that i could report, but i will leave you here and get back to entertaining myself sans soldier in these most delicious late sun evenings of summer that i have been missing in my former equatorial home.