Lightning or Magnets?

It’s been a while since I sat down and wrote much of anything worth while or worth reading. Mostly just cataloging what’s been happening to me, and while it absorbs most of my energy to think about these things, they are neither new nor unique in the spectrum of human emotion. And while I’m not entirely certain that anything I put on this page, or the page after, or the many pages that will most likely follow will break the pattern of my own literary monotony, I’m in the mood to write something with a little more depth than a description of Austrian food or the ins and outs of not speaking the language in the country you’re currently living in. I think what I would rather talk about are those sudden and electric connections we feel with the right people at the right time.

I’m not entirely certain where I stand on the big questions like God and the afterlife, and while I certainly believe there is something larger and greater than ourselves, I don’t think for the life of me I could describe it, much less name it. If I tried, I think it would be one of those things where everyone reading it would say, “Yes, that’s what I believe too!” and then insist that I am Christian, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Jewish, or Panthesist, or Agnostic or any other religious affiliation I might run into, and I just haven’t realized it until now. And quite frankly, I think I would disagree with all of them on the principle that if I have no desire to name (and thus pigeon hole – the act of description is by its very nature exclusive more than inclusive­) my mostly unformed beliefs, I would prefer it if they respected that and left well enough alone. After all, I don’t listen to a Hindu describe his beliefs and insist he’s actually Jewish or what have you. But in addition to a vague belief that the greatest good and greatest evil really stem from our inherent humanity rather than a big white bearded man or something below the surface of the earth with too many arms, I do believe there are things in this life that are supposed to happen to us, and most usually other people are the instruments through which those things happen.

From my own life, just in the last fourish years, I have a quick string of examples. My freshman year I went to Gonzaga University where I was bullied by a small little girl who was enabled by a handful of people too scared to stop her (myself included, sadly), and if that hadn’t happened I wouldn’t have wanted to transfer schools, which led me to DU. If I hadn’t been at DU, I wouldn’t have taken a Russian class which inevitably led me to two of my best friends who have taught me that I am interesting and charming, sometimes despite my own best efforts, not to mention the other myriad of fascinating people I spent two years studying with. I also wouldn’t have met Alexa, who in addition to being another of my best friends, has taught me that we get to choose the way we look at life and that makes all the difference. I also wouldn’t have ended up living with four strangers, two of whom became my Ambiguously Gay Duo, who have taught me to occasionally pull the stick out of my own ass and have fun. If I hadn’t been living in that neighborhood, I wouldn’t have found an extra family in the Brainerds, especially Claire. And most importantly (in this moment, at least) I wouldn’t have ended up in Prague, where I have flourished. In the short time I’ve been here, I’ve learned not to dig my feet in over things I haven’t given a chance yet, I’ve learned to let people in more easily, and most importantly I’ve learned to stop hating myself and rather to love the person I am and the person I have the capacity to become. And I could certainly pinpoint those changes on a particular person, the same way I’ve attributed growth to Robert, Tyler, Alexa, Garret, and Alex, but I think to do so would make him blush. But this leads me to what I actually wanted to talk about.

Do you ever wonder if the people in this life that end up being most important to us are coincidences? Or do you think that certain souls will pull at each other over time and space the same way strong enough magnets pull at each other no matter what you put between them? The pragmatist in me wants to say it’s the first one – of all the millions of people on this earth, and the thousands you meet in only a year, much less your whole life, its statistically inevitable that you will find a handful of people who will have irreversible effects on you, for good and for ill. But the romanticist in me just cannot accept that. I just can’t, especially given what’s happened – who’s happened – to me in Prague. And what about those people who change you irreversibly and then slip out of your life forever? Less like magnets and more like lightning, but even that’s a bad metaphor because lightning is random and how can something like being bullied into a happier life be random? How can a connection so intense and instantaneous that you felt it after an hour – an hour!–  be random? There are people in my life who have had such a steadfast influence in my life, it’s easy to say they aren’t random presences – my mother, for one; Lizzy, for another. There are newer people - Robert, Tyler, Alexa, Garret, Alex, just to use pre-established examples – who came into my life slowly enough that I can still probably assert they weren’t random either. But even with these two groups – new and old – I will accept arguments that they are random. They are, truthfully, the fruits of a seemingly random string of events. Any change in my mother’s life, and who’s to say I would have been born to her, or born at all. I wouldn’t have met Lizzy if we hadn’t been grocery shopping in the wrong store, and I still don’t know why we were there instead of our local grocery chain. I’ve already gone over the weird singularity that brought me to meet the five above, which never would have happened if I’d had the stones to stand up to a small school bully, or if someone else had called her on her bullshit. But this Prague thing… logically, it has to be random. There are whole different continents I could be studying on, and even on this continent there are thousands of cities I could be in instead, and then in this city there are other schools and programs I could have chosen. And that’s just on my side, just think about all the thousand different choices the particular person I’m talking about could have made that would have changed where and who he is now. It certainly wouldn’t be fair to think of him as a static entity when I’m not one myself. This whole thing has to be the cosmic result of a million little things randomly lining up. But… no. How do you statistically explain away any of this: I never considered anywhere but Europe, and I was going to go to Glasgow but at the last minute I had an overwhelming conviction that I belonged in Prague. How do you explain away that if he had literally any other job than the one he does, we would have never met, and it wasn’t even a job he initially wanted. How do you explain two people having an hour long conversation and getting the other so stuck in their heads that the next time they spoke it was almost electric? How can any of that be random?

I don’t know. I just do not know. I want to say it’s random, and I’m not sure why, but I just cannot bring myself to do that. Honestly, I can’t stop wondering if the reality of the whole thing is that I cannot possibly comprehend the way two souls can end up on a collision course, and just like no one knew what would happen at the Large Hadron Collider but it didn’t stop them from trying, I have no idea how this particular reaction is going to end either. But at no point in this whole thing have I ever been scared of imploding into a black hole, and if you know me, you know I am terrified of that exact thing happening almost constantly.

The last thing I would end this incredibly personal rant on how little I understand anything on is a quote by Elizabeth Gilbert, which I love even though she’s responsible for the estrogen filled zit that is Eat, Pray, Love. “A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake… Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave. A soul mate’s purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, and make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life.”

A small list of my favorite memories

Oh Jesus, trying to write a long blog post on a Czech keyboard is breaking my brain right now. The Zs are switched with the Ys and none of the punctuation is in the right spot. But anyhow, I have an hour to kill between classes on Mondays which I typically fill with running across the square for lunch, but I'm STILL full from my trip to Austria (every woman in the country felt obligated to feed me) so I'm skipping lunch and a killing time on the internet. So I figured I'd compose a small list of my favorite memories cause I'm also feeling a little morose today. These all, obviously, have stories behind them, but I doubt I'll go into much detail. Unless you ask. Also, these are in no special order.

My 20th Birthday - Even if I am less than fond of the person he became and the things that resulting person did, me and the ex used to get along quite swimmingly. And one of my fondest memories in the last couple years is walking together through an art exhibit of Italian painters from the 15-17 centuries while he explained painting techniques to me.

The Prague Botanical Gardens - I am not making a strong case for my happiness being independent of the men I'm seeing, am I? Oh well. I have done and seen a lot of really cool stuff here, and I could make a massive list of those experiences a mile long and still have to leave shit out. But by far my favorite day was the one I spent at the Botanical Gardens with a certain Czech local because it had all my favorite things and still managed to transcend the sum of its parts. We slept in, had a small lunch of his mom's bad ass cooking, I got to see something breathtakingly beautiful, and most of all we talked about anything and everything. I love that, just being with someone so completely that you lose grasp of time.

Saint Patrick's Day - This past St Patty's one of our roommates threw a small party, and I am not normally a party person. But after the guests left, it turned into me and Nick slow dancing around the living room and cuddling with Claire. That moment, listening to Billie Holiday while Nick spun me around the wood floors and Claire watched was a great moment of sunshine in what was otherwise a very shitty quarter for me. And the next morning hung over Chinese and basketball with Alex rounded it all out perfectly.

My grandma's waffles - My maternal grandma passed away when I was 15, and the fact that I didn't know her better is one of my greatest regrets. I'm told I'm a lot like her, in certain aspects. My grandma was a hard, angry woman with a lot of unresolved hurt in her life. But she was also fiercely loyal, giving, and protective. I kind of picture my grandma like an old cranky pit bull, and heaven help anyone who threatened her loved ones. And she was an amazing cook, and as kids we would have run over hot coals for grandma's waffles in the morning. So she'd make us a trade: she would make waffles in the morning if we spent the night at her house. I will, until the day I die, remember with absolute clarity sitting at grandma's kitchen table in the late morning sunlight eating waffles off her brown earthenware plates doused in syrup that came out of a oft- refilled Scrooge McDuck bottle.

Oh frack, class time. This list is by no means complete, fyi.

London

What a crazy trip. And yet, not the craziest trip I’ve taken in the last six months. Anyhow, I went to London.

I think the only person who reads my blog that would appreciate the difference between 11-year-old Cydney and 21-year-old Cydney is Lizzy. Or my mom, but I don’t think she reads this because I tell her most everything as it happens. Anyway, I was an awkward kid at 11, and as awkward kids are wont to be, I was poorly dressed, lacked social skils, and read at a level far and above anything demanded of a fifth grader. I think I read all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings in about three months, which becomes more impressive when you remember that a) Tolkien, much as I love him, did not write that book for kids and thus it's pretty dense and b) at this age I was still reading bedtime stories with my parents, but at this age I would read to them as much as they read to me, and they were actual novels. My dad and I were working on Harry Potter if I remember correctly, and I’m pretty sure my mom and I were slogging through Little Women. Plus whatever I was reading for school, that’s four books I was juggling. Being the voracious little reader I was (a trait I’m sad I’ve lost, and blame the internet), I ran into most of the classics pretty quickly and it quickly turned me into an Anglophile, as American literature bored me. So I’ve wanted to go to England, specifically London, for ten years. That’s little less than half my very short, mostly uneventful and still somehow strange, lifespan. So when I started budgeting for Prague (ha!) the one major trip I wanted to take, regardless of cost (ha…) was to go to London. Well, about half way through October, I had no reason to stay in Prague for any given weekend anymore, I was in a bad mood (always cured by massive purchases), and I found out one of my favorite bands was playing in London on Halloween. The decision was clinched – I booked tickets for a five day trip (really four, I’m spending all of Sunday in the Geneva airport. Side note: I can now say I’ve slept on a hard wooden bench under my coat like a hobo), a little later (last weekend) I booked a hotel since I was traveling alone and hostels give me the hebbie jebbies even when I’m with people, and tada! I was going to London.

So Wednesday I took a ridiculously easy midterm, Sara dropped me off at the bus stop (“Be safe, eat well, take lots of pictures!”) after class, and I spent literally 12 hours traveling. I flew into London City Airport, and my hotel was by Heathrow, so by train it would have taken me at least 2 hours to get there. It took longer because fuck trains and tubes and metros and subways and any other variation of underground public transport, and I got lost and had to backtrack a good ways. I flew in on Wednesday specifically for the Katzenjammer (apparently that’s German for caterwauling), but the doors opened at 7, and I didn’t even get to my hotel until 7:45. I was ready to give up, but Jeff (kid I worked with over the summer, is studying abroad in London) was gently insistent and had already bought the tickets, so I dumped my stuff and jumped back on the tube. Fuck the tube. Fuck it. We got to the concert venue just as they were taking the stage, and then it didn’t matter that I’d been traveling for half a day. It was amazing. The lungs on all four of those women, and just how talented of musicians they are! God, it was great. I also got a signed t-shirt, which I am wearing right now in the Geneva airport, looking for all the world like I snuck into the airport because it’s warm and I’m homeless. I have plans tonight, no way am I showing up looking like this.

Thursday was probably my least favorite day, only because I spent a lot of time waiting and being surrounded by obnoxious British kids. I went to the Museum of London, which would have been cool if it was not so damn kid friendly. And me being me, I insisted on walking through the whole damn thing. It’s also in the London banking area, and I walked around there for a bit. Nothing but grey suits and scowls as far as the eye could see, and just people watching it became very clear to me that this is not the kind of life style I actually want to lead. Don’t get me wrong, I like nice things, specifically nice food, but if the cost of that is suits and scowls, I’ll take a pass. And I say this is my least favorite day, but that’s misleading, I think. It was still awesome because I was in fucking London. And the museum was still very cool, just a little loud for my taste. The coolest thing, by far, that I saw Thursday was The Rain Room by rAndom International at the Barbary Art Museum. I waited in line for an hour and a half, and spent maybe fifteen minutes in there. But it was still really cool. The room is called The Curve because it’s a large, single room that curves so when you walk in you don’t actually see the instillation. You can hear it, the sound of falling rain, and smell it, that wet concrete smell, and certainly feel the temperature drop, and you can even see the silhouettes of people waiting to play in it lit against the wall in front of you. What “it” is, though, is the best part, and when you round the bend, your breath stops for a minute. Hanging from the ceiling is an 8’x15’ board that is raining in the middle of the room. And people are standing underneath, perfectly dry. The way it works is that there are 3D MoCap cameras tracking everyone inside the rain rectangle, and as you walk and move the rain stops directly above. It gave me, at least, a pretty wide radius, and I found that by stretching my arm in one direction and my leg in the other as far as I could, I could cut the rain in half, spanning the whole eight feet. Oh, and the whole thing is lit by a single flood light. It makes it easy to see the rain, except in people’s shadows, which plays some funny tricks with how you perceive the rain looks. If you look at some people’s shadows just right, it looks like the rain is bending. Also, it’s a pain in the ass to take pictures of because of that strobe light. I took a video, but I don’t know if that works better. Also, I got rained on because I walked out to grab my bag and then back in, and someone had already replaced me. I think the cameras can only track about 15 people, and I made 16 or so. I got AMAZING Korean food (I love Czech food, I do, but I miss other types of food beyond Czech, Italian, and Thai), and back on the tube.

Friday was my favorite, but again that’s a silly distinction. I went to Camden Town, which I had never heard of before but googled it on a recommendation. So how do I describe it? Have you ever been to a really massive farmers market? It’s like that, but instead of fresh produce and beeswax soap or whatever the hell else, it’s the kind of stuff you’d find in a Hot Topic, and also a Forever 21, and also a flea market, and most of it’s made by hand, and most of it’s weird, and all of it’s AWESOME. I just hemorrhaged cash because I wanted everything. I think I spent over $250, but I intentionally didn’t track it. What did I get… A pair of white tights with glitter paisleys over the ankles and lines down the back of the thigh, a frumpy grandma sweater with a malformed skull and crossbones that reads “live fast, die young” which is HILARIOUS if you know me, a couple charm bracelets that are just colored string and small bronze star charms, loose leaf tea for Max and Sara, and a dress that I more or less have to pour myself into and won’t be able to wear when I stop walking five miles a day. Then I popped over to Piccadilly Circus to meet Jeff for dinner, and while I was waiting I bough myself a tin of Golden Syrup for home (I have a caramel recipe that calls for it, I’M SO EXCITED) and saw an anime store. I stuck my head in out of curiosity, and what should they be selling but Naruto themed cosplay contacts, specifically sharingun contacts. If you don’t know what that is, I’m not going to explain it. But it’s nerdier than it sounds, and it sounds nerdy as shit. I had to buy a pair for the Czech gentleman (we patched things up last week), I can’t wait to see the look on his face when I give them to him. And I’m pretty sure I got the ones that look like his favorite character. So Jeff arrived, and led me down a very nice street to a very nice courtyard to a very nice restaurant. We split a bottle of Bordeaux, I had butternut squash soup, he had mussels, then I had braised beef on papradelle pasta, he had steak, we got presseco with dessert, I had crème brule, he had sticky pudding. It was a nice night. So anyway, that was Friday.

Saturday started unpleasant because you know who told me he’s leaving me (again). I can’t really stop him. I can be mad at him, and I probably will be when I come down from my London high, but if I learned anything this summer, it’s that at some point kicking and screaming doesn’t get you want you want. I’m sad, I really am, because I really like him. And it’s hard not to think that this is a reflection of me somehow. Maybe if I was better I’d be worth fighting for. But that’s not a healthy way to think, and even as much hope as I threw into him, maybe it was always just a fantasy anyway. I hope he misses me.

Anyhow, this is all the long culmination of a very pensive day walking around London. I walked through Green Park and past Buckingham Palace, chain smoking a pack of Luckies and listening to Ray Charles because I’m more beatnik than hipster, I got lunch at a nice restaurant and watched foot traffic out the window, I went to the Tate Modern and spent a while being pensive in a Surrealist exhibit (including covering the map I bought with my crazy illegible scrawl), read in a Starbucks, and then saw Twelfth Night at the Apollo in Piccadilly Circus. It was actually just ok, which is mildly disappointing considering I went specifically because Stephen Fry played Malvolio. I love Shakespeare, specifically the interpretive Shakespeare I run into at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The last production of Twelfth Night I saw was there, and it was a riot from start to finish. This wasn’t even a little interpretive, it was historical. All the actors were men, and the men playing the women often resorted to high pitched shrieking for laughs. And they were so focused on keeping their voices high that their lines were very flat. Stephen Fry was his usual dry self, and I don’t think that necessarily lends itself to Malvolio because it’s just such an over the top role. Also, it wasn’t visually exciting because everyone wore black and white except for The Fool, and the stage was a uniform light wood color. The actor who played Sir Toby stole the show for me, with The Fool and Mary coming in close second. And something in me shifted during the play so I stopped being “What’s wrong with me that I keep getting left for other women? Why am I the one who has to foot the bill for the happiness of the men I love?” to being “Fuck it. There’s nothing I can do about it anyway, no point getting too worked up.” We’ll see how long it lasts, I’m sure it’s just a high from being in London.

So I got back to the hotel (fuck the tube) and skyped Mom and Dad while I packed, then facebooked Sara for a bit, and got maybe two hours of sleep before I had to be up. I look like a hobo. I made my flight just fine, though the Underground office wasn’t open so I have 10 pounds sitting on an Oyster card I can’t get back. Oh well. I slept from the instant I got to my seat on the plane to the moment we hit the tarmac in Geneva, where I promptly found the non-denominational and totally empty chapel and slept for another hour on the hard wooden bench, got lunch, bought chocolate (I’m in Switzerland, it’d be wrong not to), and now I’m sitting on the plane about to start our decent into Prague. I’ve got to rush back, change because I look like a hobo, and then I’m getting dinner and possibly a movie.

Bonus Observations:

I wear an awful lot of black and grimace a lot on public transportation. No wonder no one wants to make eyecontact with me.

It's funny, I didn't realize how much I missed being hit on until it happened Friday when the waiter was blatantly hitting on me.

Thank god for tube signs and announcements being in clearly enunciated English. I missed that.

Berlin

Wrote this last Sunday, just posting it now.

Oh where shall I start? Berlin. I shall start in Berlin. Forgive the dramatic opening – I just finished role-playing a violent, spatula related death via text message.

So we went to Berlin this weekend. But this weekend actually starts Thursday night. See, I done made friends here in this city. Oh god who would have seen that coming?! There’s the Czech man-creature, obviously, but there’s a girl in my program name Sara who is not like the others. Which is to say I find her interesting, engaging, and she’s smarter than me. She’s also the second person I’ve said that about here, the first being you-know-who and the third being her boyfriend Max. I hate being the dumbest one in any given group, but its passive, "this is actually awesome and I don’t know what I’m talking about" kind of hate. It’s like saying I hate hot showers because they feel too good. I mean, if I had to choose between being the smartest in a group and the dumbest, I would pick “dumbest” any day of the week. Any how, Sara and Max: Sara is a history student at CU, and Max a fine arts photography student in Pittsburg (I think). Sara is here with the program, and she picked Prague because you can’t throw a rock in this city without hitting something old. Max isn’t studying, but came with her because he wanted to spend a semester abroad anyway. The two rented a small little apartment in a basement in Wenceslas, and have up to this point been each other’s main (only?) source of company. Well, Sara and I have a class together Mondays and Wednesdays, and we began talking that way, which is when I figured out hey! She’s a smartie! We spent most of the spa towns trip hanging out with each other, plus Martin and Anthony, and by the end I’d pretty much decided “yup, you’re interesting and that’s a valuable thing here.” Two Thursdays ago, Sara, Max, and I got an early dinner and spent most of the evening walking and talking and interacting and generally behaving like well spoken individuals. The following Sunday we got tea, and then dinner, and then a movie, and then hung out in their apartment with the addition of another person. We did it again this most recent Thursday, but instead of spending that much money, I cooked dinner, Max made a salad, and they all stayed at my place until I finally had to kick them out at 1:45 in the morning because I was falling asleep and Sara and I had to be on a bus to Berlin at 7:30 am.

The bus ride to Berlin was unpleasant, because I was exhausted and couldn’t really fall asleep comfortably. And because I was tired, hungry, and dingy feeling, I wasn’t in the best of moods. So my first reaction, once we got inside the city itself, was “I don’t like it here, I want to go home.” Home, in this scenario, being Prague. It’s interesting, I think, that I’ve started conceptualizing Prague as home. I mean, I did something similar at Gonzaga when things were still fun and hunky dory, but as soon as things got bad it was a nice little slice of hell and home became my parents’ place again. So maybe I’m thinking of Prague as home because everything has been great so far with the exception of two long weeks that weren’t really ok. I’m trying not to let this convince me that I belong in Prague, because if I let myself think that way, leaving is going to be even harder and I’m going to push to come back and maybe that isn’t such a bad thing but I need more time to think about that. Anyway, Berlin is awfully new. It feels very young, and as a person who is 80 at heart, I don’t especially like that. And of course the structure itself is “young” or really just new. I mean, I’m not surprised, as far as I know, the city was basically flattened in ’45 and had to be rebuilt, and I think the Berliners never got out of the mindset “we can build it bigger, we can build it newer” because all the buildings are incredibly new. I think I can count on one hand how many buildings I saw that looked like they were built between the end of WWII and maybe the late 90s. Daniella was saying that every time she comes to Berlin it looks different because nothing stays up for long. Compared to Prague where it’s almost bizarre to see a building built in the last ten years, it’s weird. And because of how new everything is, it felt very much like a German LA to me. Everything is new, there are wide streets everywhere which are full of cars, and even though the buildings are big, they’re spread out. I went for a walk Sunday morning and found streets tucked away from the main thoroughfare are quaint, and in some cases even beautiful in the brisk October air and in the light of a late Sunday morning. But I don’t think I’d go back. Not when there are so many other places I’d rather go.

Friday once we got into the city, we took an incredibly brief tour around and then headed back for the hotel. I took a shower to scald my skin off, then Sara and I got dinner. It was a shock to my system to have to pay $20 for a meal again, instead of $6. And then we headed back to the hotel and did nothing. We were both exhausted and a little cranky and neither of us are really inclined to involve ourselves in “night life” anyway. Sara was out by 8:30, I think I was gone an hour later.

Saturday we went with the program to a museum about East Berlin under the Soviets, which was a hoot. Nothing better than mocking failed regimes over the remains of their crumbled empire. Next was another history museum, which was free because it was celebrating 25 years of being open. We spent maybe an hour and a half, two hours in an exhibit covering German history from basically 400 AD to 1914 (I think. It looked like it started WWI, though). Now, I’m the kind of person who takes their sweet ass time going through an exhibit because I feel COMPELLED to look at and appreciate everything. I think it’s something I picked up from going to art museums with Uncle Roger, because if he’s going to spend an hour in front of a painting, god knows there’s really no use in rushing yourself. At first, out of the corner of my eye I could see Sara ping ponging between displays like a kid in a candy store. It’s a funny image in my mind’s eye, me plodding along at a pretty consistence pace and Sara running from one thing to another and then back again. There was a point where I caught her in front of a portrait of one person or another, and she was so wide eyed and excited that she looked like she was going to bust, and then she just threw her scarf of her face and shouted “I’m so overwhelmed!” It was pretty funny. After about an hour, she got bored, as did the rest of our party, and while I would have liked to stay there and finish the exhibit the way it deserved, everyone else wanted to leave. It felt blasphemous to rush through the exhibit like that, and I at least made them walk the whole thing instead of cutting out half way through.

After that we rounded the corner to the Holocaust memorial, which if you don’t know it is about half a city block covered in huge concrete slabs whose only variation is height, which gives the general impression of a wave. Like someone put grey legos on a sheet, and shook, and this is the moment before they all flew off. The first couple are maybe knee height, but as you walk further in, the blocks eventually double your height, maybe hitting 12ft at their highest. Walking through it alone is a little surreal, because everything is grey and its pretty disorienting, and your only point of reference is where you think you saw other people walking. I’m not sure how that related to the Holocaust, but it certainly invites introspection.

There was lunch, and then we decided to find one of the standing sections of the Berlin Wall. Up to this point, Sara had been making all the decisions and generally leading us in the right direction. Of course, up to this point we’d been moving on one axis – East to West – along the main street. I think she reoriented her brain to think of east and west as north and south, and when she was looking at the map to get us to the Berlin Wall, she was going to have us walking 90° in the wrong direction. I don’t know where it came from, but as long as you don’t stick me underground (or really in any vehicle I'm not driving), I pretty much always have a good sense of where I am in relation to other things. For Prague that means I have little islands around the metro stops I use where I’m fairly familiar with what’s around, and when I have nothing better to do I ride the trams to fill in the foggy areas and connect my little islands. Except for in the middle of the Old Town Square because the streets are too narrow and there’s no fucking logic. Anyway, in Berlin because we’d done nothing but walk and drive, I was able to look at the map and mostly figure out where it was. Emily’s got some pretty funny pictures of me trying to explain to Sara that East was actually behind us and we needed to go south a little bit, and as I lose my patience my arm gestures get bigger. Finally she capitulated and I played Magellan for our little group. There’s also a picture of me holding the map upside down. In my defense, we were walking south and I was trying to visualize if we needed to turn left or right.

We got to the wall, took some pictures, acted like assholes, walked back the direction we came to see the parliament building, and headed back to the hotel, which involved using the Metro, which I am still not good at figuring out in Prague, much less Berlin. We also decided, while dicking around on the platform, that our whole day had more or less been an indie film – nothing really important happened, it was a character study full of strange but entertaining interactions between strange people – and Sara dubbed it Walking While Swimming. Back to the hotel, then dinner, and then back to the hotel again. Sara and I scalded our skin off in the shower (again), then climbed into bed and started reading. We stayed up talking about boys and school, which for us meant a feminist discussion of who should pay for the check, and how disillusioned we are with our classmates lack of intellectual hunger. Also trading first impressions of each other, which made me giggle. I didn’t have a strong reaction to her, I just automatically lumped her in with Sabrina and Emily as “quiet, nerdy, shy, maybe a little awkward.” Of course now that I know her, the only one of those that’s true is “nerdy.” She said her first impression of me was “hipster girl from DU” which made me laugh. I mean, it’s not necessarily untrue, I am a hipster, but I like to think that I’m the proto-hipster because I liked all this crap before it was cool to be uncool, and I will continue to like it afterwards. Although bright red skinny jeans, matching lipstick, short ass hair and eyebrow piercings don’t really help my case.

Sunday we slept in, though I had a horrible nightmare where I was tossed down a cobblestone street Aztec style. Hard to sleep much after that. We had breakfast, and I went for a walk and waxed pensive. Always something nice, and I’ve yet to find anything that brings me quite as much peace as plugging my headphones in and wandering no where in particular. I don’t recall what was bothering me in detail, only I know I was feeling… uneasy. I wish I could remember what about. I think it might have something to do with Berlin being the most “American” experience I’ve had since getting to Europe, and it was disquieting to think that as profound a time I am having, in the grand scheme of things, it is impermanent. I hate that. But it’s hard to stay upset on a beautiful Sunday afternoon walking around neighborhoods that look like they belong on a postcard.

We piled back on the bus, with a short, maybe hour, stop in Potsdam where the Allies split up Germany and Berlin. Sara, of course, was as pleased as you can imagine. Also, a funny thing happened on the way out of Potsdam. We were driving through a neighborhood full of these beautiful, old houses like the ones in the Wash Park area at home, and I found myself imagining taking care of one of those houses, and what my kitchen would be like, and if we’d have a tree house or a swing set in the back for the kids, and hosting Christmas dinners and my someone special do the dishes afterwards and how very well I think I’d sleep at night if that was my reality. And then I realized I’d been thinking that way all weekend. German kids must be cuter than Czech kids, because every time I saw a family I starting thinking about the places I’d like to vacation with my kids. JESUS CHRIST I JUST WROTE THAT SENTENCE. My kids. Oh my god, what is in the water there that this is something I’m actually thinking about with anything other than horror?! But I think it’s the Europe thing. Specifically, I think it’s the Prague thing. The emphasis on things instead of people making you happy is so far and away removed from the American idea of purchasing happiness, that its become very easy to put my happiness in terms of the relationships around me. Also, since to spend time with my friends I have to talk to them instead of go out and get dinner or what have you, I’ve been getting closer to a select few. I think it might have something to do with that, with a shift in what’s important to me. I think it might also have something to do with the fact that these classes are so under stimulating that I’m not getting any sort of satisfaction from them, which is kind of a projection of my career.