I want to pull a bucket over my head and keep it there until the winter is over. To walk the streets spilling barrels of hot white tea that melts the layers of grey ice. Shrink down real small and squirm into a toaster and just sit there between the slats for six weeks.
There is nothing more difficult than no sun, except perhaps no sun and your closest friends thousands of miles and nine hours time-difference away. And missing the salt-sea smell and fish and the smell of fresh mountain trees and alpine lakes. And the ease of your own language, and for once in this whole long dreary winter feeling like something other than an outsider in someone else’s country.
A friend wrote me today and said it sounds like I’m really enjoying my life here across the pond. But I’m not. I’m wishing I had a bucket on my head for the next six weeks, for goodness sakes.
You know you’re getting desperate when you find yourself on a website called “How to Draw a Bucket in 6 Easy Steps.”
George Clooney improves with age
Still, life in a foreign frozen hell isn’t without its quirky moments. Like the German obsession with George Clooney. I don’t understand it. I don’t know why. But Berlin at least can’t seem to get enough of him. Sometimes I wonder if George Clooney realizes this. That his face is on my little Berlin tram and they’re writing him all over the town?
Or the travel agency animated pixelated sign that I saw this evening while waiting at the tram stop. The travel agency was called Amerika Travel. The red pixels kept flashing all the places in Amerika that you could travel to, followed by the special price for the journey, plus a little picture of an airplane, just in case you were wondering about the mode of travel.
I stood for ten minutes at the tram stop, though the tram sign assured us that the tram was coming in two minutes. It was the ten-minute-est two minutes of my life.
In the meanwhile, the adjacent flashing travel sign offered me fares to New York, San Francisco, Los Vegas, Los Angeles, Washington (meaning D.C.), Chicago, Miami, Cape Town, and Atlanta.
I think somebody got their continents a little mixed up.
Berlin, Maryland
A simple google search back at home didn’t uncover any Cape Town, America, though there are at least fifteen Berlins in the United States alone (I don’t know how many are in Canada or the other Americas).
I’ve heard of an Oslo in Florida, a Prague in Oklahoma, a Cologne in Minnesota and a Paris in Tennessee.
But Cape Town is in South Africa.
Africa is a completely different continent. Which, among other things, has much more sunshine than we do here at the moment, in this town called Berlin (Germany) that loves George Clooney and needs sidewalks melting with white tea and where I can’t find a bucket to put over my head because I can’t remember the German word for bucket or how to politely ask directions for the human-sized toaster aisle.
Können Sie mir bitte sagen, wo ich einen Eimer als Winter Kopfschütz sowie eine Trommel Schneeschmelzenden Weißen Tee umgeben von einem Menschlichem-Körperlichem Brotröster in der Nähe von Kappstadt Amerika finden kann?
Sometimes I feel like no one understands me here.
Just in case you’re wondering, this is how Google translates your attempt above:
Can you please tell me where I can find around a bucket as a winter and a drum head contactor Schneeschmelzenden White Tea from a human-corporeal toaster near Kappstadt America?
There is also a Denmark, Oregon. We took a picture of the sign. Which, by the way, said the name on both sides — as in, you’re out of it as soon as you’re into it. I think there were two houses there.
Sorry about the winter malaise – I feel like we’ve been in winter FOREVER – left Denmark after almost 8 weeks of sub-freezing, white, ‘shit it’s cold!!’ weather – got back here, and after between a few warmer days, have just gotten another 2 feet of snow. It’s beautiful, and entertaining to see how nonsensical some of NYC’s plowing habits are (like leaving 3-foot high walls of snow at the end of every side-street and between the sidewalks and crosswalks, as a result of snow-plows on Broadway and everyone just cleaning off their bit of sidewalk). But I want winter to end!
On an upnote, one really positive thing about moving back (to your new continent) this summer is that I’ll be closer to you! A four-hour train ride and very easy Skype call away. In the same time zone. Just remember – it will be over soon!