Hey fellow time travelers. It was a weekend well spent here in Munich, as Martina came down to hang out with me. My up-till-six Kellerage the night before with the South African didn't prevent me from going again with Martina Friday night. Was cool as ever. Word has it that Kunstpark Ost--the largest party zone in Germany and probably the largest in all of Europe--is going to be torn down in February, and replaced with (of all things) a family amusement park. Supposedly it will be rebulit across town in the West but this will require at least three years. Crummy news.
Saturday was another installment in an ongoing sequence of crappy gray Munich days. But since I had my esteemed colleague Ms. Berger along with me it wasn't all that bad. We made mischief in the city for a while (blowing out a giant candle and running away like criminals, holding an impromptu soccer match with an old yellow balloon that a surprising number of passers-by joined in on) before we drove across town to try give a friend a pleasant surprise. It was the mirror situation of one of my visits in Kaiserslautern, when I made Martina drive around blindly at night looking for Normen's house just so we could give him a Big Mac. In both cases we were unsuccessful. It wasn't so bad this time though, as we had long spaghetti, Pfalz wine and oven-roasted chestnuts (yum! a new one for me) at Startlodge instead. You have to cut an X in the top of the things or they'll blow up like big popcorn kernels--which happened to Martina anyway when she looked in on them.
Saturday night I put myself under the care of an expert and we dyed my hair orange. Got progressively more silly afterwards: arm wrestling at first, then thumb wrestling, and then a Bavarian sport known as "finger hooking" in which you lock index fingers and try to pull the other person all the way across the table. Martina won this one--upper body strength isn't very important; strong fingers are.
She listened as I talked into the night about my problems, always me and my reality problems, like a good sport. As before nothing was solved but it did me good. I saw her off in the morning, this craziest of girls and closest of friends over here. A skeleton named Hugo with a disco ball in his lap was riding in the back seat. Her first day of her new job was Monday--we reverse roles now, she becomes the one pinned down by a job, and I the freelancer (in two weeks that is).
Posted by Alan at November 6, 2002 12:47 AM