Thursday, October 02, 2008

10 random things about this trip

1. There are stores in heidelberg that sell nothing but gummi bears. The people in them speak less english than people in other stores. I bought gummi bears for family members and ate a whole bag of them.

2. When you are in copenhagen and you notice that you've dropped a stitch on a sock you've been knitting for a week and are in the home stretch of, and you leave the canalside coffee shop in disgust, you turn the corner and there is a magical yarn shop that will sell you the crochet hook to fix it. If you knew how to fix it.

3. No magical Freitag Bag store appears, however, which is probably good, given the indulgences in a Swedish leather jacket and Italian boots.

4. The Danes are as bicycle-y as the Dutch. But, stylish, with their big wheeled black bicycles with wee baskets, blond hair, and perfect scarves. Not really the right place when you're a short north american who feels particularly stumpy these days. See #3 re compensatory spending.

5. I still can't figure out why it took me half an hour to get gas yesterday on the autobahn. Teutonic efficiency broken down. Everyone pumped the gas, then abandoned their cars for loooooong stretches while they went in to pay. However, I did manage to perfectly name the pump I got the gas from, and the zwanzig euros that it cost, with perfect southern german intonation.

6. I can't decide if it's better or not better to have wifi when you're traveling alone. I don't know if I'd be more or less homesick if I wasn't getting email and facebook updates.

7. I've become completely polyknitterous, and can't finish anything. I've developed some kind of serious perfectionism. I was about 6 rows away from finishing sleeve #1 on Cece, and had to be talked off the ledge of ripping it out because I didn't like the way the increases had landed. (A case where wifi good). I am soclose to finishing a bee-yootiful socks-that-rock sock #1 for B's bday and I discovered the aforementioned dropped stitch. I picked up some heavy wool in Heidelberg I've been knitting a pretty ugly scarf out of that may never be finished. And I've toted around the pink yarn for Lulu's wallaby since I left home. I'm sad about the sock :-(.

8. The Danes seem to all speak English. And they're damned friendly. And the sushi is GOOD.

9. I walked and walked and walked and walked around today, but forgot my camera in the hotel room. (Which turned out to be slightly nicer than yesterday's, but only because I asked nicely for a non-smoking room after I saw the room they'd assigned me -- with a narrower bed than the one my 4 year old niece sleeps in and reeking of despairing single-bed inhabiting smoker-ness).

10. When you are a bag addict, and you see in your guidebook that there is a store called The Last Bag that sells only one kind of satchel that is the same Perfect Design that they've been selling since 1956, you get all excited, and you think, maybe this IS my bag, maybe this is the last bag I'll ever need to buy, maybe this is the bag that all those other bags were getting me ready for! But then you realize it just won't fit your stupid too-big macbook and some knitting, even if you only carry one sock around at a time, and the big cable adapter thingy for the macbook, and maybe some gummi bears, and some pens. So then you're back to #3, the elusive Freitag bag that you realize with a sigh you're going to have to buy in CANADA, because of that stupid magnetic force repelling you from Stuttgart yesterday.

So you eat more gummi bears on your bed and rest your feet before going out to eat some Fisk of some kind.

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