No Sex for Now
I know I still owe you the second, juicier half of the last post, but my body has decided differently. Now that the stress levels have subsided to more normal proportions and there's once again more blood than adrenaline flowing through my veins, it has decided that catching a bug and blessing me with fever and a throbbing headache is just the thing to do. So true to the "headache = no sex" rule, I'm slinking off to bed, leaving you behind all hot, bothered and frustrated. ;-)
Sorry, guys!
Hmm, still vacation.
I've just finished watching "Lola Runs" together with my wife on TV. It was the first time for both of us watching that film, and I must say that it's a bloody fine and really intense movie. Not that all of you haven't known that for years... (Just shoing that I can top even Layne in the fashionably late department... ;-) They showed Tom Tykwer's first short film "Because" afterwards, and the interesting bit is that Tykwer had already toyed with the ideas he so masterfully explored in "Lola Runs" in this short film eight years before he did his most famous movie to date. All of which has pretty little bearing on what I actually want to blog about. ;-)
The best friends of the in-laws, B and W had come to visit us on our marriage anniversary. Partly for the party, partly because W knows quite a bit about house construction and wanted to check out our little project. He came away with lots of praise about the craftsmanship, and a mouthful of expletives about the organization and planning in the project, which pretty much jibes with our own non-expert opinion, so all is well, as far as that is concerned.
Seeing us as fatigued as we were then, B immediately invited us over to their new house in a village on the Baltic Sea coast. Because we hadn't visited them since they had moved there more than a year ago, and we really could do with a few days of
real vacation, we immediately accepted. That probably was the best thing we have done so far in our vacation.
So we threw a few things together on Friday morning, jumped in the car and drove the three and a half hours up to their new place. Despite the fact that the roughly sixty miles of autobahn from Berlin up to the eastern German Baltic coast have been in a permanent state of reconstruction for nigh on twenty years, and some parts of it still hail from the original construction work done during Hitler's time, we arrived pretty much as planned and so still had enough time to jump into the rather cold water (definitely less than 65 °F) and watch the sun go down into the sea.
The next two days were spent doing the usual touristy things: walks along the beach, savouring the wind and water, the constant murmur of the waves, and the salty tang of the air, skipping stones, collecting pebbles, and of course swimming in the sea. And despite the place having fortunately lost most of the, uh, rustic and slightly derelict charm which formerly was so typical of most coastal villages in East Germany, I'm happy to report that the beach is still firmly under East German rule, meaning that despite all the signs everywhere proclaiming on threat of pretty hefty fines that nudity is verboten everywhere but the far corners of the local beach, it was clothing optional throughout. So you would see everything from swimsuits to women going topless to full nudity, and no-one would give a pair of donkey's kidneys, as it very much should be.
We also spent half a day in Greifswald, walking through the beautifully reconstructed mediaeval city center, enjoying an Ice Coffee (her) and a Banana Split (me) in one of the countless street cafés mostly populated by the many students of the local university, who are keeping the city young. Heck, we even saw two recumbent bicycles, which made your's truly 'bent head happy.
The new home of B and W is a nice enough affair, situated barely 300 feet from the beach in a newly built appartment complex, but despite basically being surrounded by forests, it's definitely lacking in greenery for our taste. We also couldn't help noticing that while W was happily doing his daily morning swim in the sea, meeting friends, and generally having a blast of his retirement, B seemed somehow restless, unhappy about nothing in particular, and generally feeling out of place. Our impression was that although she seemed to be mostly unaware, or even in denial, of that unhappiness, she would be better off going back to Greifswald, although even that would probably not make her much happier as such. I just hope she can find again something to make her happy now that her two "boys" have gone out of the house, one working in Bavaria, the other preparing to leave Germany to work in Sweden for several years...
Yesterday, we started out with a nice long walk through the coastal village, ogling all the new houses and infrastructure, followed by another nude swim in the sea. After this W drove together with our still slightly freezing selves to a nearby fishing village where he bought freshly smoked fish right out of the oven. We gorged ourselves on the tasty Halibut, delicious Salmon, and all the other delicacies, and then started our way back home, provisioned with enough smoked fish to last us for several days...
We had barely arrived home when the doorbell rang rather unexpectedly. And who else would be there but
our best friends, whom we hadn't seen for months due to perpetually conflicting schedules, and who were passing on their way back home from a weekend trip to the sandstone mountains just south of Dresden. So we gave them a tour of our new house, talked and laughed and generally had a most wonderful time until the sun set, reminding them that they still had a ninety minute drive before them and unlike us had to get up early the next morning. So we grudgingly let them go, but not without promising to visit them again during the rest of our vacation, seeing as one of them will be moving to Hamburg for a new job in a few weeks, putting even more distance into our long distance friendship - the most amazing thing to come off our two week vacation in Mexico a few years ago.
So Sunday was pretty much near perfect, and it stayed that way throughout the evening. But that is a topic for another post, maybe.
Hmmm, vacation
Since a few of my fellow bloggers have already emailed me to enquire about the lack of updates on Gudy Two Shoes as well as about my wellbeing, I can assure everyone that I'm alive, exhausted, and finally on the most yearned-for vacation of my life.
Our marriage anniversary party on Saturday went by without any major highlights. Food and drink where abundant and of the high quality which our extended family has more or less come to expect when my wife is running the kitchen: platters of cheese, fish, and venison where consumed, much beer was imbibed, and my wife's favourite uncle regaled us with a lot of interesting stories from the ship cruises he has become so fond of during the last few years. He's a jovial fellow with a big heart, ready laugh, booming voice, and a wry, dry humour. And it's heartening to see him slowly but surely get back his old zest for life and his keen interest in other people and foreign cultures, both of which he had lost after the tragic death of his wife who had succumbed to cancer two and a half years ago.
We missed another opportunity to refinance the house construction when everyone was treated to a free tour of our premises, and much oohing and ahhing was directed at the tiles, the kitchen, and the cork parquet I had been laying under much cursing during the last week (pictures to follow). I'll see about tiling one of the two bath rooms as well as finishing the work on the waste water pipes this week, and then we'll probably head off for a few house-construction-free days on the Baltic Sea, to which friends of the in-laws had invited us a couple of weeks ago
There were, sadly, a few lowlights as well. For one thing, someone had decided that having a big techno party just outside our village was a swell idea, so throughout the evening we were treated to a thumping bass which was still sufficiently loud to cause our ears to hurt although we were almost a mile away from the action! I shudder to think what actually being at that party would have done to my ears - I'd probably have popped my ear drums, or something. That all the noise also drowned out the party music provided by my shiny new mp3 player (yay to no more juggling CD's with greasy fingers!) was just a lamentable side effect.
Lowlight number two concerned the absence of most of friends at our party - two of them had to work, another is busy moving to Hamburg, and two more are still adjusting to the sleep deprivation that freshly having acquired offspring entails. Bummer. But then, this gives us the opportunity to have a proper house warming party
avec friends,
sans family later when we are actually moved in and settled down.
We Have Kitchen!
Yup, it's another house picture post. Because I just can't muster up the energy to actually write something. Not even to rant about work, and things have been rantworthy there this week (yes, it's the project from hell again, the one that our boss absolutely wants us to do, that everyone at work who will actually be involved in it dreads like the desaster that it threatens to become, and that our client, although they know that they need to do it ASAP, can't make up their mind about, but once they do, everything must be finished by yesterday at the lastest). And things threaten to stay like that throughout next week, in other words until our vacation starts (oh, how I'm counting the days!). Bleh!
Anyway, a week ago, our kitchen looked like
this or
this (yes, this is my wife in the background), depending on where you stood.
But yesterday the kitchen furniture arrived, which was an event we have been looking forward to for weeks, because somehow the kitchen is important to us in a way no other room in the house is. There is a drawback, of course. After all, there always is one: while we now have electricity in the house, we still don't have water, and the waste water pipes still don't go anywhere particular, so we can't actually do anything with our shiny new kitchen, except ogle it from every possible angle, which, unsatisfactory as it is, we still like to do.
And because I just can't resist posting another picture of the in-laws' courtyard, here's our
blooming orchid in the apple tree before the house.
