Dad says the produce in Berlin in June of 2006 was disappointing, that I should pack apples with me. This can’t be right. I remember how appalled I was at the available plant matter in Bergen in December… But wow we can’t grow much of anything here in New York City in late December, either, but we have access to much more than garlic and potatoes. Is it just that Bergen can’t support the import? There is not adequate market? Perhaps. That’s the self-reinforcing cycle of culture, I guess.
Where here can I get a new watch battery on a Sunday, when in this Christian god-adhering nation things are all closed?
I’ve begun making my immediately-post-Berlin plans but they’re all wrong, topographically speaking — way, way too much overland shenanigans as I shuttle between Cologne or Stuttgart and back to Berlin again and Cracow and Vienna and/or Prague and Paris, from where I’ll go to Bucharest indefinitely — must cease shenaniganning, find water, and stars, and stay.
My watch stopped yesterday, which for someone who likes to know the time and gravitates toward the analog and lives for unsettling metaphors is almost too much to bear.
I said, So far I donʼt miss anything. Not a single thing. Actually thatʼs not true. I miss the certainty that anywhere I go I have the tools to be the best possible patron, citizen, whatever, which actually just boils down to speaking the language, because here I know I have to go in and sheepishly ask that they accommodate my stupidity, and also that I canʼt avail myself of signage, which I consider very important. And I miss the selection and pricing of peanut butter.
I’d thought, looking at my map in advance of arrival to the island, that I would just disembark and walk from the port to the villa in Megalochori, judging it merely a couple of miles, assuming the same gentle sloping streets of sprawling Chora replicated on Santorini, but instead I got off the boat into a fearsome crush of tourists and other fresh arrivals by sea, barely able to move, and a string of transport-oriented kiosks at the foot of a cliff. I said this to one ride hawker who approached me, I was thinking I would walk, and he laughed and said You will die, my love, and then he charged me fifteen euro for a rear-bench spot on a cramped shuttle up-island.
On the winding road cut into the rock I played some kind of electronic riddle game with the pack of boyish Australians crowded into the back with me and listened to them talk about the weather with interest. One of them made another one promise to try olives when later they’d get to Morocco, to be open to olive conversion, and they shook on it, and I made a private bet-with-self about how it would go, never to be settled, because I will never see them again.
