Berlin, 22.01.01
Alive, alone for two more (blessed) weeks. Actually not blessed because it's getting a bit lonesome around here, but I enjoy the freedom of being able to train every night and eat whatever/whenever I want. And also sleeping the night undisturbed and not having to wipe up shit. But beyond that I'm looking forward to having Annette and Madeleine home again in two weeks' time.
Life, basically, is as follows: get up sometime between seven and eight; ride to work by nine or shortly thereafter; leave work between five and six and head for either a gym near Zoo (indoor inline training, Mondays) or Hohenschönhausen (ice training on the indoor 400 m oval in the East, Tuesdays & Thursdays) or Wilmersdorf (ice training on the outdoor 400 m oval in the West, Wednesdays & Fridays); come home sometime between eight and nine, usually very hungry and very tired. I normally take Saturday off to deal with domestic chores or, just over a week ago, to flee town with a friend for an afternoon's tourism; Sundays, I ride the mountainbike for three hours or so then watch various winter sports on TV until I fall asleep on the couch. (An aside. I love German TV! It's like having the Winter Olympics every weekend. All those obscure sports that you would see on North American TV maybe once every four years - cross-country skiing, biathlon, ski jumping, luge, speedskating, bobsled - are broadcast for eight solid hours on Saturday and Sunday. It is so cool.)
I have, needless to say, not spent much time in front of my computer. I'm not even surfing porn in Annette's absence - I'm too bloody sleepy most of the time.
The theory behind all this training is to lay down a good base in the five weeks that I have alone, so that when I revert to a less strenuous workout schedule after the family returns, I'll be able to maintain some decent form. Also skating ice four times a week does help to make up for my missing the first half of the season, before Christmas. It was tough at first but the technique has really improved in the last week or two, to the point where I was actually quite pleased with my performance in our club championships on Sunday. (I won't reveal the time I skated, however.)
Meanwhile, back in Canada, Annette has just returned from an interview trip to Ottawa, where things apparently went quite well. More to the point, Madeleine was successfully left in the care of grandparents for four days. This augurs well for our future independence and mobility. (Actually it went so smoothly that we might just persuade them to take her for the next six months. I think my father would be quite keen on the idea.)
My life will be a little more interesting over the next week because I am hosting a couple of Canadian cyclists who are in town for the Six-Day race (riding the amateur category). I will put them for a couple of nights until the race starts and then help out at the track with translation or whatever else they might need. In exchange for this great service I will get tickets to the event and maybe a few extra for friends, plus it will be hugely cool to hang around with bike racers again.
The rest of today's content will consist of recycled, edited emails. Sorry, no time for anything more exciting.
22.01.01, to Annette:
It was nice to talk to you this morning. I must have been expecting your call because I woke up before the alarm and lay there waiting in the pre-dawn gloom. Either that or the cat woke me up, which I suspect to be the case because she needed to thank me for all my work the night before, changing the litter, cleaning the apartment, making the bed with fresh linens, topping up the kibble, trimming her claws and brushing her coat. She appreciates the things we do for her.
Vita, like Madeleine apparently, has been very cute in your absence. I had to finally trim her claws though, they were just deadly. People at work were beginning to give me funny looks and comment about the state of my hands. They are now healing nicely.
It is now snowing lightly. Eww. I hope this doesn't last. We have Hallentraining tonight and I can take the S-Bahn home, but it does make getting around the city a little more difficult. We had some snow yesterday morning during skating but it stopped again quite quickly.
So the skating went well on Sunday, despite the slightly imperfect blade caused by Friday's crash. [I wiped out in the turn, thanks to a rut in the ice, slid off the track and landed on the asphalt, grinding the edge off one blade in the process. Then I spent the rest of the session in the cabin trying to get it sharp again. Not my best workout.] I was quite pleased by how fast I skated the 3,000. A good sign for the marathon. I won't beat Roman, but maybe I'll only lose one lap to him, not three or four. I'm sure the suit had something to do with it - made me feel like a "real" speedskater. (It's true, at a certain point you begin to feel like a dork if you just wear cycling clothes.) [As my Christmas present I bought myself a full-on speedskating suit, with hood and everything. It looks quite odd. I may have to take a picture.]
Slight backache at work this morning, due no doubt to the moving on Saturday and the skating on Sunday. The moving was fine. [I helped a friend move apartments. He didn't have that much stuff, but when you have to come down four flights of stairs and across two courtyards to load the truck, then haul everything up three flights to the new place, it feels like a lot.] I greatly enjoyed working alongside a bunch of smokers. "Uh, guys, do we really need a five minute break to catch our breath after every trip up the stairs?" And the pot full of Wurstchen was pretty funny. [Back home, you reward your friends with beer and pizza when they help you move. But would anyone order pizza in Germany? God no. They boil up a pot of wieners instead. And the beer is room-temperature because the fridge isn't plugged in.]
22.01.01, to a Canadian friend in Berlin:
I talked to Annette this morning, after she returned from Ottawa. She had a good interview and enjoyed her first visit to Our Nation's Capital. On Saturday she had lunch with a couple of the younger women faculty, who gazed wistfully at her chic Berlin-bought outfit and said "If you come here, don't shop for clothes here." Sounds rather like Washington, where the standard female uniform was a poorly cut navy blue skirt and jacket, white blouse with lacy collar, pumps in the Land's End briefcase and New Balance running shoes for the walk from the Metro. Gag.
18.01.01, to my parents:
Ugh. Good morning. I'm killing time while the database updates, slower than normal, and because my head hurts a bit. It's a sure sign that I'm training hard again - my alcohol tolerance is way down. Last night after skating I went out for a beer on the occasion of a friend's birthday, and my god did I have difficulty metabolizing a full litre. It took quite a while before I could get to sleep. Consequently I am tired today.
My German appears to have taken another step forward - I spent the entire evening chatting away in a bar, barely aware that I was operating in something other than my mother tongue. I wish I'd been the same with French, but I never really made it a priority to live somewhere Francophone for a year, which is the only way.
One of the guys brought his dog, which appeared to be three-quarters pit bull and one-quarter Shar Pei. Jet black with a wrinkled forehead and a ridiculously large mouth, absolutely the sweetest animal I've ever met. Serious danger of being licked to death. I quite enjoyed being chewed on, though Vita gave me a very queer look when I came home. Must have stank to high heaven.
Training, as mentioned, is going well. I'm doing two to three hours every night, normally an hour to ninety minutes on the ice plus all the riding to and fro. My feel for the ice has returned and I am skating much quicker now. I have the maration race in a month's time, that is my goal. The first few weeks back were difficult, I was constantly exhausted, but now my body has adapted to the daily routine and I feel quite good. The extra fat layer I put on at Christmas has happily disappeared.
Annette is off to Ottawa today. It sounds like everything is under control. She's always a bit nervous before these trips, but if anything is generally over-prepared. I think she'll be glad when it's through, the rest of the time in Vancouver won't be so hectic. She's finished the first draft of the book chapter she'd promised to write, and the Toronto application is done, so there's only the next interview and a bit of rewriting to do before she comes home.
That story about the internet adoption is all over the papers here, of course. I made a little joke to Annette about it then had to promise, once again, that I would not attempt to auction Madeleine on e-Bay.
What else? I bought a children's book today. It's sort of like "Are you my mother?" except that it's more along the lines of "Did you shit on me?" The title translates as "The little mole wants to know, who did that on his head." [View the excellent cover.] A mole pops up out of his tunnel and a turd lands on top of his bean and he spends the rest of the book wandering around asking various creatures if it came from them. (I won't spoil it for you by giving away the ending.) I figured it was a must-own. Germans are so odd. The fecal obsession begins very early. Still, it's better than traditional children's literature, the central theme of which seems to be that disobedient or "willful" children have their fingers or hands amputated or die or are disfigured in various horrible ways. Which basically explains WWII.
Another cultural note: the ring of suburbs around a city is called a "speck-gurtel", which literally means "fat-belt", a reference to the rolls of flab around one's midsection. I quite like that.
Oh, I think that's about it. There's a problem with the ISP that hosts our site, the connection is very slow, so I'm just sitting here twiddling my thumbs wondering if the database will upload successfully. Then I'm going to go find a cup of coffee.
17.01.01, to Annette:
Tons of BSE [mad cow disease - remember that?] stuff in the news lately. The government is talking about slaughtering and incinerating 400,000 cows, either whole herds or selectively. Much unfortunate symbolism. Will they haul the cattle away in trains? Will there be long lines stretching into the distance, with a couple of vets deciding who goes back to the fields and who is sent to the incinerator? A most unfortunate historical resonance. (I put this to a sarcastic colleague and he called it "Daisy's Choice". He also told me that the health and/or agriculture minister in Bremen is named one Hilde Adolf. "Adolf, Hilde" must look pretty funny on an passport.) On a related theme, I once heard that the German immigration authorities will never deport anyone by train, because of the symbolic association.
