I Finally Got To See A College Football Game!

Living abroad as we do, whenever we run into some other expats, the conversation invariably turns to the same topic: "what do you miss from home?" After mentioning the super-obvious (friends and family, duh), we occasionally wax rhapsodic about Portland being a foodie heaven with an ample supply of wine shops and world class bars; sometimes we'll get misty about our quasi-pet, the neighbor's cat who ended up spending all of his time at our place, but a lot of the time it's the little things, the touchstones of home-- comfort foods like a decent (and bottomless!) cup of coffee, late night runs to both Zien Hong and the sinful goodness that is the 24-hour, 365-days open Sesame Donuts (breathe there a man with a soul so dead that he would not cast his eyes upon the perfection that is their Chocolate Old Fashioned and declare "by God, THAT is a donut!"). Like I said, the little things.

But I really missed my Saturday tradition of watching college football on the TV from 9:00am 'til whenever. I was blessed to have a very understanding wife who knew my love of the game, and put up with bouts of occasional fanboy screaming at the TV for hours on end. But with the move and the exorbitant cost of cable TV here, it simply could not happen (to get ESPN Europe, you would have to pay a king's ransom, and even then, you would be locked into an ironclad 1-year contract, and only get a sliver of the "regular" US programming, so the idea of spending over 1400 Euros to see maybe 20 football games all year was a bit of a non-starter). Slingbox, the darling technology of the expats, works only if you have a confederate back home with both cable TV and super high-speed internet connection... who wants to watch the same exact programming at the same time. So I suffered in silence, watched the scores update themselves every 60 seconds on Yahoo Sports, maybe caught an occasional online radio broadcast of a game that wasn't blocked (legally, you have to block these things from international listeners, but sometimes stations forget to switch on the jammers)-- hardly a dynamic evening.

As they say in Indiana, sometimes even a blind pig finds an acorn. I was tipped off to a likely extralegal website that rebroadcasts sports games on the internet, and holy cow, it actually worked. So the first college football game I saw in over 13 months happened to be my alma mater Purdue (the best 3-5 team in college ball, baby!) beat the woeful Fighting Illini of Illinois, followed by a stream of other games-- I hate to admit it, but I was up until 3:00am this morning watching football, seemingly trying to make up for lost time. It was great. All I needed was a donut to make my evening complete, but you can't get everything you miss in the same evening.

Safe!

Things are finally settling back to normal here at Expat HQ. B's job is safe. Without going too deeply into it or unfairly (or fairly, whichever) bashing her employer, let's just say that the last 3-4 months have been trying times here, and we lived under the constant pall of this whole adventure of living abroad ending a lot quicker than we expected. So instead of having the time of our lives in Paris a couple weeks ago, it was more subdued than either of us had planned-- fun yes, but wistful. The fantastic news is that by surviving this round of "right-sizing," B is spared from any further staff reductions, and we can pick-and-choose the timing of our departure instead of her company. This called for a celebration, so I busted open the piggy bank and got a bottle of the fantastic Laurent-Perrier Brut Millésimé 1997 champagne. A great exclamation point to a great piece of news.

It's Snowing In Germany!

It wasn't that bad, but it is always disconcerting to find it was actually snowing (light flurries, actually) yesterday. Today, it was coming down harder and actually stuck. I was debating on whether or not to put on my shorts 2 weeks ago in Paris, for the love of Mike! We've been repeatedly told that it never snows in Nuremberg, but here we are in mid October pulling out the scarves and pop-pom hats.

I Had To Go To France To Figure Out Germany

We're back from our 5 days in Paris, and have spent the last week playing catch up, yelling at our dipstick apartment super (I'll save that one for some other time), restocking the pantry, and cleaning up the joint in anticipation of a dinner party this weekend. But as the title suggests, it took a trip to Paris to help me sort out my feelings on the subject of Berlin, the last major city we visited some 7+ weeks ago (downtown core, the Mitte, pictured) when my parents were visiting. While I wouldn't call it "writer's block," I really couldn't think of anything to say about the place, nevermind it's considered one of the world's great cities. With a visit to another notable European city to put things into perspective, I think I can now say this about Berlin: Meh.

While we have friends who positively rave about Berlin and sneak up there every chance they get, Perhaps I'll qualify my comments by saying that given its size, we didn't have enough time to really get a feel for the place-- after all, its 3.4 million people would make Berlin the 3rd largest city in the USA behind New York and LA and well ahead of Chicago-- and its large area of 344 sq. miles makes it comparable to Dallas, a town synonymous with the word "sprawl" (by comparison, Paris has an area footprint of about 34 square miles). So spending less than 2.5 days there probably did not do Berlin justice. All the same, while it stirred some powerful memories for my Dad (who was in Berlin some 47 years ago as a GI), I found the vibe there to be very hard and gritty and the people to be pretty darned rude. It's not like they haven't heard English before-- but our Bavarian inflected German really seemed to grate on some people (remember, Berliners think Bavarians from southern Germany are all a bunch of dumb hicks-- mix in our American accents, and it seemed to bring out the worst). And despite its obvious place in world history, there really wasn't much to see there (we didn't visit the museums on account of time constraints, true enough). Checkpoint Charlie, the legendary flashpoint of East vs. West is little more than a hideously tacky street full of souvenir shops and guys in fake ill-fitting Russian army uniforms hustling money so you can take a picture with them, and some of the major monuments were moved or removed entirely. History's lessons indeed. But here's the crux and what what I really took home from France last week: Paris struck me as a city that truly wanted to be great, and did whatever it could to make that happen. Berlin seems to have had its greatness bestowed upon it due primarily to geographic and historical circumstances and not any sort of overt effort to become one of the world's major cities. Not everything was bad though-- Berlin is so busy remaking itself that it is an architectural geek's dream, and our brief walking tour of the former Communist-controlled East Berlin was a small treat, and I always treasure my all-too brief visits with my folks. But on the whole, I'll take Munich.