an hour in the eighth

   



Work ate me a little over the past week or so, and I've only just now gotten around to uploading the pictures from when I went on a one-day business trip to Paris two Wednesdays ago. My coworker Anna and I were lucky enough to sneak in an hour of wandering around the 8th arrondissment after we were done with meetings: down the Champs-Élysées and over to the Seine, with views of the Eiffel Tower. Not bad, not bad.

Feierabend

One of the very best German words there is: Feierabend. It's the evening, specifically the evening after a day of work, but there's something really wonderful about it in that it has that bit of feiern in there, which means "to celebrate" -- celebrating the fact that now you can sit, guilt-free, by the side of the river and drink a small beer and write, because you've made it through another day, because the business part of the day is done.

food & coffee & the city i love

I'm a huge fan of taking pictures of the table in front of me while at cafés and restaurants.










It seems like most everyone I know is working on repatriating rather than expatriating. Like Cheryl (moving my very favorite city!), and Katherine, and my ex-coworker Róisín, who just left Frankfurt after thirteen years of living here to move back to Ireland and become a teacher. And here I am, 3.5 months into ex-pat land, moving to a new apartment quite soon (for which I am only moderately equipped, but an IKEA run will happen soon, and in the meantime I am quite delighted with my impulse purchase of these spoons the other day -- I may not have forks or knives or, in fact, plates, but I have got spoons!).

I don't feel totally new here anymore -- I don't get lost walking around the Innenstadt; I have a working grasp of the public transportation system and how to bike to work; the German keyboard seems more natural than the American one on my laptop now (though this latter is just sad, since it means that I have been working too much!) -- but I don't feel totally settled yet, either. Summertime, everyone keeps telling me. Just wait for summer.

I don't think Frankfurt stands much of a chance of knocking NYC out of my number one favorite-city-ever spot, but I guess it doesn't have to. One of my college friends was born and raised in L.A. and had no intentions of ever living anywhere else. "It's the best city in the world," she said. "Why would I want to be elsewhere?" I didn't get it, where L.A. was concerned, but oh, I feel that way about New York. And as much as I miss it right now, it's strangely comforting, too, to know that I feel that way about a place -- and to know that I'm going to go back, that that is where I want to be. It's nice to have that to look forward to, nebulous though my date of return might be.

come on, come on, we'll dance all night

I seem to be on a posting time delay! If I were up to date, I would be posting about how I am spending the second long weekend in a row on the Jersey Shore, and am putting my wicked plot of not working a full week between now and Labor Day into action (this coming week will be Week Three of this). But I am dumb and have neither taken any pictures of the Jersey Shore nor brought my camera cable along, and I never posted pictures from my business trip to Switzerland, anyway, so that is what I shall do.

At the end of June/beginning of July, I spent about a week in Lausanne, Switzerland for work. Lausanne is a ridiculous place to try to work, because it looks like this:

     

We were staying in the Hotel Beau-Rivage Palace, which certainly didn't help matters.

     

Let's put it this way: the amount that my room cost for a week and change was a decent-sized chunk of what I make in a year.

Pretty hard to argue with that view, though.

     

     

Lausanne is a very cool city on a hill with multiple levels of walkways and hidden squares. The metro line we were on ran straight up a hill into the city center -- so very directly uphill that you could feel yourself sliding off your seat when you headed back down.

The Saturday I was in Lausanne, I spent five hours in a copy shop. This was the copy shop (through the archway):



The Swiss thought I was the weirdest thing they'd ever seen, especially since I spoke basically no French and could not properly explain what the heck I was doing there in the first place. Random American making 800 Swiss francs worth of copies? Extremely bizarre.

After the work part of the trip was over, I went and visited my former roommate Inga and her family in Trossingen, which is pretty much directly on a parallel with Freiburg, only the Black Forest is in the middle. I am a fan of the Black Forest.

     

Inga's family also has a seventeen-year-old cat named Idefix. Idefix really loves to rub all over you and let you stroke his head and back until the point when he decides he is done with you and bites.

     

After a couple of days in Trossingen, I headed to Frankfurt at the behest of the partner who'd asked if I was interested in transferring there. (Yes! I said. Yes, I am interested!) I was sort of . . . underwhelmed by the city. I'm thinking about moving from New York to Frankfurt??, was basically the way my thoughts went. But my law firm's office is in the Main Tower, which is pretty neat. And the town is cute enough.

     

(That first picture is of the Römer, which I think would be cuter minus the sound stage!)

The Frankfurt transfer is pretty much totally official, by the way. I'll know timeline details by Wednesday (approximate timeline details, anyway, since it's all still dependent on the visa process) and after that I will be going. A little bit scary but mostly very cool. Also, at a party at the Naumanns' new shore house the other night, half the Naumann clan decided they are going to come visit me in early December to hit up the Christmas markets and the spas at Baden-Baden. Should be a delightful and hilarious time.

gone away, queen of the highway

A weird and kind of staggering thought that occurred to me while I was sitting in business class two weeks ago today, about to fly to Switzerland for an arbitration hearing: if I hadn't randomly decided, at age fifteen, that my high school's German exchange program sounded pretty cool and hey, I should start taking German, my life would look nothing like it does.

Maybe 'nothing' is strong. It's entirely possible that I still would have gotten hooked on the idea of Pomona. It's rather unlikely that I wouldn't have still been friends with Katie, and so maybe I still would have ended up living in New York with her and Ana and Diana after college. But I certainly wouldn't have studied abroad in Freiburg, wouldn't have filled Cleary's need for a German speaker, wouldn't have been sitting on that plane at that moment two weeks ago. And that was a crazy thing to think—much as we can't have any idea what it was exactly that we did that will lead us to where we are in life—that I could say with so much certainty that, if I hadn't started taking German as a fifteen-year-old, I wouldn't have arrived at that particular point.

Incidentally, it is also pretty staggering to think that, eight years ago, I could not speak a word of German.

More about this after I talk to my boss today, but I very well may be moving to Frankfurt within the next few months. Big things are afoot!