In Berlin, finally...

Wow.

The first week in Berlin has been, to put it underwhelmingly light, full. My preconceived notions about this foreign study (as they so often are) were wrong. We won’t spend six, seven hours a day in class being talked at. We won’t take the ‘raging tourists’ track. We won’t even have to dither in the muck of German cuisine every day and night. So far, life has been good.

Considering the jam-packededness of our stay up to the point of this writing, I won’t try to recapitulate all the trips and experiences, but nor will I flutter through this reflection without including details from my point of view. Stories are probably the best course of action. You might have noticed that I tell an exorbitant amount of stories – they can make people laugh, reveal a lot about me and where I’ve been, and I talk too much anyways. So while I have ya, I would like to tell some stories…

 

SeaTac to Amsterdam, with a layover in Hell

I was the first person seated in my aisle on the plane to Amsterdam. Just before the flight attendants closed the fuselage doors, a Libyan woman rushed down the aisle with an infant in one arm and two young kids in tow. They jostled into my row. (This is the part where I sigh painfully and rub my temples as I recount the flight.) The woman looked to be in her mid-40s, with an ornately decorated head scarf and a neat black shirt and pants combo—she was sweating like a turkey in November but lacked the relief of cooler layers. Her son, four, and her daughter, three, wore matching “Dora the Explorer” shirts. A ripe, greenish-yellow booger dangled in the infant’s nostril. I said Hello to my new buddies. The woman lowered her head and emphatically shook an open palm. “I speak no American.” Whoop-dee-doo!

Take-off went smoothly; I mindlessly flitted through Sebald’s The Emigrants with my thumb and looked out a window towards the snowcapped Olympics. Before we had settled into cruising speed I went to my Zen place: long breaths in and cathartic gushes of air out, hoping for a quick daydre… WHAP!!... and the little bastard to my right stomps the seat in front of me. We were three minutes into the flight, at best. The elderly Dutch man in front of me was irate, but since we were still hurtling upwards he could not turn to give me a proper tongue-lashing. What ensued was an awkward he-did-it-no-he-did-it discourse crossing three generations and three languages. The flight attendant politely asked us to remain cordial for the duration of the flight.

As it happens, the two kids speak some English. Their dad either works at UW or is a student there—I high five the boy with a “Go Huskies” hoo-haw. The boy reveals their plans to visit family in Libya while the girl asks for my name. This is a wonderful trick, you see, because the two brats love (LOVE!) to sing the Name Game. I should not have let my guard down. In my casual state, I was vulnerable to their collusions—you could call me a casualty of casualty. I was bombarded by: John, John, fo-fawn, banana-rama, mah-go-blawn, fee-fie-fa-foe-fawn… va-John-John! and all the silly variations until the flight attendant came around with refreshments. Aspirin chased with beer tastes like shit.

I caught some sleep sometime after we had passed Greenland. The kids were passed out and “Fool’s Gold” only goes so far. After some time I stirred and sleepily fixed my cotton ball pillow, taking a quick peek to my right to see how the little ones were. Mom and the three-year-old girl were gone, the boy lay prostrate across their seats, asleep, and the baby was teetering close to the edge of her seat. I picked the baby up and looked wildly around for her mother. As I hunched back into my seat, baby in arms, the mom came back from the bathroom. She gestured that she wanted her baby back, I obliged, and then she turned towards the bathroom again. Two minutes and three Name Games later, mom returned with the baby and a grapefruit-sized white bundle in her hand. She was having some difficulty maneuvering into her seat and so I held out my hands to take the baby. Instead I was presented the curious toilet paper-and-plastic baggie bundle.

(The finale deserves its own paragraph. Sorry, grammar.)

I looked over the unknown package quickly and slipped out of my seat to see if the flight attendants could point me towards a trashcan. The stewardess, Jeanne, turned up her nose when I approached. “Do you have a bin somewhere? I have this thing…” I muttered, trying to keep hushed in the darkened cabin. “We can’t throw that away here. That’s a diaper,” answered Jeanne with a frank chilliness that only a 55-year-old flight attendant possesses. And it was only when the toilet paper flapped open to reveal a healthy deposit of tepid feces that I realized my bundle—which I tossed in the air and yelled “Kobe!” only 15 seconds earlier—was full of Libyan babyshit. How expensive per minute is Child Protective Services on an eastbound Delta flight?