Small things

17 minutes. She gave me 17 minutes before uttering her token sentence "so het ons maar ons dinge" (unsure of how to translate this, perhaps a mixture between 'that's life' and 'everyone has their own problems') and hanging up. My grandmother usually manages a maximum of five minutes of telephone conversation. Usually she'll tell me what she has been up to and then end the call by asking when I'll be back.

Maybe I got 17 minutes because I had an answer. December. 3 months, no plans.

She tells be about all the cousins, their weddings and the birth of the first great-grandchild and her neighbour Oom Boet gardening with a cane and his wife having broken her hip and that trip in the 80s to Germany before the wall fell and my ouma's own flu at the moment. Nothing is repeated, she appears as always. At 85, she has lost the ability to recall what happened a few minutes ago, but not what happened decades ago. I am told about old trips with the grandfather I never met, about what her plans for the day are, about what we'll do for Christmas.

It's a phone call, nothing big really, but in times of uncertainty it's the small things.

So het ons maar ons dinge, ne.

I walk until

We ate Paris. There is no way around it. We turned the city of love into the city of a love for food.

It already started on the train ride to Hamburg: all I had were some delicious cherries and a chocolate flavoured milk, still bought the evening before in Denmark. The cold had not left Germany yet, so I was dressed warmly in jeans, sweater and leather jacket. Upon my arrival in Paris, the layers had to come off. Finally, it was hot.

The first night was spent reuniting with an old friend and her fiancé, in the city by coincidence. We bought a baguette and cheese (and wine), headed to the Ile de la Cité and sat down amongst Parisian youngsters also enjoying the heat, the river and some impromptu jamming on a guitar. B and JH and I just fell easily into old conversation, caught up on gossip and contemplated our futures. After having spent six weeks in Nantes shooting a TV series, both of them were ready to go home, and as she said it, be around 'our people'. By my mense. Another friend, also from SA but now in Toronto, posted something about how all we are is the communities we surround ourselves with. I don't know what it is, but we all seem to have a strong sense that were we are is not home. We long for long dinners that end in the kitchen at 4AM, for cheap wine, for boerewors and braais, for speaking Afrikaans, for fresh fruit that doesn't cost an arm and a leg, we long for our people.

But how do you reconcile wanting to be there with also wanting more than that? I don't miss the crime, I don't miss having to have a car, I don't miss enormous shopping malls and traffic and fear and poverty and politics and problems. Yesterday I went to a free film screening at the university and at 1AM cycled home all by my lonesome. The impossibility of this at home! This nomadic lifestyle is walking the line between missing home but knowing there are other choices one could make.

Choices like what to eat next, haha. The rest of the week was spent hanging out with my friend L. Even buying groceries together was a tiny adventure: we went to Lidl, but getting there involved walking through a couple of streets where it seems all the hair and nail studios of Paris have lined up. They cater for African hair, so we weren't really eligible for getting our hair done. But even more fascinating were the guys hanging out in front of the salons: fit young men with gold chains would approach women on the street to get their nails and hair done. What would the job description be? Hustler? Nail-pimp?In Lidl itself we were treated to the spectacle of an older couple (75ish) being accused by a younger lady of being inhuman, and then shouting at one another whilst the rest of the store looked on. Not a bad start to the week, I think.

Lidl lunch. 

Our culinary tour took us to L'As du Fallafel, which was a lot of garlicky sauce with a couple of fallafels tossed in a pita bread, and which L really liked and I really did not. After having stalked Jamie Oliver's head pastry chef on Instagram, I insisted on going to L'Éclaire de Génie, which has fabulous looking éclairs and barquettes with wonderful flavour combinations. L wanted some froyo instead, but as we found none in the Marais she settled for a McFlurry. I should have maybe saved my 7€ and gone for a McFlurry, too, since the berry barquette was somewhat disappointing.

There was a queue of 30 people at l'As du Fallafel, and at the place right across the street just one lady.

Éclaire de génie. 

We explored the Marché des Enfants Rouges (oldest market in Paris), which hosts an arrangement of food stalls, but as we were there rather early we didn't sample anything. Instead, we headed back to our quartier to get some ice cream at Baci Bisou, a place near the Quai St Martin. I got fleur de lait and noisette topped with Nutella and white chocolate (all in mofos), soooo good.

We tried some really terrible spring rolls (none of the Chinese eateries we saw make them fresh, they are pre-deep fried and then heated up in the microwave), some decent baguettes, some great pains au chocolat, a great Mars cheesecake at Berko and probably some things I can't remember right now.

Berko cupcakes

Food choice for other Fête de la Musique attendants quite obvious...

On Sunday night we were exhausted from the Fête de la Musique, and the place we had intended to go to was already closed. Instead we ambled into a Pakistani/Indian place called Sheezan which turned out to be the best thing we ate all week: the prices were incredibly affordable, the food authentic and well-spiced and it was a very comfortable atmosphere to eat in, almost like being in your mother's kitchen. Also, they had mango lassi, so I was pretty much sold from the get-go.

Sheezan

Mango Lassi

Lamb Korma

Our last supper was at a Mexican joint whose name I can't recall. They have a set meal where you can choose three different tacos or tortillas with a drink, or a burrito. The tortillas are either with maize-meal or normal flour, and were well proportioned. Sadly they got my order wrong, so instead of the tortilla with nopales and cheese I got mushrooms and cheese, but they were tasty nonetheless. I remember eating nopales (cactus leaves) only once before, when our gardener in Mexico showed us how to prepare them and made a delicious meal. I mean, it must be quite a feat to get an 8-year-old to like cactus leaves.

Viva Mexico cabrones.

It was good to be back in Paris, blanketed in anonymity, free to disappear among the crowd.

Parachute

I love my bed. The sheets smell lightly of detergent and lightly of me, the futon has never made me wake-up with a back ache and although the bed is just a simple Ikea construction it works (for now). After two weeks of sleeping elsewhere, I love my bed even more. It was the greatest relief to come home to it and pass out, finally getting a good night's rest.

The first week was spent at a conference for PhD students on visual methodologies at Aarhus University in Denmark. About 20 students from all over and doing very different PhDs came together to discuss the manner in which we choose to study visuality, and how traditional approaches can be remixed to fit the individual topics. The course was led by three wonderful women whose insight and ways of navigating academia was inspiring and ultimately it was more than I had hoped it would be. When I came to Germany, I expected students from various backgrounds and engaged lecturers wanting to discuss canonical works, as well as debating current trends and developments. It is a course in culture, language and media, but somehow it feels as though we stagnated for 18 months and are all feeling rather over it.

The beach near my AirBnb

The week in Aarhus by contrast was exactly how I had imagined by Masters: people with diverse backgrounds, all with a desire to be there and learn from one another, coming together and exchanging worldviews, knowledge and a few beers. We were assigned specific groups, but could combine our various talents to best research the various tasks we were given (or rather, where we were given a wide framework to choose our own specific task from). It was a learning curve to see how the other students approached the research, how each used different methods and how things that I had considered frivolous and more for my own interest than as academic research could be validated (such as doodling or making subjective notes or simply taking photographs).

Before Flensburg, I thought I had found my way. Academia would be where I wanted to spend my time, where I could learn and teach, where knowledge and interaction and working together would be valued, because that is how the department I was in worked (despite administrative bickerings). But the system at this university and the lecturers' attitude of simply not giving a fuck chipped away slowly at the desire to go into the same field. What if everyone, everywhere was like this? Would I want to spend my time surrounded by people who, outwardly at least, have no passion for their jobs, no wish to talk with the students, no  desire to work with instead of against others. I am being unjust to this city, because it does have its beautiful moments and I do value the time spent, the wonderful apartment and the new friends made. And yet it took a little of an optimism that previously would not yield to mumblings of having to choose differently. Now I hear the whispers, ingest the insecurities, constantly overthink whether I can do this. Whereas I looked forward to whatever happens next, this place made me fear it.



Aarhus gave back a sliver of reassurance since I could see and talk to others who had struggled with the same thoughts. Aarhus also gave me music, a saviour in all cases.

Mo. 

Ginger magic Jack Garratt. 

The Northside festival was part of the field work we did, which is also why I initially signed up: a reason to rationalise the great expense of the festival ticket. Friday's line-up already made it all worth it. I stood front and centre for Jack Garratt, and hot damnnnn was it good. As a British guy behind be said: "Yeh, he's a proper lad". I caught Death Cab singing Soul Meets Body and then got into angst-ridden 20-year-old mode for Incubus. The Danes filled the hills for Mø, a Danish singer who dresses like Sporty Spice and whose songs all sounded the same to me. Our little group headed to a different stage to see FKA Twigs, but for having being rather hyped this past year she just seemed exhausted and ingenuine. She came on stage, had her back to the audience, stood there for a few minutes, then left again to come back dancing sultrily and breathing into her microphone, which was her entire performance. Northside redeemed itself through a great set by Alt-J and then the Wu Tang Clan got everyone to jam. At 1:00 in the morning Grace Jones gave the performance of the evening: I cannot remember having consciously listened to her music, but she was enigmatic. She changed costumes, had her tits out, made jokes with the audience and just seemed like a fantastic person with fascinating skeletons in her closet.

IPA. 

Bruschetta Burger. Fancy. 

Little tarts. Fancy #2. 

Saturday was a rainy and windy day, but it suited the set by Anthony & the Johnsons perfectly as he sang with the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra. Somehow the melancholic music and the sound of the rain falling on everyone's raincoats worked so well together that I could forget the miserable weather, the loneliness felt when not going to a festival with friends, and thinking that I shouldn't miss the bus again because walking home for an hour in the rain would suck.


Sunday I decided that just chilling with the others was enough, so we grabbed some beers, stood in a queue for an hour to get a tshirt printed, saw the marvellous man that is Ben Howard and danced a bit to the final act of the festival: the Black Keys.

'Sup Handome. 

The next two days we used our research to formulate concrete findings and suggestions before presenting these before a panel from the festival and ReThink2017, a group charged with making Aarhus a cultural capital in the coming year.

I travelled back to Flensburg, chucked my dirty clothes on the floor, packed new ones, slept a little and went off on the next adventure.

The Wolf at the Door

All these people coming in these doors. They do not see me, yet I see them.
I observe their mannerisms, the unfriendliness and superiority; the ones intent on a quick chat, the ones in a hurry, the ones that know what manual labour means and the ones that don't.

On the weekends an older man comes in with a tiny felt bag that fits two plain bread rolls. He looks like rat-man Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter films when he becomes human again. The top of his head is bald whereas the white whisps of hair around the sides stand out as though he has been electrocuted. He walks slightly hunched over, shuffeling wherever he goes. His face has a gnawing look. All of this I can chalk up to old age and genetics. The thing that freaks me out though are his nails. Long, hard nails that scratch my skin when he hands me the money for the bread. Those nails. The only thing that shifts my facial expression from friendly to freaked are those nails.

Today an older gentleman walked in with his young son. I'd estimate him to be in his mid-50s and his son about 10 years of age. They just wanted to cinnamon rolls, Zimtschnecken with either chocolate or normal icing. Deliciously sweet. As the father handed me the money, his hands were shaking. Shaking constantly. What it means to not be in control of your body, this. Wondering whether he has had a stroke, an illness, or whether the shaking was never not normal to him.

An lady of advanced age comes by daily. She brings her own miniature yellow coffee pot for one. The lid is chipped, the pot stained by daily Danish coffees. We fill it up, and she goes home.

An American woman comes in ever so often. Loud, brash. What you would expect an American to be, stereotypes not being disappointed. She comes in eating sweets and buys more pastries and breads. I like her because I can speak in English but her loudness and her insistence on having a chat at times becomes an obstacle when there is a line and I can see Europeans not understanding why things aren't being done chop chop.

There is a Spanish lady as well, in her early 30s. Her husband sings at the theatre here. I have never been. She speaks in Spanish to me, asking about the day, but then switches to German when she orders.

At times, friends suddenly stand there when I look up. At other times, people I recognise from somewhere, class perhaps, but where I can't put my finger on it. All these people, waves of them, crashing into the heat of the bakery. And I, sweating, in an ill-fitting T-shirt and unwashed hair, I see them all.

Don't Panic

According to the psychologist, the one problem I have is saying 'yes' to things too often.
I kind of associated saying 'yes' to things unexpected with saying 'yes' to possible adventures and thus not be left at the end of my life thinking: sheesh, wish I had done more.
Therefore, when a friend asked if I wanted to join her and her parents on a cruise to Oslo from Kiel, I thought: this could be cool. Oslo! Why not?!

The problem arises when you realise that I am a naive idiot: I thought the point of the cruise was spending time in Oslo, and not spending time on the ship. Why would I want to spend all my time on some enormous vessel where everything is massively expensive and there is nothing really to do? Alas, apparently most people go on cruises for the ship and not for the destination.

Last Monday we drove to Kiel with this nice guy Henrik, a student doing an internship in Leipzig at the BMW plant. Then we met my friend's parents and wandered around Kiel for a bit since we were rather early and the ship wasn't leaving for a couple of  hours. Her parents are cruise-people. They had been on a cruise to Göteborg the previous days and enjoyed talking about the enormity of the vessels; they liked comparing the two ships as they were loaded in the harbour; they kept going on and on about how large the ships were. For cruise-ship people, this is certainly an important aspect of cruising. For non-cruise-ship-people like myself it is worth mentioning once, at most.

We finally boarded and found our way to our cabins, which were spacious enough with two beds and a little bathroom. Then, with a throng of other people, we headed to the upper decks to see the ship leaving the harbour, as in Titanic when everyone is waving at the people down below from an impressive height. Except that it was nothing like in Titanic: everyone crowded around the railing in their all-weather jackets, taking photographs of the firth as the ship propelled itself forward. No one was waving because no one cared whether the big white thing that left and came back daily was leaving. We weren't going to start new lives in a New World or drown in icy waters. Basically, as I gathered later, most people were there for the food.

Then the wind and cold became too much, so I passed out for a little nap as my friend explored the ship with her parents. As part of our deal we had booked the dinner and breakfast-buffet options, which meant that we basically stuffed our faces with way too much food. I think there is something in the illusion of having paid for something and then having to get as much as possible from it. Well, let me assure you, we had our fill.

Baltic Sea.

The Storebæltsbroen, a bridge linking the Danish islands. 

The next morning we finally cruised into Oslo. That, I'll admit, was the coolest part of the journey: slowly entering the harbour with a great panorama of the entire city. It reminded me of how travel must have been decades ago, of how back then there wasn't the same expectation of velocity, of getting somewhere as fast as possible. My own grandfather emigrated from Germany to SA by taking various ships down from Venice and along East Africa to finally reaching Durban.

Propelling into Oslo

We didn't get to see much of Oslo since we only had four hours there. Or rather, 3 hours, as the disembarking and reembarking takes a while. With the parents we caught a tram to Vigeland Park, a park filled with sculptures all made by the same artist. Then we went back into the city to meet Ivan, a friend who by chance had relocated to Norway. He showed us around a bit and we ended up drinking a cappuccino at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (without going into the museum). Then we headed back to the ship, boarded, again watched as we left the harbour, again ate too much at dinner, and said our goodbyes in Kiel as I went to Berlin and my friend and her parents went back to Flensburg.

Green Oslo. 

Vigelund Park. 

Oslo City Hall, where the Nobel Peace Price ceremony is held. 

Adventuring, a little at least. 

Ivan told us about an essay by David Foster Wallace entitled A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again where Foster Wallace describes his week-long cruise from Florida to the Caribbean. Our trip was a lot shorter and less sunny, but I'd also not do it again. The point of going somewhere is to actually see the place you were going, to spend time exploring the nooks and crannies, and maybe go into a museum or two. I had looked forward to seeing Oslo, and yet there was not enough time. had we stayed a night or two, perhaps I wouldn't be so negatively inclined. Although it was a great bonding experience and lovely spending time with my friend's parents, it really is for other people. I don't even know which kind of people, really. Cruise-ship people, perhaps. People who like going crazy at buffets. People who only buy all-weather clothes. People who buy cigarettes in cartons at the Duty Free store on board. People 70+. People amazed by the size of things.

Not me though. I am not one of those people.

Oh, one bonus of the duty free store on the ship: they had The Chocolate Block wine, one of my favourites. But it cost R300, so I thought: "Rather not". 

Stormy Waters

So.
Last week I went on a cruise from Kiel to Oslo. And forgot my diary in the cabin.
Those pages are a written testament from the moment I left SA, with all the trips, concerts, emotions and thoughts in between recorded in it. I realise full and well it is just paper, it is not the thing of most monetary worth that I could have lost. Yet it matters, because it cannot be replaced. I try to remember what I wrote down. The drawings I did of the covered Muslim ladies at Doha airport with their very fancy footwork. The questioning of whether the winter depression will ever end, whether depression can truly be linked to the darkness outside and is not simply a consequence of not being able to see the wood for the trees. Late night notes on a full moon admired from my bedroom window. Little trips to Copenhagen, Hamburg, Amsterdam. Drawn maps of places where I didn't have internet. Daily anecdotes on the long vacation back home. All these words, lost.

I've had diaries since childhood. In a box at my mother's house a dozen or more are gathering dust. Perhaps each of us has something that saves us, something that makes sense when everything else does not. For the one it may be a form of exercise, for another it may be escaping into WoW or League of Legends or some other alliterated game. It may be a person or a pet or dancing to 'Lotus Flower' when you are alone. Yet (I assume) we all need to flee our minds and our environments at times. And that is what these diaries have provided: a safe space to make sense of things. Not even to make sense so much, rather to release the jumbled mess in my brain onto the neat lines of a page. The written word, the word written in my handwriting, makes the bad and the good better.

My aunt asked me last year why I write. What is the reason to sit down, whether it be in front of a computer or a blank page or a diary or a typewriter or whichever other device you may choose, and to start pouring the words onto paper?

The answer is simple: there is nothing else. It is not about being read by others (although naturally one also wants to be read) or about creating the next great novel or changing the world. This writing is a chance to be selfish, to give all of myself to myself. It is a chance to see how I have changed over the years, how what seemed like mountains at the time could be conquered. It is a testament to the past, stemming from the fear that something might be forgotten. It is writing with my fountain pen when most things are typed these days. It is collecting tiny snippets of concert tickets and everyday conversations. It is knowing that words matter.



Quite fitting: this Scrabble ad. "There's magic in words". Indeed.

I feel like I'm just treading water

Not Waving but Drowning
BY STEVIE SMITH 1902–1971

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Do the hard times come to a screeching halt at some point? Do things start making sense and all of a sudden you know, you just know, what it is you are doing?

These are restless nights, man. And not just for me. I am not restless in isolation. All around me there is fear mongering towards a generation so unsure of ourselves that we are deer in the headlights, unable to move in any direction even when we know the fucking 18-wheeler is barreling down the highway at top speed and won't stop to spare us. From all sides come the nagging questions about what our plans are, what we intend on doing with our lives, whilst at the same time being told that there are no jobs, that by the time we retire the retirement fund will be empty, global warming will have killed off all the polar bears, China will take over and disasters upon disasters upon disasters will happen. And this is not even considering the small catastrophes that happen at 4 PM on an ordinary Wednesday, the ones where the unthinkable occurs to the ones we love. 

So I am in a constant state of panic about not being able to manage it all, about unsuccessfully multitasking, about where to come 2016. For now there is a plan, for the next 6 months there are barely hours left to breathe. But come 2016, the Fates are reinventing my wheel for what feels like the umpteenth time. 

Logic and experience tell me it will be ok. Everything will be ok. You can't plan this, you have to leave some things in the hands of whatever comes next. Logic and experience tell me I can handle all of it. But still. At times I wish I was made of lesser stuff, that I needed someone besides myself to tell me it will all be ok, that I could remain in one place for the sake of one person, that life within boundaries would be my choice. Instead, an anxiety about wanting more than walls and 9-to-5s and a daily dullness challenges the fear I have of being much too far out all my life and not waving but drowning.

My flaws are open season

Bit of that pubescent insecurity flaring up. Bit of the old playlists balancing it all out again. At times all you need is a little air guitar.

You got some me in you

Jy stuur foto's van skape voor julle twee weer op pad is. Hoe anders ons verhouding is in vergelyking met julle s'n. Vandag het ek met G. gesels oor ouers, oor wat die ander helfte gemis het deur nie daar te wees nie, watse verskil dit maak as mens saam deur die vuur moet stap. Ek verlang na jou, na die lang pad, na kos soos wat net jy dit kan maak, na tye met die hondjies, na die reuk van daai grys-blou truitjie van jou.

Ek wil voorberei vir die gesprek met die sielkundige, die voorbereiding vir 'n nog groter/ander gesprek einde van die maand, ek wil notas maak in my dagboek.

Toe kry ek dié, van 'n tyd net nadat ek weer terug was in die land waar selfs die wolke in gelid marsjeer:

Vanaand maak ek my bed
met 'n laken wat jy oor
12 000 km
2 vliegtuie
3 treine
en 'n taxi gebring het.
Dit is niks besonders nie,
vaal blou. Dis al.
Maar selfs deur my
verstopte neus
(verkoue in die somer? waar op Gods aarde?)
ruik ek hy is van ver,
van die tuiste af. 

Ek is lief vir jou Moomin.

Floriography

At some point in high school we were doing The Merchant of Venice. Our teacher was a tall dame nearing retirement. She was always impeccably dressed, with a hint of expensive jewellery. Frau something-or-other was intimidating yet friendly, intent on teaching us to have ambitions whilst also making us appreciate the beauty of the language. 

This day, we were nearing the end of the play, and I knew the scene would come. The one I had heard quoted before, the one I (mis)wrote on my jeans, the one thing Shakespeare wrote besides 'to be or not to be, that is the question' that I can't forget. 

Always these lines: 

SHYLOCK

To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we willresemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.

The Merchant of Venice,3,i.
  

You are one of us

There is something about pilgrimages, about being on the long road with a certain goal that appeals to my inner wild child. Travelling, moving somewhere out of the ordinary, means breaking away (at least for a while)  from responsibilities. My mother and I have road-tripped together most often, so it is hard for me to hear about her driving alone to fetch my gran in Jeffrey's Bay. It is hard not being there, not helping to pack the car, not taking the longer shifts. I know the road they are taking: Jansenville, Graaff-Reinet, Middelburg, Colesberg, Bloemfontein. When driving down from Pretoria my grandmother would call at intervals, asking where we were, calculating how fast we were reaching each milepost along the road.

The family was trekking into the heart of the country for a reunion of epic proportions. Cousins, great-cousins, aunts, uncles, everyone related in some way, everyone wanting to see how the others had changed. Underneath it all a current of familiar strife, people having fallen out and not spoken to one another in years. This frustrates me extremely. My cousin Emce calls me 'kwaai katjie' and the other day my mother and grandmother laughed as they said I was a 'kwaaitjie kabouter' (it translates into an angry kitten and an angry little gnome). They say this without listening. I am angry, it is true, but at them, for never talking about anything. Avoiding conflict and pretending at everything being a-ok runs in their veins, with the end result being no one talking to one another. If we do not speak about it, it is not happening.

I fully understand that not everyone wants to talk at length about their feelings. We are not on Freud's couch, there is no need for psychoanalysis. But I will insist on honesty. I will insist on making things a-ok, on working at it, instead of feigning ignorance at the problems in our midst. They do not understand this being-far-away-thing. I appreciate the videos, the voice messages, the photographs of togetherness being sent over social media more than they know. I thank the Gods for WhatsApp and FaceTime. Yet the sentence "When are you coming for a visit?" stresses me, because I have no answer. I don't know if or when I'll come back. Personal aspirations clash with familiar desires, wanting to see more with wanting to be there.

It won't be an easy choice, when I eventually make it. It won't be a permanent one, probably. But it will mean more years in far away places, not coming to Sunday lunches, Christmas dinners or helping to drive the long road. It means building a life so apart form them that I fear at some point the voice notes will stop, the photographs won't be shared, and I will no longer be one of them.

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz

The car I learned to drive in was more of a ship than a car. I steered a ship on the road, not some plastic sardine box. The old white Merc 190 from the late 80s was my great-uncle's car, which my father had bought off him somewhere when we were living in Geneva. The car traveled with us to Mexico, and then was placed in a container and shipped back to South Africa, full of cases of red wine if I remember correctly.

The problem with this is that the Mercedes is a left-hand drive, and South Africa has right-hand drive cars. So any time the driver would have to turn right, seeing the oncoming traffic was made harder than necessary. Before the white Mercedes there was the blue station wagon, also a Mercedes, and much more of a ship to steer than the 190. It was a solid steel block, relentless in its stability. Someone clipped the station wagon while my sister was waiting at a robot and she barely felt it (probably an exaggeration, but I quite like the idea of her not noticing she is in a car accident).

Beyond these two cars there was another green Merc somewhere in the dark recesses of my childhood memories. My father still drives a silver Merc station wagon, and the white ship was my ride in Cape Town during last year's holidays. Somehow, we have remained fairly loyal to the brand.

Sticking with the horse. 

In Stuttgart, we had the option of going to the Mercedes Benz Museum or to the Porsche one. Since Mercedes has an older history, we headed there on Wednesday morning. The percentage of Mercedes cars increases exponentially the closer one gets to the imposing building that hosts the museum. The idea is to start at the top and then spiral one's way down automobile and world history whilst also seeing the various cars from different eras. Nina and I are both not car obsessed and I think one could spend a lot longer in the museum than we did. It is beautifully done, but after having spent two hours on the top three floors alone we speedwalked through the remaining six levels. In any case, the classic cars seemed more appealing due to their Great-Gatsby looks than the ones that appear from the 1970s onwards.

First patent. 

In the end we got slightly lost on the sales floor (where no one tried to sell us a car, wonder why) before eventually having to go up two floors again to escape the gigantic museum. Next time I might stick to art again.

Wait on the brink

With many travels coming up in the next few months I realised I had never spoken about the get-away to Stuttgart at the end of March.

We never wanted to go to Stuttgart. My friend Nina came over one night and we spoke about Germanwings' bling booking option. We were both feeling drowned by this place and in need of different air, so on the spur of the moment we booked a flight to an exotic place. Or so we thought. For an agonising 45 seconds we were giddy with excitement at ending up in Budapest, Manchester, Geneva or Paris. We spoke about acquaintances in those cities that we could stay with, and what adventures we would have. Then the site showed us our destination: Stuttgart. We wouldn't even be leaving the country. Getting to the airport in Hamburg from here would take longer than the actual flight. Disappointment washed over us, and the need to say that we'd make the best of it. Hell, we'd both not been there before. And we'd get away, at least.

So on a Monday morning we boarded a plane to Stuttgart, where we spent the first two days at Andrea's place. Andrea is in his early forties, has an enormous bush of black ringlets streaked with grey that frame his face and speaks a strange German that is tinged with both his native Italian and the local Swabian dialect. He has lived in Stuttgart for 17 years and works at some IT company. The first night he showed us around a bit and made a great supper consisting of pasta with broccoli, raisins, pine nuts, generous helpings of olive oil and even more generous helpings of Parmesan. The raisins complemented the dish fantastically, as did the wine he generously offered us (his entire kitchen is stocked with wine since his friends keep bringing him some and he does not drink).

Tuesday was spent exploring the city. Since I am slightly OCD about seeing things in new places whilst not spending any money, I had trip-advisored myself though the Internet and written down what might be interesting to see. Our Tuesday started off with walking up the inclining hill to the Corbusier house in the Weissenhof neighbourhood. but the trip was rather pointless since the Curbusier museum was closed and we both aren't so interested in his five points of architecture to truly appreciate the areas designated style.

Corbusier House. 

So we went back down the hill and into the city library, which is often featured online for its distinctive design. It was wonderful simply being in a library with a large collection, so we investigated the different sections and then went to the roof terrace. I was expecting benches and maybe a roof garden, but it was just concrete and steel-mesh flooring, with a view of half a dozen cranes.

Books books books. 

Our walk continued through the business district towards the central station and then to the Hans im Glück fountain, which is surrounded by little restaurants. In the hopes of finding something similar to Hamburg's Sternschanze or Joburg's Braamfontein we went to the Bohnenviertel (Bean District), but were sadly disappointed in finding only a handful of interesting stores and quaint restaurants in the entire area. Our quest to find the beating heart of this city led us onwards to the Feuerseeplatz with its lake and then we took the S-Bahn out of the city into the winelands. Thinking we'd go on a drinking tour of different vineyards we started climbing the Rotenberg. Again, we were mistaken: none of the wineries were open yet because spring hadn't really started and there was not a grape in sight, never mind some wine. We soldiered on in what felt like sweltering heat, conquering the mountain in wingtips. At some point we took a short-cut up an endless row of tiny stairs between the vines, and collapsed at the top. The time it took to recover from the vertical incline would've probably amounted to the same time it would have taken had we snaked our way up the hill like normal people.

Feuerseeplatz

"No time, I have to live!"

Upon reaching the top we sat down in front of the memorial site of some dead Wüttembergian queen and enjoyed the view. No ocean in sight, just a sea of hills. Late afternoon lead us down the mountain again where we bought a cold beer and relaxed next to the river. When it started raining we took the train back to the city and indulged in a Swabian meal of Spätzle with cheese or Geschnetzeltes (strips of meat in a creamy mushroom sauce). Spätzle is a dish I associate with various parts of my family: when I was younger we'd sometimes visit distant relatives in Wiesenbach (a tiny town in Baden-Württemberg) where they'd often make Spätzle with Geschnetzeltes. My German grandmother also fed us Spätzle with Rouladen the few times we visited her and my grandfather in Paarl. Lastly, my mom would make double the amount of Spätzle and bake one dish with cheese in the oven whilst freezing the other one for the times that she could not be there. Strange how a noodle is more than a noodle at times.

Love never ends.

View from the top. 

Beer time. 

Dinner: Spätzle with Geschnetzeltes. 

Tuesday left us exhaused, so we headed home.
I'm also exhaused, so I'll continue the tall tales of adventure time in Stuttgart tomorrow :)