18. 2(Xen)

That title, there, is a mathy play on words. See, I've got the quantity of Xen multiplied by two, which you can also say as Xen times two.  And, see, it's part two of the Xen Times blog, so...get it?

Hmp. Anyway, we pick up where I left off. 

Saturday Megan had to work again. I suppose it is the reason we came here, but I was coming to realize just how it much sucks not speaking French. I've thought my French, while not good, wasn't terrible. But what little French I have gets scant practice. If Megan's with me, she does the talking, so I pretty much just buy croissants in the morning, beer at Villa Borghese, and brief interactions at the grocery store (“No, I don't have a fidelity card,” “I'm using American Express,” etc). And I can read signs sort of okay, but usually I have her there to double check with.

17. Xen Times

My brother came to town. Xen's my youngest brother, thirteen years my junior. Megan and I wanted to show him a good time in a town that we live in, but rarely go all tourist-ey in.

That's him there on the left, plus, like, 20 years.

And thus began a madcap tour of more museums and attractions than even Mike and Monica (Megan's parents) saw when they were here (that was over New Year's, and I'm getting to it). I found that even with my meager French, even though I've been here for a while, it's hard to get by without my compass rose, the star by which Petit Bateau sails, the soon-to-be Dr. Megan McMullan. It also made me wish I had a pedomoter.

16. Recloses recluses

I have always been a bit of a firebug, ladies and gentlemen. Well, I say a bit, but...

I almost burned down our neighbors' house when I was little. A friend of mine and I sneaked into their basement. My mom found us there because of the smoke billowing out of the cellar door from the cardboard boxes we were lighting on fire.

Being forced to apologize to my neighbor, though terrifying, did not cure me. I carried two boxes of wooden matches around in my pocket always; the cardboard book kind were useless, hard to light and no good as tinder. I had them in my pocket when I was playing soccer a couple years later (well, football, actually; we were in England at the time). When I blocked a goal with my thigh the two boxes, or maybe all those match heads themselves, rubbed together and burst into flame.

15. Hair

I don't have a lot to talk about this week. Things seem to be holding their breath for the coming week. There's Christmas, which seems to be a much more understated deal here than in the US. Can I say much more understated? Should I just say less stated? Hmm. Nope. That must be one of those words where we've lost the positive. Nobody's plussed anymore, and maybe it's because we use sequiturs all the time that we don't talk about them.

Oh wait. The opposite of understate is overstate. Which are extremes of simply stating something. Hmm again. See, if I was going to be really, like, high-quality about this post, I would delete all this since I'm not drawing attention to something interesting. You know, stuff like pointing out that scientists do in fact know how bumblebees fly. See, Antoine Magnan, a French entemologist in the 1930s, after doing research and calculations and stuff, said that bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly and put it in a book. Then he checked his math, realized that he'd goofed, reworked the...things, and figured out that it made perfect sense for bumblebees to be able to fly.

Wrong Bumblebee. And he couldn't fly.

But...Christmas is coming. A friend of ours is leaving town for a week or so and we'll be keeping his place just south of Paris, out in the woods somewhere, safe and warm. That should be fun. Then Megan's parents are coming for about a week over New Year's, during which time we're going to freaking Marrakesh. Yeah. In Morocco. That'll keep me in blog material for a while. But for now...nothing. So let's talk about my hair.

14. Berlin: After the Fall of the Turkey

The day after Thanksgiving in Berlin (link to last week's post here), we woke to the banging and pounding of hammers, punctuated by the occasional scream of a power saw. At first, my muzzy head thought we were back in Le Petit Bateau where these sounds were, if not welcome, at least familiar. When we finally bestirred ourselves from our bed about 11 and headed into the rest of the apartment, Brunella told us that the building's owners had been planning to do some major renovations, modernizing the wiring and plumbing throughout the building. But she'd thought they weren't doing it until next week. Apparently they were running ahead of schedule.

Ah well. I was at least used to these things. There's been construction and remodeling in the building that houses Petit Bateau almost since we moved in, and directly below us for more than a month. At the very least this percussive wake up call would ensure that we didn't sleep our time in Berlin away.

However, there was an added element of excitement: while they were modernizing the plumbing, the water on our side of the building would be turned off. Today and for the rest of the week we would be unable to use the faucets, take a shower, or use the toilets from 8 am to 4pm.

Pic unrelated. But funny.

13. Thanksgiving in Berlin

We went to Berlin, y'all! We've got a friend- whom I shall refer to as Brunella- living there for a while doing academic stuff of various flavors. Some of you know her and might recognize her in some of the pictures, but I'm going to use Jean Grey to represent her because they're both hot and have sexy auburn hair.

So Brunella was planning on having a Thanksgiving dinner to show her friends in Berlin how we roll when we decide to glut out. Now, Germany is no stranger to lots of food, but it needed to be shown how, way back in the day, the Pilgrims and the Indians, er...Protestant buckle-fetishists and indigenous peoples, urm...crazy crackers and guileless Native Americans, like, ate some stuff in idyllic harmony before going back to playing the colonial repression game the way it's played everywhere else. 

Brunella invited us to this bash, and we were all like, “Hells yeah!” It turned out that an American lady we had met previously, who was living in Paris with her family for academic reasons, was throwing a dinner for others of an American persuasion in the City of Lights. She invited us to come and we did, so we got to have two turkstravaganzas this year. But that diverges from the tale at hand. Come read with me.

12. The War with Monsieur LeClub, Part II

When last we looked in on this naval engagement, things were heating up. After some initial cautionary fire, Monsieur LeClub had shown his complete disregard for our well-being by having a party that kept us up till all hours. Meanwhile, Polecat was chattering with her friends at annoying volume on the other side of our wall. If you haven't read Part I of this tale, well, you really should. We had just spoken with our building manager, La Guardienne, and she said that she would speak with LeClub. We have our own attacks planned, as well.