Sticky Apple Kisses

Tomorrow is Raven’s motorcycle carnival! I wont be checking it out tomorrow, but next week when I am home and dreaming again of the trip in July I will be drooling over the links she recommends!

SO after working the past 2 days, I now have tomorrow until Tuesday afternoon off (and maybe even that yet since that class seems to want that day off anyway!). So tomorrow I am off to Switzerland with my parents, and then Thursday we are off to Italy until Monday. I may not flock to Parmigiani watches, but I think my parents will enjoy the scenery of both countries with or without the Swiss watches!

So again, I will be AWOL. But taking lots of photos for your viewing pleasure!

After a weekend in the Black Forest what could possibly be better than to spend the night checking out Stuttgart’s Spring Festival, which I have been assured repeatably was the same thing as Octoberfest only cooler because Stuttgart had one in the Spring as WELL as one in the Fall.

Lets just say its a good thing we are going for cheap hotels and hostels for the trip through Italy because we’ve spent all our money on mugs the size of our faces!!

So we survived our first weekend together on Germany’s highways and in the Black Forest. I have always joked that Autobahn is the German’s own Formula One Race Track. My father was driving Patrick’s old VW Polo. My father who hasn’t driven a standard in years, and never for longer than to move my brother’s car from the driveway.

Plotting the route:

So now we are on a highway that has no speed limits (and Mercedes and BMW’s and Audi’s blasted past us like we were doing 90 instead of 140). Lets say that dad treated himself to some German beer once we got to our hotel.

On a different note mom finally went for a bike ride! She never went for long, and she refused to get on back for the autobahn, but Germany has Bundesstraßen (federal roads) as well as Landesstraßes, which are lovely country roads that let you travel along and enjoy the country side as you go!

Mom suiting up:

and getting ready to go!

If worse came to worse we would have stopped at a hotel along the way to recover from the stress or if we terribly lost~! Hotelsdeutsche has thousands of hotels conveniently located for last minute travelers by road in cases of emergency, as well as cheap last minute specials, and we are off to Munich next week!

And so I may be a little quiet over the next few days as I do my best to show my parents all that Southern Germany and northern Italy has to offer. Despite being able to say we can drive to Italy in 5 hours, I felt pretty homesick today when my parents showed all the pictures and videos they took for me back home, I may need new ram to store it all, but it was beyond awesome to see it. Skye J can talk! The last time I saw her she had just learned to walk and could only say hi while raiding my dirty underwear!

A little early, but tomorrow is my mad day!

Ok, so the best way to begin the story is the background to the beginning (welcome to every historians nightmare, where to begin, as every beginning was precluded by major events that allowed things to progress as they did. herrrrr)

So to begin with the most important details, I had just spent a year in Japan. I had applied for grad school in a fit of homesickness, and as my time in Japan came to a close I realized that grad school wasnt where I wanted to be in September after all. So I applied for a job in Korea, and went home to visit.

What has been neglected in that synopsis is that I lived with my then partner of 2 years in Japan, and Japan proved to be our breaker. Yet like many couples we decided to cling to what was dead and buried, or as a line from one of my fav Tori songs goes “and when we died I tried to bribe the undertaker.” Well thats what I did. I still went to Korea, and he stayed home, but we decided to try it long distance.

2 weeks into it I realized exactly what I had done. I relished my apartment to myself, I loved my freedom, and I realized I didn’t miss my ex. Who I then broke up with. This was about mid September, and though I sometimes regretted it (because once you lose someone you realize you may in fact still want them) I basically thought it was a good decision. I still loved him, but we had too much history to go back.

Flash forward one month, my ex has decided to come to Korea, and now I am confused as to if I want to be with him again or not. AND my neighbor bought a dog, which is important to the story for two reasons, one - his girlfriend told him it was her or the dog, 2, I took it.

He got it off a guy on the street, and it proceeded to die a horrible death one week later while I watched as it convulsed on the floor, took it to the vet, and was told he had canine distemper.

Now I had an ex coming to Germany, that I still loved but didn’t want to be with, and a dead dog, and so in a fit of drunk depression I cut my own hair. Short. As in I tied bandannas in it all the time to cover the hack job.

Me and Glen:

Again what does this have to do with the story? Well when new girl Krista arrived the last week of October, we (as in the teachers at school) decided to take her to a bar to celebrate her new home. I distinctly remember thinking to myself “I will only go to be social, its not like I am going to meet anybody anyway, wear that ugly brown shirt and be done with it.”

New girl Krista turned out to be AWESOME and my partner in crime the entire time in Korea. She also managed to lure 3 Germans (one who turned out to be Swiss) to our table, but still I wasnt interested. I was drinking, I was having a good time, but I wasnt thinking anything else. After all, one of them had the DORKIEST glasses ever.

Like so:

However when drunk I will flirt with anyone. And Krista was having so much fun, I decided to go down and meet them.

And then when one of them took of his glasses, I thought he was pretty cute.

And I took him home with me that night for my first ever one night stand. The next morning I bid him goodbye to hold my head and go WTF????????

And then I saw him at my bar the next week, and the next week, and the week after that, until I finally decided to make an honest man out of him and give him my email so he could at least contact me that way.

I do remember he took this picture:

and then in December he left to continue his trip around the world on motorcycle, and in particular to Siberia for Christmas (and to visit a girl he had an attachment with , however open ended it was).

But in February when he said he was in South America, and if I was bored of Asia I could join him, I said yes. And the rest as they say is history. (and like history never so neat and tidy in reality).

And last, my fav pic of us, taken after we got back together the one millionth time in Berlin. If nothing else we are not boring.

Yum yum, and why I am an adult. I emailed my mother and told her that I hope she has abandoned any and all hope of eating healthy here. I just plan on showing her the best that Southern Germany has to offer food wise, and trust me, food wise it offers lots! Despite causing a minor freak out among some of my cousins friends when she commented on my blog entry on gaining weight and ambivalent answers (I mean short of a list of best diet pills I really don’t know sometimes), I am actually quite happy with my weight and I love food. So even if I wasn’t I don’t really see it changing anytime soon. Not while I live in Southern Germany anyway.

We need to clean clean clean. It’s not that we leave food everywhere or we are dirty, but we are lazy and there are papers and books everywhere. As in everywhere. As in it looks almost as bad as when we first moved in. The only reason I know this pic is from when we were moving in is because the Thai covering is missing from the chest.

We need help! I wonder if places like movers New York will just come and take it all away without making you move.

My parents arrive on Wednesday!! I am beyond excited about the whole thing! Though the whole mingling with Patrick’s family in the Black Forest promises to be interesting, this is the first time my parents have come to visit me! (They really missed out by not coming to Japan!!)

I tried to convince them to bring Sky J Baby Doll, but they won’t. I am not exactly domestic, I travel too much and I already have itchy feet (I broke out in a cold sweat the morning I renewed my work visa), air tools will never be on my list of must haves, but I miss my Skye J so bad!!!! Surely my brother needs a break!

For the record I got in trouble for letting her do that.  ;-)  but not as much trouble as when I taught her (BY ACCIDENT!!) to get off the couch head first. 

This weeks WW is actually how I spent Wednesday morning. Something in me finally clicked. A big motorcyle is no different from a little one, I have got to stop letting this bike kick my ass.

And so I had a heart to heart talk with Betty, and we came to an understanding. I want to ride her, not her ride me. She took it well, and I had to be dragged off the compound, all the fun of riding a motorcycle came flooding through again, and she went to being an extension of me rather than a large machine I was trying to maneuver.

I learned to ride in Canada after visiting Patrick in Argentina and falling completely in love with bikes. (I wrote about my experience prior to Argentina here on Empowerment 4 Women), I honestly had no idea how long I would stay in Argentina, I was half planning on having him drop me off in Chile so I could find a job teaching English there.

I did not even have gear at this point, and the first day we met up in Buenos Aires we had to invest in gear. Or at least a helmet. I still was not convinced, and so I bought the cheapest helmet I could find, figuring I was there 2 weeks tops anyway.

The Green Princess Of Coolness Helmut:

Alas, it turned out to be hard, kicked in the stomach, love. Even with the baby alligators living outside of our tent.

The truth was motorcycles offered a freedom I had never had before. And having a tent rolled up and attached to the bike so that we could crash and sleep anywhere (and we did, even in the bushes behind the parking lot for the Valley of the Moon).

After the trip I was home 2 weeks and enrolled in a course so I could get my license. The major difference between Canada and Germany: In Canada you are allowed to drive once you pass your written exam with another driver. In Germany you lose all rights to your future license if you are caught doing so. And so they put you on a path that clocks in at around 2000 Euro, as you pay 45 Euro for 45 minutes for each of your 12 required lessons.

They also treat the small bikes differently than the big ones. Learning on the 125 cc and passing on it would have meant I could drive the 650. Here in Germany it does not work that way. If I want to drive a 650, I need to pass my license driving one.

And I confess, though I loved Betty I was intimidated by her. I didn’t fully trust her. Until Wednesday morning, when Patrick took the day off work to take me to the ADAC compound when no one else would be there. (As a learner of either a car or bike in Germany your only choice to practice is paying for those lessons with your instructor, or on the enclosed compounds where 100 other new learners are bouncing and bopping their cars around). Though I was going there once a week, the sight of those new learners popping their clutches and bouncing up the street hardly inspired desire to put Betty at their mercy.

And on Wednesday we had the place to ourselves, and it just clicked.

Now it really is just the count down of the lessons. I have 3 in a row on Saturday, I hope to have it all over and done with by the end of May, though my guess is that it would be wishful thinking that it will be done in time for the Horizons meeting May 22nd - 25th. Not driving my own bike.