I just had a shockingly short trip in Europe. Usually my travel MO is to go for a month or several months or a year when I travel internationally. The careful exploitation of natural breaks in your life plan are integral to this type of travel of course, and so now that I am a working stiff with a "regular" job and not adhering to a campaign cycle or being a student, I have to wander a bit less and plan quite a bit more.
Surprisingly though, short was not terrible. Although I slept in a different bed nearly every night, it was almost how I imagine old rich ladies feel after a wildly expensive spa weekend: tight, taut and rested. It helped, I suppose, that I went nowhere new. My youthful dalliance as an exchange student was in the same German state as the wedding, so it felt like a form of homecoming. The train routes make perfect sense to me here. The culture is as comfortable as yoga pants, and the language came soaring back into the speech section of my brain almost effortlessly.
By arriving a day and a half before the nuptials, I was lucky to fold into the planning errands of the happy couple and found my German spilling into the front seat with amusing stories and harmless gossip. Weddings are particularly inefficient events as all the guests are there to see the couple more than each other--but the actual couple seem always just out of reach.
Despite concerns that the weather would be too cold/rainy, the coffee & cake part of the agenda, and champagne toasts were cozily performed in a three-sided barn with netting on the third side and heat lamps interspersed. I stuck with the Brazilian and German girls who had also been exchange students (with the bride) in my home state in 2000. During the toasts we chatted with the bride's boss, unbeknownst to us, resulting in us telling him that the bride had been a "party girl" in former years. Whoops.
Wedding in German is Hochzeit, or directly translated, "high time." The highest time of the night was a surprise firework show, funded by the father of the bride. Brilliant explosions of light above the sleepy German farm was set to the Lion King's "Circle of Life," as over a hundred guests, emotionally softened by the effects of alcohol, wondered upwardly up with shiny faces of joy. Ain't love grand?
After all the speeches, the eating, the dancing, the bouquet tossing, the skits and the photo-shoots, small groups broke away in a series of taxis and cars. Arriving at the hotel, we were approached by a worried boyfriend: he had lost his girlfriend. When he confused our Brazilian friend for his girlfriend, we realized that the confusion might rest on him. Less than a minute down the road, we came across the actual lost girlfriend, who had apparently left the hotel by foot to find cigarettes at 4am in a thoroughly sleeping village. Unfortunately we had now lost the boyfriend, who it was later revealed to have gone into a hedge. We orchestrated a very drunk reunion between the two that was actually quite heartwarming.
The remaining days of my trip included a day trip back to one of my favorite cities in Germany, Köln, where three girls climbed to the top of the Dom on legs that were dead tired from too much dancing. On Monday, I wandered around Brussels, eating waffles and frites to make up for all the museums being closed, the day capped with a behind-the-scenes tour of the European Parliament buildings (my dear readers should know intimately how much I like Parliamentary buildings--this one is an airport motel compared to Westminster). En route back to New York, I slipped past customs for a few hours to have lunch and a pre-noon beer with a good friend in the Dublin airport. Next time though, I'm going for a month at least.
