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Previous: September 14, 2003

Next: September 16, 2003

September 15, 2003

Damien dropped us at Gare de l'est at 10 PM. He stayed till departure --- 11 PM. Thanks, Damien! You saved our lives! The girls slept in the car ride to the station. We had to wake them to get on the train.

Asleep? At the same time??? Pinch me.

We booked a private sleeping compartment, with three berths, one atop the other. It was tiny. Teensy weensy. Between ourselves and our luggage, you couldn't stand unless everyone else was lying down, including the luggage. Thankfully it wasn't so small that Inessa couldn't fall asleep within 1.3 seconds. (Eva, on the other hand, found her second wind.)

We tried every combination of ourselves in different beds.

First, it was Inessa on the bottom, Gina and Eva in the middle, me on top.

Finally Eva fell asleep. Then Inessa woke up and wanted someone. Gina went down with her. I stayed on top.

Eva woke up. Gina went back to her. Inessa wanted company. I joined her. No one was on top.

After a while Inessa wanted to be with mama. She joined Gina and Eva in the middle. I stayed down while the top stayed vacant.

When the girls fell asleep, Gina went up to the top and crashed. I stayed at the bottom. It finally worked.

Until Inessa woke up. She and Gina went down to the bottom. Eva stayed in the middle. I went to the top.

Approaching 2 AM we managed to synchronize ourselves, and blissfully slipped off...

An annoyingly short 6 hours later the conductor woke us. He stood in the doorway, bobbing and weaving and holding a tray of hot tea and croissants, which took the edge off the ungodly fatigue. At 9AM we pulled into the München Hauptbahnhof, where the good Mr. Ingo Zeller (weekday vs. weekend) met us.

In the plush leather seats of his Alfa Romeo, we cruised to Furstenfeldbruck, 25 kilometers east of Munich, in the climate-controlled wonder of double carbon filtered fresh air, aided by a GPS-controlled intelligent navigation system, at a nominal rate of no less than 110 mph. There to greet us was Gina's sister Beate (weekday vs. weekend) with a breakfast of freshly cooked wiener & weisswurst, warm pretzels, and a medley of sinus-invigorating mustards. All part of a complete breakfast. We were soon joined by Gina's sister-in-law, Bettina (weekday vs. weekend), and later that evening Gina's brother Bruno (weekday vs. weekend) stopped by.

Beate and Bruno live in the house that their father, Dr. Voll, built. Well, maybe he didn't build it. I don't know. But, anyway, it's a large home split into three discrete sections. In the middle live the Dr. and his wife, Siegrid. Bruno/Bettina and Beate/Ingo live on either side. This makes visiting quite easy.

Late that night Ingo introduced me to Rodney Carrington, a singing cowboy/story teller from Longview, Texas.

This is an excerpt from a live recording called "C'mon, Laugh You Bastards".

"Anybody here been so drunk you went home with someone you're not real proud of? Some of you are doing it right now and you don't even know it. But you never do, do ya? Not till the next morning, wake up naked with em and go, "AW, SHIT!!!" Not so bad as when they wake up and look at you and go, "AW, SHIT!!!"

"I was in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, about four years ago. I got drunk and went home with an ugly woman. Boy she was horrible looking. If you ever go down there and look for her she ain't hard to spot, I got news for ya. Ugly. Had a horn poking out her titty. Ugly woman. I made the mistake of riding with this woman about 30 minutes outta the way. I didn't have any idea where the hell I was going. I didn't really care either. All I could do was sit in the passenger seat of her car and go, "I love you. Show me your titties!" Okay, I didn't do that. Ah, fuck, I did that.

We got to her house and did a little thing, and I sobered up and I went, "Can you take me back?"

She said, "Call a cab. I'm tired."

I called a cab, and I said, "Come get me right now."

He said, "Where are ya?"

"Shit, I don't even know."

"What she look like?"

"She's kinda short. Got a big ass and blonde hair."

"Hell, I know where ya are. I'll be there in a minute."

Later Carrington relates his efforts at trying to buy a "fake weenie" for his wife. When the salesman offers a particularly long one, he says, "That's too goddamn big. I don't wanna compete with that sonofabitch. There oughta be a law where they don't make them damn things over four inches long!"

This reminded me of a question my friend Hernandez once asked. If in the US the average pecker is six inches, what is it in Europe? In the metric system? Ingo wasn't sure. I suggested Google. He browsed to their German site, and punched in something like "average length in Europe." Bam! The first page had it: 17.5 centimeters. Which is 6.69 inches. In Europe you get an extra half-inch. This "Old Europe" thing ain't all that bad. But I suppose it depends how you look at it. When I related this to Gina she said, "In Europe, either a woman is lucky, or the men are better liars."

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Next: September 16, 2003

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