Back home, and I have no idea what time it is….

Home! Here at my computer, drinking my coffee, listening to my radio, in my house! Home! It’s always fun to go on a trip like we went on (and we did have a lot of fun), but it also always nice to be home after a trip like the one we went on.

I’m in that fuzzy space of time right now; it’s 6:30-7:00 am here, but it’s about midnight in Munich, and my body is somewhere lost in that space. So for now, while I download pictures from my iPod, I thought I’d post a few miscellaneous thoughts on our last couple of days:

• Sunday we went to Munich as a sort of “staging area” for our flight home on Monday/yesterday. We stayed at a hotel in a suburb of Munich near the airport. Our first activity of the day was going to the airport to check things out, which turned out to be a pretty good idea– the airport was a bit of a maze, at least to us.
• Back at the hotel we were staying, there was some kind of wine/beer festival out in the courtyard. It was kind of rainy and such, not exactly festival weather, but it was kind of fun nonetheless. We had some wine and beer, some sort of Bavarian cheese spread (which I found kind of yucky), and trout roasted on a stick (which was good). The entertainment featured what struck me as a bizarre sort of German lounge act. These three guys in lederhosen had all this computer stuff backing up their singing, and they sang a combination of old American pop music and German songs. They did a terrible job with the American songs, so I can only imagine what they did with the German ones.
• While at the Munich airport, I managed to spend most of our Euros, though I had to make two trips. There was some rig-a-ma-roll doing all this; even though I was spending cash, I had to give them my passport and country of origin and such. So when I came back to the counter for a second time to buy a soda, the woman waiting on me said to the other woman behind the counter (in German, of course) something like “Can you believe this guy is back? Jeez, why didn’t he just buy everything at once?” The other woman behind the counter said “Idiot!” (in German, of course– which, btw, is “Idiot!” but pronounced with a German accent). Hearing this I gave them a stare, I said in my bad German “Ich spreche ein bischen Deutsch, und ich verstehe Idiot.” Which means “I speak a little German, and I understand ‘idiot.'” I should have added something like “you dumbasses,” but I was pretty tired.
• The flight stuff was largely uneventful, and the heightened security wasn’t that bad to deal with, really. We did have to go through a fair amount of security stuff in Atlanta, though: first through customs, then to get our luggage, and then back through customs, and then we had to recheck the bags, and then go back through security for a domestic flight. It seems to me like they could have streamlined those last two steps. Oh, and the only flight on this whole trip that was late was the last one. Figures.
• Our house/dog sitter Molly picked us up from the airport, and btw, a big shout-out to Molly. She did a just awesome job, watering the plants, taking great care of Sophie (who she just loves even more now), keeping everything clean, etc., etc. Hell, she even baked some cookies!
• Sophie had a gloriously happy reunion with everyone– particularly Will.
• I started up my cell phone and there was a message from Steve B. informing me that we had a computer stolen out of my office. Jesus F. Christ, welcome back to work, eh? So I get to go in there this morning and deal with some of that, I guess….
• I downloaded 662 photos from the trip to my computer. I think a lot of those are duplicates, but I did indeed take a lot of pictures. It’ll be fun going through the “keepers” on those. Stay tuned for a bunch of stuff being uploaded to my Flickr account, for sure.
• And now back to life. Annette and I both want to make an effort to purge ourselves of the pork/wine/beer fest that was Europe. A nice salad. And maybe a cheeseburger.