Wednesday, August 21

We arrived in Frankfurt in mid-morning.  The passport stamper didn’t insert our passport into a reading machine.  What new tech is this?  Perhaps he has everything he needs to know, from Singapore Airlines.  There is a good chain of custody for us, from entering JFK.  Frankfurt is a good place to enter Europe because there is an intercity train station right in the airport, and the train fare plus the plane fare were the best deal.  I think I found the plane ticket on kiwi.com.  When kiwi.com is working well, you can submit a query like “New York to Germany” and it will give you a list of flights.

We walked to the airport train station, and boarded a train to Munich.  Our friend Dennis picked us up and took us to his new apartment, where we met Lucas, who is Dennis and Paulina’s one-year-old.  We then walked to Occam Deli, a nearby restaurant.  Dennis’s neighborhood has most of what you need nearby.  Occam did not seem particularly child safe, as you expect from a restaurant named after a razor, but Dennis and Paulina have had a year to perfect their baby eyes and stopped him from going in all the important directions.  Now they get to learn a whole new set of tricks when he walks and then drives. Afterwards, idle post card and mobile plan shopping and so to bed, hoping to avoid jet lag.

Thursday, August 22

I set up my computer in Dennis’ office, and worked for most of the day.  At one point Dennis and I rode bikes downtown to get SIM cards which we can use all over the EU.  Buying them from Vodafone required a two-month minimum, but coincidentally, our time in Europe covers most of a two-month period, so that was just fine.

Duje, another friend of ours in Munich, and his girlfriend Leem, came over for dinner.  Paulina made a delicious Brazilian fish stew.  Leem seemed like she was doing something terrifically interesting in Hollywood, but she couldn’t talk about it.   How many different reasons are there that you can’t talk about your job?  The most common reason is that there are only three people in the world, all of whom share your open office, who understand what you are doing in any more detail than you could fit on a Hallmark card.  The reason everybody thinks of first, is that your government is planning to kill someone, and you are helping them do that, and it mustn’t get back to the intended victims.  Leem’s reason, also very common, is that the product isn’t announced yet, and you don’t want to lose a competitive advantage.  I am sure you could continue this list at some length, interspersed with distracting commercials that you must be very careful to avoid clicking by accident.

I don’t know what Duje does.  I think he doesn’t talk about his work because Liberal Arts majors are never really satisfied with their career until they can’t talk about it for proprietary reasons.

Friday, August 23

We hung out at Dennis’ most of the day, working and writing postcards.  Lucas is fun, just like Paulina and Dennis are.  All engineers should have babies.  The differences and similarities between babies and other projects are too humorous to miss.

In the evening, Dennis took us back to the train station, and we found our sleeper cars on the train to Venice.  We had a compartment of four on the overnight direct train to Venezia.  Our bunkmate greeted us directly: “I hope you don’t snore.”