I'm back. Miss me?
Last Friday I took off for San Francisco. By Monday afternoon I was back in Germany. If you blinked, you might not even have noticed...
It was time for the annual pilgrimage to Big Game. And despite being seriously inconveniently located this year, a pilgrimage is a pilgrimage. Anyway, it's not unprecedented for me to make the commute from Europe – when I lived in France I came back for it then too. Granted, I think I stayed longer in California the last time, but this year I chose to make the trip as short as possible because I want to enjoy my remaining time in Germany.
Still, if anyone knows how to make the most of a compressed trip, it's me. After waking up around 4:30am on Friday, I took the U-Bahn to the Hamburg Airport (it's interesting to see who rides the U-Bahn at that hour... lots of blue collar workers I never see riding it during more conventional commute hours), where I got a 6:40am flight (stand-by is a good thing), and yet barely had enough time to transfer to my next flight in Frankfurt thanks to the understaffed extra security check apparently (so the sign says) required by the United States. (Of course, anal though the US may be about airport security checks, I don't think it's US policy to mandate one x-ray machine for a 747's worth of people. I think the airport came up with that policy on its own.) But I caught the flight, and then about 10 hours later showed up in San Francisco (where I had four voicemails from Orbitz telling me my flight status, which was of minimal use to me since I was already sitting on these planes when they called me to tell me what time they were going to take off, and anyway, it was an American number they were calling and I clearly wasn't there to answer it...).
I decided to rent a car this time so I could dash around the Bay Area doing whatever errands I wanted conveniently. That evening I met a friend for dinner, but unfortunately by then jetlag had started to interfere with the blood supply to my brain, so our conversation became limited at a certain point by my inability to speak English. I did find it odd this weekend, however, to be somewhere where speaking German was neither necessary nor useful. I kept having to suppress my instinct to try. (It was very confusing...)
The next morning I woke up (at 3am, which was not what I planned) and decided to enjoy breakfast at the IHOP attached to my motel, where upon arrival I immediately noticed the neatest handwriting I've ever seen on the framed xerox copy of the failing health inspector's report that was on display near the entrance. I briefly contemplated not eating there as a result, but I was really looking forward to some pancakes. So I rationalized that they'd probably fixed the problems by now, and my breakfast probably wouldn't kill me. Well, maybe the cholesterol would, but not right away.
Then I ran two more errands, including a quick jaunt to Fry's Electronics. If you've ever lived near one you'll know of what I speak. It's geek paradise. Every kind of electronic component and device is available there, somewhere. I decided to buy a plug adapter for a Chinese plug to go into a German outlet. A student here has this setup, but her adapter is broken and keeps splitting in half and falling on the floor. I decided to see if Fry's would sell a new one, and of course it did...
Then, at last, it was time for Big Game. I drove into $tanfurd – sorry, "Stanford" – and parked somewhere in the eucalyptus grove near the stadium. The one nice thing about the game being there is that it's a really good place to tailgate. Much better than Cal, actually, where tailgating really isn't very practical (because parking itself isn't very practical). My friend who's been hosting Big Game tailgates for centuries (give or take) was in his usual place, and it was nice to converge with lots of people I rarely get to see anymore. Now that we've all scattered, it's nice to have this occasion to come back together. This is partly why I'm so religious about it; there's something reassuring about knowing that no matter where I am or what I'm doing, on the last Saturday before Thanksgiving I will ALWAYS be there.
The game itself was fun. Cal had half the seats, it seemed, which is a little unusual because normally the home team has about 2/3rds of it. But last year at Cal, when we were great and Stanford wasn't, we had more like 85% of the seats filled. Which is too bad, in a way, because what fun is a rivalry if the other team doesn't show up?
But once again, Cal was pretty good and Stanford wasn't. We won 27-3.
By then it was pretty late, because the game hadn't started until 4pm, and I was pretty much jetlagged toast once again. I stayed over at my friend's house – whose father is a recently minted lawyer himself (he gave me bar tips!) – and then the next morning drove back to the airport. At 2:15pm Sunday I took off for Germany, and arrived on Monday 10 minutes late for my French class. (I tried to standby on the earlier flight from Frankfurt to Hamburg, but Lufthansa seems to like to channel US Air's stupidity on that front and wouldn't let me change unless I paid a lot of money for "reticketing." So instead I ended up late for class.)
I expect to struggle with jetlag for some time, now that I'm back, but I think it's more of a general sleep deficit than anything else. I was running behind even before I took off for the weekend. But I'm also recharged – I had fun, and I got to enjoy a weekend in the sun. I am therefore the only person in Hamburg right now with any palor...
It is sort of existentially confusing, however. It's hard to believe I went anywhere. It was just a weekend – most of my classmates didn't even notice I was gone. It's hard to believe I was, now that I'm back in my German life. But I was indeed. I just spent two days in California. Air travel is a wonderful thing, letting people live two lives at once.