not so much in a writing mood, but I guess I’d better before I forget the weekend…

Thursday night rented a van after work and started driving up towards Frankoforte. Drove about 3 hours to just before the swiss border and then drove around looking for a hotel. Found one for only 45eur so took it. I managed to scrape my rental van on the teeny tiny entrance to the parking area which worries me all weekend and even today.
Celebrated the coming of my birthday by sleeping through it, then get up in the  morning and continue on to swiss cheese land (my first visit). Italy has toll roads (the real freeways are tolls. If you want to drive backroads and take 23 times longer you can feel free to skip the toll, but only fools and guys riding bikes whilst wearing uniforms do that sort of thing), but in Swissville you pay a  one time a year fee for a sticker that goes in your window and I guess would be considered a toll as well (but this one is mandatory). I did that and continue driving through swissburg.
Now as I said I’ve never been to Swissland, and never had any desire to go, but WOW! It is a gorgeous place. Driving around the bottoms of the mountains and seeing the lakes, and mountains, and fall leaves was pretty amazing. I took absolutely no pictures, but if I had a car, a week and some cash I would go spend 7 nights in 7 cities.
With the help of many red bulls I push on and arrive to Frankfurt about 4PM. Drop off a load of laundry at kats and then we hit the wine market. It was a typical Friday afternoon. Bumped into a few people at the market…it was as if I’d never left…and I was hoping that life had stopped when I left, but alas the world continues… 🙂
Went to Waxes after and then Kat’s for Joeys…someone ordered wrong and we only got 2 pizzas which was not enough as Pete was in da haus! We tried ordering more pizza at 11:05, but Joeys was closed, so Pete volunteered to make us cheese and ham sandwiches until we ran out of ham…Well done though Pete. The sammiches were tasty! Happy birthday to me!!!
Actually once again only 1 person in Germany remembers when my birthday is…that always seems to happen :). Both my parents write me emails on Sunday to wish me happy day.

Saturday go to Ikea and load up the van. Then rush over to Matt’s…Driving around Frankfurt was horrible. It’s really strange to know a town by public transport, and then have to drive in it. Even worse when the town has subways. You sort of lose all sense of direction when you ride the subways regularly…anyways…Driving around Bergerstrasse was the worst…but I made it eventually. We watch that horribly boring Ireland footy team (ok. On this evening they were fairly entertaining I guess), and order pizza…cuz as we all know – you can’t get pizza in Italy!
I dropped my tv on it’s head while opening the back door of the van looking for clothes…This also stresses me out for the rest of the weekend…

Have lunch with Julia and then watch Couples Retreat at the english theatre. Good closure that! Nice choice…Go to Saffas for Mexican night! Pete is the king of green chile sauce! Nice job Pete! How bout Rome one of these months?

Get up at 5:40 the next morning and leave about 5 til 6. Just beating the saffas alarm so they don’t get to say bye. I got stopped at the Swiss-Italy border…They made me park on the side and some dude comes over to look at my passport and then look in a couple boxes.
He asks: (pointing at my guitar case – while playing air saxo-ma-phone) what’s in there?
Me: A guitar.
Him: (points at a picture frame) Who is the artist.
Me: My ex-girlfriend
Him: a girl..hmpphh (not impressed). You can go.
Arrive home about 5. Have to rush to unload as the rental van has to be back by 7. Just barely make it and tell her about the scrape (they would have found it anyways)…and they charge me a 75€ “reporting fee”…seriously!!!!! What’s the lesson here. Honesty costs you 75€. Lying to them costs nothing…well done Europcar. You suck!!!! She said they’d call me yesterday with more info, but noones called yet. I hope the 75€ fee is for minor incidents that they don’t think will cost more than 75€. If it costs much more than that then I won’t be eating in December. The life of an immigrant is a happy life.
As for the scratch there was some paint on the van from the thing I scratched, but I managed to get that paint off and there was a tiny bit of discoloration on the van itself which I guess means I really did scrape off some of the van paint…anyways if I wasn’t rushing I could have bought some touch up paint or shoe polish or something over it, but that wasn’t an option unless I were to rent for another day…if I had known about the reporting fee then I would have just kept it another day…jerks!

So in short I made it. It was great to see everyone.

…and Matt is coming for a 2 day visit in December. Looking forward to it!!!

…and it was basically like 1o years worth of christmas in here unpacking my stuff….10 years worth of clothes, art, DVDs and an UNDAMAGED TV!!!! At least that turned out OK.

All of the garbage is still in here because of the weird garbage situation here…Not sure if I mentioned it already, but you can only take out certain types of garbage on certain days…So paper on every other Tuesday, Cans and bottles on every other Wed. etc…I don’t know if they really enforce it, but I’m sitting here with empty cardboard boxes waiting for next Tuesday…My full name also happens to be on the boxes…great! Cheaters never prosper…unless I cut out my name…hmmmmmm

…and no Birthday cards in the box….tsk. I’ll complain about it again next year 😉 but no worries people.