Thursday, 26 May 2005 | Sauce

[excerpts from my trip to europe]

(London, 5/15/05)
Richard fed us too many drinks (who drinks wine as if they're drinking shots?), first on the sidewalk that curled around a corner pub, and then at dinner. We hadn't planned to go to London at all, but we had a layover there that we decided to stretch to its 24-hour limit, and managed to acquire 23.2 of it.

Which means that on Friday night, we rested a single crooked airplane-hour, and on Saturday (post the London Eye with Esther, the Tate Modern, running into friends, an impromptu cab tour of the city, and the introduction of a strange older lady into our evening), we slept for 120 lightning minutes before catching our flight to Berlin.

...

(Berlin, 5/23/05)
The man was staggering purposefully and yelling at pedestrians waiting to cross the street. I didn't pay attention to him until he was in our faces, releasing hot, beery breath with each syllable. "Are you from Jerusalem?" he asked Todd (without judgment, we deduced). "Palestine?" He held his beer tightly at its throat, slurred his words, and stood with his feet apart, for balance.

I'm not quite sure what all he told us (besides that he would let us have a sip of his beer for 400 Mark), but he went on for a long time, during several changes of the light. I kept hoping for the timing of the light to coordinate with the periods in his sentences, but there were no periods in his sentences at all, it turned out. We finally interrupted him and told him, gently, that it was time for us to go. He responded by trying to cup Todd's face in his hands, and then he stumbled in my direction and spurted, "May I give you a kiss?"

"See you later!" we called from the middle of the road. "Nice chatting with you!" from the other side of the street.