Sounds and Resurrection

Greetings from Dresden, the city that never stops raining! Actually, I’ll retract that statement and say that it does stop raining every once in a while to give his pals, snow and sleet, a chance to prove themselves. I’m not going to talk about the weather though, because there are more important topics to discuss…

I have lived in this nice, new apartment of mine for nearly 2 weeks and I’ve come to realize that it’s less of an apartment and more of a ritzy dorm for international students. I really enjoy the fact that I can walk down the hallway and talk with people from all over the world, but there is one problem…the thin walls. My first complaint about this structural problem is the selection of music that my neighbors share with me. At the moment, one is blasting the “Chicken Dance Song,” a wordless song played by an accordion/trumpet duet that has a rightly named “Chicken Dance” to go along with it. Before that, they were playing something that sounded like the Russian National Anthem and ABBA is always a favorite. Anyhow, the other sounds managing to float through my walls are sounds of a different kind. They belong to my upstairs neighbor, a man (I assume it’s a man) who frequently has the uncontrollable urge to play the tuba…the flatulence tuba that is. It is absolutely amazing how he can have so much gusto in his lower intestinal tract to produce sub-woofer quality toots. I am not kidding when I say this, but one seriously woke me up the other night- perhaps it was magnified through the box spring coils, I don’t know. My guess is that he’s not used to the Germans and their sausage-cheese-bread diets. He needs help, perhaps I should bring him some vegetables.

Speaking of vegetables, I was cooking dinner tonight and I went to cut up a bell pepper, only to find that there was a large dead worm/caterpillar thing in it. I won’t lie, coming from the US where pesticides are frequently used, I rarely see this sort of thing and it kind of grossed me out. So I put the bell pepper down and left the kitchen for a little post worm cool-down. When I came back 20 minutes later, the worm/caterpillar was gone! He has risen from the dead, crawled to some hiding spot, and is now patiently waiting to sink his tiny razor teeth into the next delicious piece of produce that comes his way! I can’t find him anywhere and I keep having reoccurring visions from that children’s book, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” where the caterpillar eats his way through ice cream, salami, watermelon, and I think it was a lollipop until it pupates and becomes a butterfly. Rather than teaching children about the cycle of a butterfly, I now see it as a tool of propaganda for the pesticide industry. I certainly do not want that caterpillar to eat me out of house and home only to become some pesky butterfly that won’t move away from my lamp fixtures when I’m trying to read.

Alright, that concludes this email. I was going to write a little more about some of the sites that I have seen recently, but I got a little carried away with the caterpillar in my kitchen. I apologize for that, more stories will come in the next two weeks or so. With that said, Happy Thanksgiving!!! I’ll be eating a delicious turkey/stuffing/cranberry sauce meal with a friend from Sewanee… that is, if the caterpillar doesn’t eat if first!