midfuckepiphany

ok, back from europe. all in all, a pretty chaotic trip ... but those are always the ones that seem most fun when you look back.

as i alluded to in my last entry, this was actually the second leg of a trip that began with a week in china, and i only had a few hours of being back here in dc in between trips. so in 72 hours, i flew from shanghai to beijing to chicago to dc to philadelphia to munich. that's like two-thirds the circumference of the fickin globe. bear in mind also that when i travel, i am never without drink in hand, so at this point i was already operating on about eight straight days of near constant intoxication. so needless to say, when i finally arrived in munich, i was eager to have everything go smoothly.

so i get to my hotel only to find it is a shithole. see, usually i make my own travel arrangements, but this time our magazine's advertising department made the arrangements. i thought it would be ok because they made the arrangements for the hotel last year when we covered this event, and those arrangements sucked as well, and i didn't think they'd want to screw it up twice. last time, they booked us into a decent enough place, but it was actually about 90 minutes OUTSIDE of Munich in the middle of a cow pasture, so any money the idiots saved on the hotel was easily surpassed in cab fare, and we were totally isolated from events going on in the city. so this year, they acknowledged that they fucked up last year and assured me that they wanted to make it up to me and said i didn't have to worry about it, and that they would totally take care of everything and correct the mistakes of last year, etc etc.

so of course this year they fucked up just as bad. the hotel was very central in munich, but, like i said, it was like a squatter shack, which is fine for me, but makes it kind of hard to do the sorts of things they're asking you to do for them job-wise. more importantly, when i checked in, i asked if my colleague from London - Iain, a guy in the ad department - had checked in, and they said not only hadn't he checked in, but there was not even anyone by that name with a reservation. wtf? i trudged up to my room convinced that Iain had backed out at the last minute, leaving me in a roach motel while he checked into a five-star joint. Bastard.

all i wanted to do at this point was sleep. but first i had to do something about getting my suits cleaned for the next days' job stuff - they were rumpled pieces of shit because i hadn't even unpacked them from china. i hate wearing suits, but sometimes they insist on it, and since the hotel didn't have a laundry service, i was going to have to find someplace in munich to do the laundry. so the lady at the desk gives me these really complicated directions for how to find a local cleaners that involved me making countless lefts and rights on streets that all had names like 'Gnterhufsteinmllenfrber.' wtf?

anyway, i eventually found the place and dropped off the suits and managed to drunkenly muddle my way through a conversation using a lot of hand gestures, the upshot of which was that my suits would not be ready until noon the next day, even though i was supposed to be somewhere at 9am. but whatever, i just wanted to sleep, so i headed back to the hotel.

on my way there i reflected on how awesome i always find germany. it was a gorgeous monday afternoon, and i was in a pretty cool area of the city. germany always seems like such a cool, laid back vibe.

and the GIRLS. the girls in germany are fickin gorgeous. like every one of them are these tanned, blonde, tight-bodied goddesses. they must produce them in a factory in germany or something. seriously, like, you look around and it's like 70 percent of the population of germany are these unbelievably hot chicks walking around by themselves, and the other 30 percent of the population is irrelevant. this is the exact opposite of the situation in the united states, where only like 30 per cent of the population are hot chicks, and each one is invariably surrounded by ten horny guys desperately trying to get in the chick's pants. And the US chicks look so stuck-up that i'd rather punch them in the face than fuck them.

but not in germany. gorgeous girls who look like decent human beings, totally alone. AND they HATE WEARING CLOTHS. could one ask for anything more? they all have like the skimpiest dresses on and their breasts are hanging out and they aren't wearing bras. an eye candy feast.

but i digress. i made it back to my hotel room, stripped, collapsed into bed, my head hit the pillow, and i was out.

for about an hour. then my brain was ripped to awakeness by the jangling of the telephone.

"Hello, it's Iain ... "

Oh boy.

apparently what had happened is the ad department had fucked up iain's reservation, so he had no room, and, because of this exhibition, every room in the city was booked. so now he's saying that he may have to crash with me.

fuck. this was the last thing i wanted. i mean, iain is an ok guy, but he's an ad person. in publishing culture, the ad people and the people who write the articles are like oil and water. writer people tend to be kind of artsy and laid back. ad people are these like - well, they're sales people basically. i didn't even expect to be spending tons of time with the dude at the exhibition, much less be share a room with the guy.

but whatever. sometimes this is just how it goes in the journo biz. so i put on my cloths and groggily go downstairs to meet iain. he said he had to go to the exhibition grounds to set up a display so that it would be ready for the next day, and he would work on finding a solution to the room problem and get back to me in a couple of hours. so i took his suitcase up to my room, took off my cloths and immediately fell into a deep sleep again - it was about 4 in the afternoon.

i slept for a long time, and then regained consciousness at about 2am feeling a whole fuck of a lot better. just then, in barges iain, and the dude is COMPLETELY FUCKING HAMMERED.

"I am bollocked, mate. BOLLOCKED!" he kept announcing.

Apparently he'd been on a major bender all over munich after setting up his stand, and so he comes in and starts bouncing off the walls and jumping up and down on the bed and incoherently shouting things out the window about how he and i are the "next generation of the magazine." which i guess is in some way true.

anyway, i was in a much better mood, and i was awake anyway, so i figured the only thing to do was crack open one of the 40 ounces i had purchased at the store earlier and join iain in his revels.

even though he is a sales guy, it was actually kind of fun. we bantered drunkenly till about 4am or so. iain half coherently laid out all his ideas for the future of the magazine, and some of them actually weren't bad. i was also relieved to be informed that at some point during his drunken evening he managed to find another hotel room for himself for the remaining evenings. way to go iain. the room he found didn't have an 'in suite' bathroom, which definitely sucks, so i have to give it to iain - he definitely sacrificed. i also told iain about the laundry situation, and he told me not to worry about it, that he'd cover for me in the morning, and i could just show up when my laundry was done.

then iain demanded to watch porn, but i had to inform him that the hotel didn't offer any.

"What?" he burst. "But this is Germany!"

he definitely had a point there. usually one of my favorite things about going to germany is that virtually every hotel offers a wide selection of some SERIOUS hardcore anal porn on several channels. but this budget hostel that the ad department stuck us in even jipped us on that front. but iain, never without a 'plan b', whipped out his new mobile phone which is able to store mpegs and began to watch some saved porn on his phone. his tastes seemed to lean more toward intense oral action, and one of his more disturbing clips was of a girl getting pretty brutally intermittently slapped in the face while getting skull fucked.

"You love it!" iain howled at the girl in his phone in his east london drawl.

finally iain passed out. but i was wide awake with nothing to do. so i took the remaining four 40s and two bottles of wine supplied by the hotel out on to the balcony and slowly polished them off as i watched the moonlight bounce off the munich rooftops.

the next day, despite the fact that i was now brutally hung over and only got about an hour's sleep, i was still able to drag my ass out of bed on time. i kept thinking that if i could just get iain out the door to this event, then the rest of the week's plan could resume as planned. but the sonofabitch wouldn't wake up. i went downstairs and had breakfast, and left the tv on, but he still wouldn't wake up. his alarm kept going off, but he would groggily hit 'snooze' and mumble "I just can't be bothered, mate."

mind you, this is the guy that, literally for months leading up to this event, had been lecturing ME about how 'we really need to be on the ball' at this event because our reputation with this particular industry had taken some blows lately (all because of things that were iain's fault) and how 'partying is ok, but we have to mostly be serious.' and now the lazy bastard won't get out of bed on DAY 1.

whatever. i figured i could either sit around the room with a knocked-out iain, or go out and do something while waiting for my laundry to get done. so i told him to lock up when he left and headed out. i found an outdoor cafe not far from the cleaners and sat down and drank copious amounts of beer and girlwatched all morning.

ah, german girls. so many. so beautiful. so naked. even the pregnant ones were hot. at one point this really hot, blonde, tan pregnant babe walked by me. she was clearly proud - her whole midriff was exposed and her pregnant belly looked fully lickable. to my surprise, she paused as she walked by my table and then came over and asked if she could sit with me. i said sure, and we wound up getting in a long conversation.

her name is anna. she was on her way to getting her hair done. she wanted to change her look as kind of a symbol for her desire to change her overall situation. she suspected that her boyfriend - a turkish dude / bartender / model wannabe / father of her unborn child - was cheating on her. she said the day before she went for a doctor's appointment and when she returned home found a strand of long black hair on the sofa. she criticized him for that, and also because she said he pays too much attention to his looks and preens "like a woman."

"If i wanted to be with a woman, i would take a woman," she huffed with a throwaway hand gesture.

eventually it was time for her hair appointment, so she vamoosed. i eventually collected my laundry, made it to the event, and the week of work officially began. all in all, i think it worked out well. it was very productive, and i think iain and i definitely represented the mag well during several long drinking bouts.

iain and i only went out by ourselves on one night, and it was fairly low-key. i think iain was making an attempt to bridge the ad sales/article writing culture gap by striking up a philosophical conversation with me. i appreciated the gesture. however, it's dangerous to get me into a conversation like that when i'm extremely drunk because i tend to vere into dark thoughts about death, and this time was no exception. i'm sure i sounded completely weird. but iain had some of his own dark thoughts on the subject, and he was incredibly forgiving of my weird drunken behaviour the next day - once again.

everything was wrapping up nicely, and i had only one more thing to do at the end of the week - on friday, i was to fly from munich to bordeaux, france, to research a production plant with a couple of the gents from the exhibition. to tell you the truth, i really just wanted to make it a quick stop and wrap the whole thing up in a couple of hours - get in, see the plant, say good-bye, and then take a well-deserved break after my two and a half week travel marathon by chilling in bordeaux for a day and a half.

But one of the guys who runs this production plant, a frenchman with a handle-bar moustache named Jean-Louis, insisted that after i see the plant, i join him and his family at their home for a very long diner. it was a kind gesture, and i think this is kind of a european way of doing business, meeting the family, etc. I couldn't really say 'no,' so before i knew it, my quick in-and-out business plan for friday had turned into a 16-hour commitment.

you have to understand that me and the people that i write about for the magazine have absolutely nothing in common. they are all very conservative older businessmen, and i am just sort of a typical american stoner punk, who only keeps this job for the traveling opportunities. so when i am around these work contacts, i have to put on an act that is worthy of multiple academy awards. so even if on the surface it looks like i'm not really doing much, inside, i'm thinking all the time, 'ok, what would this type of person say in response to that statement.' furthermore, for many of the people i interview, english is not their first language, so i have to play this acting game IN TRANSLATION. the whole game is a strain. that is why i can usually only sustain the facade in short bursts. i usually try to limit my exposure to these people to about one-hour increments. so the idea of having to keep it going for 16 hours filled me with dread. but there was nothing i could do. i even had to take the same plane from munich to bordeaux with these guys.

if i was to pull this off, compromises would have to be made. for one thing, no way was i going to be able to endure 16 hours in business cloths, so when they met me at the airport, i was wearing my usual jeans, sneakers and t-shirt, with the only concession to business being a blue sort of army-style collared shirt open in the front. that way, i figured if i was hauling around my camera bag, i could maybe kind of pull off a 'war correspondent' type look. em, or not ...

anyway, they spotted me from a distance in the airport as i was charging my ipod (they were both wearing full suits and ties. wtf? how can anybody, ANYBODY, endure a 90-minute flight in that sort of get-up?). the looks on their faces as they approached me were drawn, skeptical, perhaps hinting of fear. i sensed immediately that there was more going on than concerns about my attire. it went back to something that happened the evening before:

i was just about to leave the exhibition the night before for the last time, when i was accosted by one of the people that i write about - eddy, a south african industrialist. he was furious. at the exhibition, people were only seeing our May issue for the first time, and i had written an article in there in which i quoted him making a particular claim (i'll spare the boring details). so he came up to me and said he never said it and demanded an apology.

to make a long story short, he DID make the statement in question - not just once, but several times, emphatically, and I even checked with him specifically to make sure it was ok to go public with it. also, unbeknownst to him, i recorded the whole conversation, so i could even prove it in court if i had to. but this happens sometimes in this biz: people say things, then it goes into print, then their bosses see it and get angry with them, so rather than admit that they fucked up, they try to claim they never said it.

i wound up smoothing things over with eddy, who has always been one of my best contacts (specifically because he has such a big mouth). but apparently, at a drinking session later in the evening that the bordeaux guys attended, eddy's boss, the ceo of the company, gave several angry speeches about how our magazine had printed "rumors" instead of facts.

so in the airport, i thought i'd better nip this one in the bud, so as soon as they approached and said 'hi, how are you.' i launched into, 'fine, but a disturbing thing came up at the exhibition yesterday ...' blah blah blah, and told my side of the story. when they first approached, they must have thought, 'great, he's dressed like a freak AND he prints lies.' but after i told my side of the story (which they believed because they'd had similar experiences with eddy), they relaxed completely. furthermore, the weight of the matter totally blew the clothing issue out of their minds, so all was cool.

so we all got on the plane. luckily for me, i was seated very far away from them, giving me a few hours of respite and allowing for the heavy intake of alcohol, which i knew would be necessary to get through the next 13 hours.

we arrived in bordeaux, and for some bizarre reason (remember, i'm communicating with these gents in broken english and hand gestures) they took me to the offices of a new image consultant they'd recently contracted. so here i am in this french graphic arts studio, we're all sitting on beanbag chairs, having this four-way discussion about corporate logos with people who don't speak english, and they're asking me what MY opinion is. Like, wtf? (the whole french leg of this journey can pretty much be summed up with )

so then we leave there, and the guys drive me to their facilities, which were about an hour west of bordeaux in the wine country. it was actually pretty cool, vinyards everywhere. the town is called Blaye (pronounced "bly"), and it had a cool, small-town, historical feel, kind of like some of the places i've been to in italy. it overlooked a massive river, and much of the architecture dated back centuries. there is also a famous old citadel in the town - kind of a big castle with a mote around it and cannons. they drove me through the citadel. it was cool. they said that the french built it hundreds of years ago to fend off english invaders who were after their wine.

they took me to lunch in a nice kind of old pub place across from the citadel and we had a long talk over wine and beers about industry matters. that's really what these sorts of visits are good for. you can get lots of good, candid background dirt that people would never tell you in a formal interview.

then we went to their factory, and i tried not to seem too bored for the two-hour tour. overall, i think it went well. then jean-louis and i said good-bye to thierry, the other guy, and we headed toward jean-louis' place. great, i thought, that part's down, just another six hours to live through.

along the way, jean-louis gave me a tour of several small villages that were very picturesque, and we stopped and walked for a bit in a town called Bourg. it was actually pretty cool, and i could tell jean-louis was really trying to relate to me on my own level, which i appreciated.

then we drove to his place, which was gorgeous - a secluded chateaux with a swimming pool and nothing around it but vinyards. it was like a scene out of Stealing Beauty without the sex. He introduced me to his wife and his golden retriever, and we sat in the back yard, enjoyed the gorgeous afternoon, and i began consuming most of his alcohol supply.

his wife prepared us a four-course diner, and i made an uncultured American ass of myself on numerous occasions. (he asked me if i knew what frois grois was, and i was sure they were frog legs, so that's what i guessed, and ... um, yeah, i'm an ass. i found out that it's some kind of goose liver pate. the idea of putting this in my mouth made me want to wretch, buy i was polite and managed to choke most of my portion down. at least they weren't frogs legs. jean-louis and his wife were cool about it though; they said most american visitors to their home had the same misgivings about frois grois, and they've learned that the best approach is just not to tell them what's in it.)

all in all, the experience was really kind of cool. i mean, how else would i have ever gotten to do something like that, you know? it was one of those times where i sort of leave my body and look down on the bizarre scene unfolding from above: me. a working-class stoner punk dude from new jersey eating frois grois with a french family in the middle of vinyards. you know?

finally 11pm rolled around and i was almost out of the woods. there was just one more hurdle: jean-louis was really amped about introducing me to his son and daughter who were expected at 11pm, arriving on a train from Paris, where they both live. i knew this was going to be a tough one, because it's one thing to be able to keep up a conversation with an experienced traveller and career diplomat of sorts like jean-louis, but people my age in france come with a lot more baggage - they HATE AMERICANS. this was going to be tricky. furthermore, jean-louis seemed particularly amped to introduce me to his daughter who is exactly my age. i almost got the feeling he was trying to set us up, which was weird.

anyway, they show up - his daughter, his son and his son's girlfriend - and it was an awkward 30 minutes of everybody sizing everybody up. i just tried to play the opposite of the stereotype that i know everybody in france has of americans - i tried to be quiet, humble, polite, un-warlike, and didn't take any bait. by the time my taxi arrived, everyone was really being cool to me, and we said our goodbyes. they really seemed like a nice family.

for the first 15 minutes of the one-hour cab ride back to bordeaux, i didn't say a word. i just let all the stress of the day and the previous two and a half weeks bleed out of my aura. eventually my attention wandered to the taxi driver - a drop-dead gorgeous, awesomely-dressed girl about my age. not what you'd expect to see behind the wheel of a taxi. she kind of looked like Aiki on this site (see archives). we struck up a long, weird, almost existentialistic conversation. it was like that scene with bruce willis and the female cab driver in pulp fiction, except i was in the front seat and i wasn't talking about killing people. sometimes i feel like the purest kinds of relationships that i have with women are those little random flirtations that come and go in instants, and where no one expects anything.

finally she dropped me off near where my hotel that i'd hastily booked through expedia was supposed to be. it was on a pedestrian road so she couldn't take me all the way there, so she pointed me in the general direction, and after that i was on my own. i caught one last glint in taxi girl's eye, and then stumbled off.

it was about 12:30 am on a friday night in busy bordeaux, and the street i was walking down was kind of an outdoor mall and there was still plenty of activity in the streets. i asked a guy and a girl who were hanging out where the fick my hotel was. i was exhausted and in no mood for trial and error. they seemed kind of amused that a genuine american "dude" - especially one as bedraggled as i was - would randomly approach them with suitcase in tow in bordeaux after midnight. (this would be a rarer thing there in southern france than it would be, say, in paris.) they were really cool though and pointed me in the right direction.

"thanks. i mean, merci, merci," i said in the most pathetically american accent imaginable. they laughed.

my experience at the hotel i would be saying at for that night and the next was full of the types of quirks that i seem to always find at french hotels. time and time again, the thought runs through my head, 'and you do it this way ..... why?'

i went to the front desk, which was on the second floor, and there was one guy there, who technically spoke ok english, but everything that he referred to seemed to apply to some alternate universe. he'd say 'left' but point right; he said my room was on the second floor, but handed me a key to one on the fourth floor; he told me to 'sign here' and then pointed to something that wasn't the signature box.

so we get the check-in squared away, and he says, "you're room is in our other building." wtf? he tells me i can get to the other building by exiting that building and going right. but i saw the whole street he seemed to be referring to before i came in, and i didn't see any hotel. and i said, "so ... a right, and then another right?" and he said, "no, just a right." ooooookay. so i head out and do as he says and head right and i walk, and walk, and walk, dragging my suitcase along this cobble stone road, and eventually i'm like, 'fuck this.' so i turn around and drag my suitcase back to the front desk where this dude is, and i'm like, "dude, what the hell? i turned right like you said, and i'm walking forever and i see nothing." and he scurries over and says, "here sir, i will show you." and then he walks me to the same street that i asked him if it was on originally. he tells me to go down the street, go to a door, he'll confirm my identity on a monitor, and he'll buzz me in. so i go down this street, which was more like an alleyway, go to this door, which was completely unmarked as a hotel, push a buzzer, and then he lets me in. like, wtf? so the hotel pays for this elaborate monitoring system, rather than just paying for an extra person to man the second front desk after hours. whatever.

another example: the next day i get a pizza-to-go from one of the local pizza joints, and i walk into the lobby and head to the elevator to take it up to my room to eat it. and the girl at the front desk stops me and says, "no, no, no sir. there is no eating allowed in the hotel rooms." i gave her a serious look like, 'you've got to be fucking kidding me.' and she says, "it is for you. so you do not get food on the carpet." and i'm like doing everything in my power not to flip a switch on this chick. and i say, "but you have room service IN THE HOTEL." she says, "yes, but that comes on a tray." i'm like, oh my god. so i say in my most sarcastic john malkovich-meets-G-Unit voice, "well do you have a PLATE i could borrow?" she goes "humph!" and then reaches into a storage closet RIGHT NEXT TO THE FRONT DESK and pulls out a plate and hands it to me. "Thank you," i said sarcastically. As i headed to the elevator i think i must have heard her say "humph" again four or five more times.

Then, later that night I had fallen asleep - i had to get to bed early because i had a criminally insane 6:10am flight out the next morning - and i woke up suddenly at about 11:30pm and thought, 'oh shit, i'd better schedule a wake-up call, or i may really be screwed.' so i call the alternative universe guy at the front desk, and i say, "hello, could I schedule a wake up call for 4am?" pretty simple request, right? He responds: "Today, or tomorrow?" I'm thinking, 'wellll ... it's 11:30pm, so obviously it can't be today, right?' but i worried that if i said "tomorrow," the whackjob might get confused and think i mean the next day. so i thought i'd make it really simple for him; i said: "I need to check out at 4am." And he says, "you cannot check out at 4am, there will be no one at the front desk. If you want to check out, you have to do it now before midnight." Baaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!! I unloaded on the dude. I yelled, "you have got to be fucking kidding me! you mean to tell me that i've got to put on my cloths and go down there now just so I can check out?!" And then he babbled some things for about a minute or so, none of which made any sense, but after listening for a bit, it occurred to me that what he meant to say was simply that if i wanted to check out at 4am, i couldn't do it in the "other building" that i was staying in, but would have to go to the primary building.

O.
K.
fine.

i said, "just give me a wakeup call at 4am," and i hung up not knowing if the call would ever arrive. haha.

suffice it to say that bordeaux was a very scenic french town, if a bit touristy. i think it could be a place that you could have fun in, but you'd really have to have friends there who could take you to the right places. mostly i just hung out, drank beer at cafes, peoplewatched, and poked around in some stores.

i managed to make my early flight to munich and talked to a german surfer dude on the plane. apparently the coast near bordeaux has some good spots. he was planning his next surf run to costa rica.

i made the hotel arrangements for my final night in munich myself, so the hotel was top of the line - luxury from top to bottom; and, yes, QUALITY GERMAN PORN! My last night there I checked out an area that was recommended to me called Leopold Street. It looked pretty cool. Lots of bars and stuff. Got drunk, needless to say. But i really didn't have enough time to fully investigate it. Mostly i just enjoyed the hotel. And the porn.

I was looking forward to getting back to my stuff in dc. i was so pathetic by the last day that i was out of freaking socks, so i wound up having to pay 15 euros for some in the airport, and the only kind i could get were german national team colored soccer socks that came up to my knee. haha. Still, as I was boarding the plane, i was already feeling like i didn't want to leave. i always regret leaving everywhere i go. i wish i could be ubiquitous.