Pete's Log: more exercises in absurdity
Entry #1405, (Life in General)(posted when I was 28 years old.)
Sara chided me for not calling the Walking Man in Schwabing by his real name in a recent log entry. We determined that his name is Qezherkraphf. That should really be a Q with an umlaut instead of Qe. The umlaut indicates the q is silent.
Last night I went to a Toytown dinner at a Thai restaurant. It was a fun event, and the food was pretty good, though my tofu dish was missing the tofu part. Sara decided to attend this event as well, kind of last minute. After dinner we were invited to an Irish pub by several other attendees. So we went there. Discussion was lively and covered topics such as American politics and the Finnish language. There was also the usual bit of Sara throwing coasters at me.
We left the bar a bit late, but according to the schedule in the U-Bahn station, there should have been two more trains going in our direction. Everybody else who had come to the bar actually lived in that neighborhood, so at this point it was just Sara and I.
So we sat down in the station to wait for our train. We had about twenty minutes to wait. Sara had a German children's book with her. She'd checked it out from her school's library to use for German practice, but it was at this point way overdue and she hadn't read it. It was called "Wenn der Mond sprechen könnte." I read it to her in the Maillingerstraße U-Bahn station. It was cute.
A train came by in the other direction, and then an announcement was made that no more trains were coming through that station tonight. I double checked the schedule, and it definitely said two more trains were supposed to come by in our direction. So we waited a while longer. The scheduled time for the first of the two trains came and went. Then the announcement was repeated. Then they started turning off the lights. So yet again, Sara and I found ourselves stuck somewhere in Munich without public transportation.
We didn't really know where we were, but I had a general sense of which direction we needed to go to get somewhere familiar. So we started walking.
After a while, we found it. A statue of a horse with no rider. I commented that it was unusual to see a statue of a horse with no rider, and Sara decided she ought to be the rider. It was a large statue, though, and it took some effort to convince Sara that she could, in fact, climb the statue with my aid. So finally the decision is made, and I boost her up onto the horse.
At this point I would've been satisfied with living vicariously through her, but Sara helped convince me to try climbing up myself. I really didn't think it possible, but I made it up there. So there we are, sitting on a statue of a horse, not even certain where exactly we are. But we make the best of it, huddling together for warmth and enjoying another absurd experience. Before we know it, we've been on the damn thing for several hours, and we notice the public transport has resumed running.
So how do you spend several hours on top of a cold metal horse in the middle of the night? I'm not sure, but we kept ourselves entertained. We did see some interesting people walk by, and talked about the sorts of things you talk about when you really should be asleep. Variations of the phrase "I can't believe we're sitting on this metal horse" were heard frequently.
And before I get in trouble, the horses name -- as determined by Sara -- is Bree. She's supposed to figure out what that's short for and get back to me. We're also going to try to break the curse on the horse so it can reanimate and take us places. So after the transit started running again, I finally made it home shortly before six. Which means I'm running on two hours of sleep today. But it was hella worth it.
For future reference, the horse was near the Königsplatz U-Bahn station. I suggested that perhaps we should start work on a book of statues to sit on in Munich. We've already found two. And on both occasions, we were pretty much sober, believe it or not.