St. Emma of the Chemicals

Dinner at RUB was good, as usual. Post-show supper at New Venus was made even better by the presence of water and ginger ale. So thirsty. So very, very thirsty.

( And now on with the show. Usual warning about spoilers applies. )

I think we are almost reaching saturation on Sleep No More. As we were enjoying our post-show breakfast-at-night, st_darwin suggested that perhaps next time we come to New York, it'll be in the spring, and if Sleep No More is still running, maybe we should only see it once. I, for one, am not ready to forgo it entirely, but I can definitely see how limiting it to one show per visit would enable us to do other things. My feet would definitely appreciate it.

We slept in a bit before heading down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. I had my usual bizarre mix of Contenental/English/American style breakfast, with both orange juice and English Breakfast tea while the sound system played something really trippy. It sounded like "still stoned from the night before" music; interesting, but not at all appropriate for a breakfasty setting. We were seated near the toasting machine, which was one of those things where you put the toast in at the top, and it goes through a little conveyer belt underneath the toasting element, and then gets dropped down the back and slides out the front again. Except something was wrong with this toasting machine. Deeply, horrifically wrong. Toast kept getting jammed in the back instead of dropping down to the next level, and because the heating element was still on it, it would inevitably begin to smolder, then smoke, then burst into flames. Copious amounts of smoke would pour from the machine, people would freak out a bit, and one of the attendant servers would come over and poke around a bit with metal tongs. I couldn't quite see if they'd turned the machine off or not, but I was definitely hoping they had, because otherwise it would be entirely a bit too much excitement at breakfast. After using the tongs to shove the now-charred bits of bread out the bottom of the machine, the attendant then would turn the intensity of the burner down, and wander off. Then the next thing you know, one man – after running his toast through five iterations of the toasting cycle – decided to turn up the elements. And the cycle repeated itself: smoke, then flame, then mild panic, then a perfectly calm attendant coming over, fiddling with things and poking with tongs, and resetting the system. We left after the second group of men decided to fiddle with the burner intensity. Two toaster fires was quite enough for one day.

We then headed to Trafalgar Square on the Central line to catch the hop-on/hop-off tour. There were demonstrators massing in Trafalgar Square. Some of them were very clearly left wing, and protesting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the prisons in Guantanamo and Bagram. Others were considerably more right wing than that, and the police were out in full force. Our bus tour swept through Trafalgar Square a few times, and each time, it seemed like 40 or 50 more police officers had joined the scene. The number of police vans down at the Houses of Parliament was more than a little scary. st_darwin later did some online research and discovered it was the English Defense League, who I'd never heard of before but who are apparently anti-Islamist. Countering them on the left was the Stop the War Coalition, which was a group that had considerably more of my sympathies.

We rode the top deck of the bus for the full circuit, through one change of buses/tour guides, and got a good overview of some London history, and an idea of some things we'd like to see on future visits, such as Buckingham Palace and the England at War Museum. (As a minor Tudor geek, I'd like to see Hampton Court, but the only link that has to anything we saw today involves a brochure. And several anecdotes about Henry VIII). My favourite historical anecdote not involving Henry VIII was the one about how Green Park allegedly got its name; one story states that King Charles II and his wife were walking in the park when she plucked a flower, handed it to him and told him he should give it to the prettiest girl in the park. He gave it to someone else, and in her anger, she ordered all of the flowerbeds torn up. I have no idea if it's true or not, but there are no flowerbeds in Green Park, and it is a great story.

After our tour wrapped, we got off at St. Paul's, and made our way around the cathedral and back to the Central line, which we took back to Shepherd's Bush, and then walked back to our hotel. I caught a quick nap before Gaz called, and we arranged for him to come and pick us up.

He showed up at 4:30, and we had a few beers and dinner at a great Kiwi burger place he'd found, and then hung out afterwards catching up on all the stuff that had happened in the last ten years. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about this, but I will say that it was amazing to see him again. I don't think I'd realized quite how much I'd missed him – even though I think about him a lot and dream about him regularly. It was as if no time had passed, really. It felt like we were hanging out together back in Vancouver again, almost. Comfortable and completely easy. Alas, I did not get to see his wife and daughter, as they had just left town that morning, but I did get to see some pictures of the daughter, and she's adorable. Their house is lovely, and he seems happy doing what he's doing in London, so of course I'm happy for him, even if it does mean I don't get to nip down to the pub for a pint with him on a regular basis. Not that we've done that in well over a decade. We parted resolving to be more constant email correspondents with each other (this is, regrettably, an issue for both of us) and with best wishes for a certain team in tomorrow's big rugby match.

For a variety of reasons - history, theatre, friendship - I need to get back here more often.

The reading lights on our flight from Stuttgart were strangely subpar. They were more white than the average reading light and seemed to be aimed somewhat strangely. You had to sort of twist your body a little to the side and then hold the book at a rather jaunty arms-length angle to have the light actually hit the page where it should.

I did not see it for myself, but I am told by a reliable source that in the men's room at Stuttgart airport, there are vending machines that sell condoms and artificial vaginas. After I got over the initial shocked horror, I could not help but scan the waiting room, wondering just how many of the men there had recently purchased an artificial vagina for their business trip and/or vacation needs.

No one needs to be thinking that about the men on their flight.

We got off to a bit later of a start today and headed into Triberg, in the Black Forest. We checked out the waterfalls, at least at the lower heights. We could buy peanuts to feed the local squirrels, but there weren't any squirrels to be seen so SIL had to content herself with just tossing peanuts into the woods, where hopefully they'll be found by squirrels at some later point in time.

Then we visited the House of 1,000 Clocks. We made a few Rob Zombie movie jokes going in, and it actually was a little scary. In the entryway, there was an animatronic figure intoning "I am the Black Forest clockmaker" in an unnerving monotone. I'm not sure if there were a thousand clocks, exactly, but there were a great many of them, ranging from plastic cuckoo clocks mostly made in China but assembled in Germany (and thus capable of bearing the words "made in Germany" on the clockface) to more minimalist clocks. From there we went to an actual clockmaker's shop, which in addition to cuckoo clocks had all sorts of carvings: nativity sets, boxes, Christmas ornaments, little carved animals and dwarves, all sorts of things. The clocks were seriously impressive. Alas, with the cats, we are not able to have nice things like cuckoo clocks, even if I do have one that my grandmother left me.

We had lunch at a local pizza place that did an excellent pepperoni pizza, which I had with a Ketterer pils, which was lovely. Then we ambled down the street, poking in and out of shops before arriving at a bakery/tea house. st_darwin and SIL had the strawberry cheesecake, but I figured there was no way I could visit the Black Forest and not have a slice of Black Forest cake, so that's what I had, along with a cup of Earl Grey tea.

We went back to the house, and packed up (we're leaving Germany tomorrow) and then went out for Italian food and gelato. Our flight isn't until the evening, so we'll probably hit downtown Stuttgart for some sightseeing and shopping in the morning/early afternoon.

It's hard to say what my favourite thing about this trip has been. I've had such a great time! My one regret is that we never got to eat at the infamous Chinese restaurant that serves "hot cock." (That's what the English menu says. I've seen photos.)

For the first time in days, we had a bit of a sleep-in before packing up and heading to France. Just across the French border, a hawk swooped in front of the car in front of us and was clipped. The impact sent the hawk spiralling upwards, and then back down again, into the median. SIL and I were horrified. Our conversation derailed, and all we could think about was that poor hawk, and that poor driver. If it had been our car, we would have had to pull over to calm down. As it was, we just spent the next several minutes aghast, and hoping like hell that N1 and N2 (who were in the car behind us) didn't see what just happened. Fortunately, they didn't.

A short time later, we arrived in Strasbourg, a lovely town with some impressive edifices. We ate lunch at L'Eden, a Lebanese restaurant just across the street from a cathedral which I believe may have been L'Eglise St. Maurice (it's kind of hard to tell from Googlemaps). I had the brochettes de poulet, which were served with salad and blé rouge, which I believe was a kind of couscous, and a kind of spiced tea that was quite lovely; st_darwin had the brochettes de boeuf, which were also really nice (I tried one). From there, we drove about half an hour into the mountains to visit Le Montaigne des Singes, which was a sanctuary/park for Barbary macaques. The macaques roam free within the enclosure and eat popcorn which is provided to the visitors. This, as you can imagine, was totally awesome, and I took tons of good pictures. At one point, as we were making our way around the trail, there was a frantic burst of activity from the woods as one macaque took off after another, which was running for its life, amidst a burst of furiously angry chittering and squawking. I have no idea what was up with that, but the macaque doing the chasing seemed deadly serious. There were babies, as well, which were very tiny and cute. I saw one mother make definite aggression/warning facial expressions at tourists when they stepped over her line of what was acceptable to do with her baby. One of the signs in the park depicted some of the favourite activities of the macaques; #9 on the list was mating, and yes, there was a picture.

After that, we drove up to check out the castle at Haut-Koenigsburg. We arrived a bit too late in the day to go through the castle, but we did have time to wander around the outside a bit, and have a coke while overlooking the land below, which was mostly farmland dotted with picturesque villages. Then we ventured into one of those picturesque villages, Kintzheim, for dinner. None of the local restaurants served dinner until 6:30, so we had about an hour to wander around the village and take pictures. Seriously, Kintzheim is so cute it's straight out of central casting. The streets are narrow, lane-like and winding, and the buildings, which mostly seem to date from the middle ages, are straight out of a storybook. I must have taken dozens of photos. The area seems to cater mostly to French and German tourists, because the information in English was relatively sparse, and most people spoke both French and German well (as you'd imagine for Alsace, which is the kind of region where bilingual names like "Haut-Koenigsburg" are not at all unusual.). Between my incredibly rusty French and SIL's passable German, we managed reasonably well at ordering treats in a bakery, as well as fondue for dinner at Auberge les Armoiries d'Alsace. The woman in the bakery spoke no English at all (but was quite nice about my appalling French), and the restaurant host spoke German with SIL, French with me, and odd bits of English to communicate ideas when both of us looked completely confused.

Tomorrow brings the promise of a castle. We shall see. But as for the rest of tonight, it'll be beer and bed for me.

We were up dark and early at 4:00AM to prepare for our 5:00 cab trip back to Liverpool Street Station. From there, we purchased round-trip tickets for the express train to Stansted Airport, and boarded the train for a comfortable 45-ish minute ride. Shortly after departure, a conductor came along and asked to see our fares and we got our tickets punched. It was just such a classically English experience.

Stansted itself is a smallish airport, with an efficient security line, which includes a conveyer which pops security bins up and slides them out to the people waiting to put their laptops into something. Past security was a rather impressive mall, with a couple of sitdown restaurants, smaller food kiosks, bookstores, souvenir shops and all the things one expects to find in a modern airport. One thing I didn't expect to find was the vending machine in the ladies room that offered a small toothbrush that fit on the tip of one's finger. We took the tram to our terminal, where there was a small shop. Remembering my experience in Chile with the steak-flavoured potato chips, I decided to buy a bag of crisps in a flavour that seemed somewhat locally exotic. "Roast chicken" was just the thing! It tasted eerily like roast chicken, which was a bit off-putting, but it did quickly grow on me. I'm not sure I'd have it again, but as a chip flavour it was definitely an interesting cultural experience.

Germanwings is the kind of budgety airline that doesn't even give you paper bag tags for the luggage you check at the last minute because your regular checked bags are overweight. The models portraying flight attendants in their onboard menu are all classically beautiful and have a real "coffee, tea or me" vibe about them. Even in the children's promotional material, the redheaded model/flight attendant couldn't quite keep the come-hither down to a dull roar. The actual flight attendants were good-looking but thoroughly businesslike. We turned in our "Happy Picnic" vouchers for a snack-type meal that was not entirely unhappy: in my case a baguette with cheese and a tiny can of real-sugar Coca-Cola. (All the soft drinks are real sugar over here. None of this high-fructose corn syrup nonsense.) I am not partial to cheeses in general, but it seemed better than the meatier option. The cheese itself was not unpleasant, but the bread... the bread was heavenly. Thick and full and chewy. If this is the kind of bread that goes into mediocre budget airline meals, what kind of bread do real bakeries serve? I suspect I'll find out soon enough, but it'll be a miracle if I can get through this without massive weight gain.

Once in Stuttgart, the border agent joked with me about only staying one week. I must have bought into the stereotypes about dour German officials, because I was not expecting jokes. My sister-in-law (hereinafter, SIL) was waiting for us, and we headed off to her place, past the Mercedes Benz plant, on the fringes of the Black Forest. The house itself is cute: narrow, but tall, with a wooden spiral staircase connecting all the levels. It is very slippy. Everyone falls on it. The house rule is: hand on the rail going up, no stocking feet going down. Everyone still falls anyway. Elements of the house are a marvel of German engineering: the windows are capable of opening either vertically or horizontally; the bedroom doors have a lip around the inside to ensure maximum light-tightness; the window blinds are on the outside (but you control them from the inside) and they are capable of letting in as much or as little light as one wishes – and by as little, I mean you can get the kind of perfect darkness that vampires and migraineurs require. The kitchen is either a painfully small American kitchen or a somewhat largish German kitchen, depending on how you want to view it.

We had a lovely lunch at a local Italian place. st_darwin and I split a pizza, and even though he ordered the wrong thing (pizza diavolo), it was still really, really good. The bruschetta was more like an extremely crispy-crust pizza and the tomatoes were spectacularly flavourful. And the beer... so good. So, so good. I am going to be spoiled for beer. After lunch, we dropped by the nephews' school to pick them up. (The nephews will hereinafter be known as N1 and N2.) When we got back home, we were on the verge of collapse, so we both had a nap while the kids did their post-school routines. Next thing I know, my brother-in-law (hereinafter, BIL) was knocking on the door, asking us if we were ready for dinner. We decided on a Greek place, and after a short drive to a small town just adjacent to the one in which they're living (I have sadly forgotten the name, but will go back and fill this in a bit later), and a bit of a struggle finding parking on the narrow and in places quite steep streets, we found it.

They serve a shotglass of ouzo to every adult customer, which is very generous and friendly of them, but as a supertaster, I perceive ouzo as anise-flavoured jet fuel, so very much not my thing. I had a pils instead (more beer – is anyone surprised?), and an utterly delicious lamb fillet with roast potatoes and salad. Then we came back to the house, packed the kids off to bed, and spent the rest of the evening hanging out with BIL and SIL, drinking hefeweizen and watching Modern Family. The beer in this country is so good that I'm finding even the hefeweizen to be a delight to my tastebuds.

Tomorrow: the beer fest. Do you have any idea how much I'm looking forward to this?

When I went to bed last night, I was optimistic that I'd wake a morning person. How extraordinarily naïve of me! No, my body decided to wake me up at 3:15 local time (10:15 Boston time), and the message it was giving me was this: "Was that supposed to be a nap? Because I have overnapped and now you have a sleep hangover!"

One day I'll get this right. That day, however, is not today. I was joined in my sleeplessness by st_darwin, which is good because otherwise I might have woken him in my fidgetude.

I did what I could to maintain some sense of serenity. I put on my iPod with my narcotic mix. When the second song to come up was from Alan Moore's Highbury Working, I had to consider that perhaps London was trying to send me a message. I decided to roll with it. I did a brief kundalini yoga meditation, and we decided to quietly play computer games until such time as one could reasonably shower and repair downstairs to the breakfast area.

We had the standard English breakfast, which consisted of bacon and/or sausage, toast and sunny-side up fried eggs. I got daring and tried the eggs, and while the taste wasn't bad, the texture was spongy enough to be displeasing. The tea was outstanding. The bacon was surprisingly Canadian. (Do they call it Canadian bacon here? Back bacon? Just bacon?)

We headed off to the Globe at rush hour, which in retrospect was a bit of a mistake, since I couldn't sit on the train, and my ovaries started to throb with every jerk and jostle of the train car. The hotel is about five minutes from the Hammersmith Tube stop, which makes getting around pretty straightforward. We took the Tube to Mansion House and walked across the Southwark Bridge to the Globe. On the north side of the Thames, you could see stairs leading down to a ladder, which led right down to the river. Apparently you can go down there at low tide and find all sorts of artifacts from London's past.

The Globe, in a word, is amazing. It's not on the site of the original Globe – apparently that's where the Southwark bridge is now, but it is in as close to the style as the original Globe as modern reconstructionists have been able to reconstruct. It's all wooden, all oak. There is no metal anywhere; the oak slabs are stuck together using mortise-and-tenon and hand-made wooden pegs. It's open-air. There's a roomy section for the standees ("groundlings" as they're known), and apparently they can get rained on and/or sunburned depending on how London's weather feels like behaving. There are three rows of seats, and the seats mostly consist of wooden benches. The exception is in the gentlemen's boxes, which are situated very close to the stage, so much so that the view from the box is mostly of the actors' backs; one sat there to be seen, rather than to see. They have actual cushioned chairs. The rest of us have to rent seat cushions and backrests, which make an otherwise uncomfortable seating situation marginally less uncomfortable. We did the tour of the theatre, strolled around the exhibition hall (which had some fantastic costumes), and poked around the waterfront.

We had lunch at a Turkish place, TAS Pide, where we split a pide – like a flatbread pizza – with ground chicken, peppers and cilantro. It was delicious. I had a pint of mystery lager, and st_darwin had a tiny bottle of Schweppes Canada Dry ginger ale. We people-watched for a while, took a bunch of pictures, and then entered the theatre for the matinee, which was really cool because in Shakespeare's day, all plays were matinees, so it felt kind of authentic. The play was "Much Ado About Nothing," which is my favourite of Shakespeare's comedies, and it was fantastic. There was a lot of interaction between the actors and the crowd. Eve Best (Beatrice) and Charles Edwards (Benedick) somehow managed to stand out from an impressively awesome cast. There were a few moments when the sun was directly in our eyes and we had need of the silly paper visors that the ushers were handing out, and there were a couple of acts when it was so intolerably hot from the sun being almost directly overhead that I thought I was going to melt, but before long, it had cooled off, the sun had moved behind the building, and everything was perfect.

After the play, we walked across the Millennium Bridge to St Paul's, which is completely impressive, then hooked a right and made our way back to Mansion House. By this time, my body had pretty much hit its limit, and my walk, which started off the day so perky, had slowed to a crawl. I got a seat by asking a nice gentleman if he wouldn't mind giving up his – I was ready to launch into a sob story, but it wasn't necessary – and by the time we arrived back at Hammersmith, I was rested enough to make the slow trudge back. We chilled out for about an hour in our room before heading out in search of the pub we went in search of last night. This time – on the advice of a hunch of mine, after confirmation from Googlemaps – we went left instead of right, and there it was, just past the tennis courts and the natatorium. It was a typical, quiet English pub, with a reasonable selection of mostly non-English beers, and a menu that hit all the high points of British cuisine: fish and chips, pot pies, roast beef dinners on Sunday (reservations recommended). I had the fish and chips, which came with mushy peas. "Mushy" in this case actually meant "totally pureed." The colour was lovely, the taste was delightful but the texture... it really doesn't bear thinking about.

After dinner, we stopped at the local Tescos and had a good prowl up and down the aisle seeing what was available in stores. There were milkshake packets, strange candy bars, a whole bunch of laundry detergent brand names I'd never heard of, and a whole row of cell phones for sale. And something called "long life milk", which apparently uses ultra-high temperature pasteurization. Alas, however, there were no air travel sized shampoos, which was our whole reason for going to Tescos in the first place. We got a smallish bottle of a shampoo I'd never heard of before but which looked promising, and we'll just put it in with the checked bag. (I will admit that I'm really looking forward to having squeaky clean hair again. These last few days have been disastrous for my locks.)

We then made our way back to our room for some quiet time before bedtime. All tolled, I have walked 4.7 miles today.

4.7 miles. I am not even two weeks post-surgery. I officially rock. My energy levels are fine (no energy drain, no sudden crash) but my ovaries want to leap up through my abdominal cavity and throttle me.

Part of our trip involves a brief flight on a discount airline known as Germanwings. I know nothing about Germanwings, other than that their flights from London to Stuttgart are reasonably priced, and come with snack vouchers.

Only they aren't called snacks. No. Germanwings refers to its inflight snack service vouchers as "happy picnic" vouchers.

I did not add those quotes. Germanwings did.

I am unclear on what they are intending to get across with this, but I am imagining an extraordinarily good-looking, snarky, black-turtleneck-clad German man making scare quotes as he intones the words "happy picnic," with an ever-so-slightly curled lip.

Apparently the "happy picnic" snack comes with "assorted meats." I am at the same time trepidatious and eager to find out what it all means.

I bet there's a word for that in German.

In spite of our GPS' best efforts to buffalo-jump us, we made it to New York City with only traffic-induced stress. We then proceeded to check in at the Waldorf Astoria.

I will not lie: it's a lovely hotel. They do not make them like this anymore. There are glorious mosaics on the floors, elegantly wood-paneled elevators and enough architectural details to take the sting out of an egregiously long wait at reception. It is, in most ways, the antithesis of my first New York City hotel, the beloved Chelsea. If the Chelsea is the spiritual home of disreputable writers and rockers, the Waldorf Astoria is the earthly home of travelling supermodels and tennis stars. The bathroom has a scale in it, presumably so the former can decide whether or not they get to eat on any given day; the latter was spotted during the aforementioned egregiously long wait at reception. The US Open is in town, apparently, and the key to spotting the tennis stars is to follow the swivelling of every female head in the room. I do not follow the tennis, so I can't say definitively who he was, but he was dark-haired and hot, so I suspect Roger Federer.

Our room is on the 25th floor. We have a fantastic view of St. Bartholomew's, and other buildings that range from the moderately interesting to the thoroughly mundane. Our room is, in a word, posh. The desk chair is cushy, and unlike the Chelsea all of the furniture matches. If the bathroom were to make a fashion statement, it would probably be something like, "I hope you like marble," because it is marblicious. This place is, to put it bluntly, a little too rich for my blood. As much as I would love to become accustomed to la vida Waldorf Astoria, I fear I am at heart a (Hotel) Chelsea girl.

We ventured forth to Chipotle to get enough food for me to be able to take my painkillers before we headed off for a fun-filled evening of Sleep No More, where I logged 2.61 miles. Yes, I was trying to take it easy.

( Details of Sleep No More visit #13. Spoilers ahoy! )

And most importantly, what will I find tomorrow night that's different yet again?

Our hotel room has two layers of opaque blinds on the windows, for extra light-tightness. And around the corner there is a late-night airbrush fake-tan salon. To take away that pasty look that comes from being up at all hours and really not at all out much in the daylight, I suppose.

Sleep No More was amazing as usual. They're changing the conceptualization of Mrs. Danvers and the Second Mrs. De Winter, and I'm sure I'll have more to say about that later. I finally got to see Macduff's door dance. And Hecate dragged me into a room, removed my mask, pushed me into a dark room, threw me up against a wall and tasked me to fulfill a quest for her, one which I will sadly be unable to fulfill.