Nobody Said it was Easy

This post will have no pictures, though I took many. You’ll see why.

My 48 hours in Edinburgh went by quickly and coldly, and I managed to see four Fringe shows (including Aoife’s , which is fantastic and beautiful and haunting, as her shows tend to be) and get in some good time with the sister. We cooked a lot in her strange, unwieldy kitchen, and I helped her change a lightbulb. In other words, we had a good time.

After two nightmarish experiences on EasyJet (it’s never worth it, never) I made it to Berlin. Everything was almost exactly the way I left it two years ago: the unbelievably smooth transportation system hasn’t gone up in price, the falafel and pretzels are still cheap and ubiquitous, and all of the buildings that were previously under construction still are under construction. In other words, I lept right back into it.

My three days in Berlin were scheduled around meals: all the cafes, restaurants, and stands I’d most missed were in due course visited and enjoyed. I caught up on my reading while Jesse used my computer to continue work on his novel—his own laptop had suffered from a mysterious and swiftly disabling ailment and was being repiared.

We did our reading and writing in cafes, until Thursday, when we arrived in Kreuzberg and discovered that the laptop hadn’t successfully shut down before being loaded into a computer bag and bumped up and down stairs and through Berlin’s subway tunnels. My compter didn’t decline as rapidly as Jesse’s had, but in the end it succumed all the same. It’s now sitting in an Amsterdam computer repair shop, its ultimate fate uncertain.

The computer is in Amsterdam because I am in Amsterdam now. My pre-studies jaunt is over, my friends all decidedly not in the same city as me; the part of my life in which I deplete all my savings has begun.

I’ve met both my roommates at this point, and both my roommates are away for the weekend, so I’ve been hanging out in the apartment, checking email on one roommate’s old laptop and making occasional ventures into the city for food and supplies. The laptop has a tenuous relationship with the internet and runs all programs with reluctance, so it takes about 10 minutes to load Google maps, and crashes if nytimes.com spews forth a pop-up ad. I’m beginning to wonder if JK Rowling had laptops in mind when she wrote about how onerous it is for wizards to use other wizards’ wands.

My various introductions to the city and school start tomorrow and last pretty much all week, so I’ll soon be much more busy and have met lots of people. If I have any luck at all, the computer will be fixable and I’ll have it back by next Saturday. If you don’t hear much from me in the meantime, now you know why.