Falling Back

This morning the clocks fell back an hour here in Germany. I got an extra hour of sleep as a result, needed after I celebrated Katya’s visit from The Ukraine to Erfurt.

It’s been awhile since I last saw Katya. Most of you may recall her most vividly from when I went to Kyiv for New Year’s Eve a couple years back. I partied until late in the night (for me) with her family, getting drunk on vodka and enjoying everything Kyiv had to offer.

This time she called me Saturday at 5 to announce that she’d taken the train from Wiesbaden on Friday, gotten into bed and proceeded to sleep until Saturday afternoon. I immediately hopped a train and headed west to Erfurt—thankfully the train system was not on strike this weekend.

We wandered around Erfurt, ending up at a tapas bar for dinner, where we snacked on Olives and talked about nearly everything. She’d had the misfortune of spending time in Paris while the transit strike was going on—thus making it difficult and expensive to get around. I had my first Capirinhia with dinner, before we headed out and picked a nearby bar to sit and talk in.

I don’t recall the name of the bar, but it’s a students bar n Erfurt, and while I ordered my second Capirinhia of the evening, she ordered a Long Island Iced Tea – which meant the bartender had to pull out a chart telling him how to make it. We resumed our conversation and the next thing I knew, I had drunk a couple more Capirinhias—a total of four in the evening. After her Long Island, she switched first to coffee and then to tea.

It’s hard to capture the essence of the evening here—I realize now that it sounds like an itemized list of what we did without being colorful. I guess what I am trying to say is that hanging out with Katya is great fun.

I miss having her around.