May 7

Ha ha again I’m on a train. Again I’m glad to be using an American keyboard because my fingers have such intense muscle memory. I was using a German keyboard for two days while at Seb B’s mom’s house and the Y key was switched with the Z key. Also the @ symbol was on the Q key and you couldn’t use the regular shift key to get it, you had to use a second shift key. In place of the quotes/apostrophe key is an A with umlauts. There are many other differences but I’ll only mention one more. The question mark key is on the 0 key. You never realize how many Y’s are in an English sentence until you have to think about where to find a Y.

It’s the little things that make the world go round.

My two days at Seb B’s mom’s house were fantastic. It was a little bit like having a family again. Seb’s got 2 younger brothers, Laurence, who’s in his first year at college, and Felix, who’s 17 and was accepted to a school in Canada for his senior year. Laurence was in the middle of his exam week so I didn’t see much of him except at lunch and dinner. Felix also had several tests, but managed to play some music, go on walks with me, go to a concert, and dance with me in the dining room. I taught him some lindy hop and he taught me a cha cha routine. I realized I have a long way to go if I want to get back into the ballroom style. But it Will happen. It was brilliant to borrow some brothers for a few days.

I got a lot of business done while in Innsbruck so I feel good about that. I also started to put together a guest list for the traditional wedding celebration Josh and I are going to have in October. Man, my family is huge.

So I’m stopping in Salzburg, Austria today to catch part of their Thursday market. I’ll walk around the gardens across from the market. I’ll go to the city center. I’ll eat some lunch. I’ll get the train that afternoon to Vienna. I can’t wait to get to Vienna! I won’t get to waltz while I’m there but I’ll get to go to the museums and the hostel I’m staying at is decently priced and has instruments you can use. Please, God, let there be a bass!

Did I already mention that Lydia is bringing a mandolin and a harmonica with her when she comes? Well, she is. Guess I’ll be trying my chops at the harmonica for the next month.

I was trying to book a hostel in Brussels but they were outrageously expensive. And their facilities didn’t seem that expansive or good. So I figured I’d get a hostel in Antwerpen, about a 40 minute train ride from Brussels. That’s fine with me but now I’ve got a compromised expectation of Belgium. The chocolate better make up for it.

Felix was a little impressed with how much stuff I had in such a limited amount of luggage. And he was amused with some of the items I deemed vital for travel. Namely my dance shoes. I think I’d travel without a toothbrush before I traveled without my dance shoes.

I was thinking the other day that if I went deaf I could still dance. I’d know all the songs in my mind and besides, I’d have a partner who would lead me. If he just let me know that the song was “In the Mood” I’d know how I wanted to dance to it. And I dance without music quite a lot anyway. As long as he was dancing in time with the music, I would be too. I don’t know why this thought came to me. I think cuz my left ear was clogged on one of the train rides and I couldn’t hear perfectly through the left earphone. The point is I could still dance and I would still want to. It’d be a bit like Beethoven, only a little different.

The first night I was in Innsbruck Felix was going to a guitar concert. I went with him and the guy who played was a world renowned classical guitarist. He was so expressive in the sense that he distorted his face according to the mood of the chords he played. He hummed along with his own playing, sometimes singing a scat note or two. He opened and closed his mouth with down turned lips like a big grouper trying to shake the fishing line. He hunched his shoulders, threw his right arm in the air after a particularly intense strum like a rock star. The guy was not just a musician, Felix said, he was a comedian. During the first few movements of the first song, Felix and I were suppressing laughs. We couldn’t look at each other or we would have disrupted the silence of those sitting nearest us. When he finally finished his first full piece he struck the last note, slightly lifted the guitar away from his body, replaced it on his lap, and hung his body over it like a marionette. The crowd clapped and released the laughter they’d all been stifling like Felix and me. After that the musician made a joking comment or two and the audience finally knew that it was acceptable to laugh when he did something unexpected or quirky. There was now a relationship between the performer and the audience. He played some more modern pieces near the end of his concert including a classical guitar homage to Jimi Hendrix. For his encore he played 2 original pieces, the second of which was almost bluesy, almost funky. He’d tap the body of the guitar for a percussion sound, he’d strum and pluck high on the neck like and 80’s metal guitarist. You could just about dance to it.

Have I mentioned the mountains much? They look like ant hills covered in moss. Only they’re mountains covered in trees.

I’m going to Salzburg where “that terrible film that everyone knows about except Austrians” was filmed. The Sound of Music. Seb’s mom is awesome. She grew up there so she gave me some advice on what to see.

Bis Bald!
(A German saying which basically means see you soon but it’s used when you know that you will definitely see that person soon. So I say it to you.)