A Bavarian Christmas

My hosts are going Xmas shopping today and needing a little downtime I have elected to stay here citing my distaste for holiday crowds and my addiction to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

My hosts are a very sweet couple, Liz and Marcus. Liz is a professional guitarist and teaches guitar and yoga. Marcus is an elementary school teacher. They live next door to Liz's mother and her uncle and grandpa live down the street. They have two cats who, if outside, arrive every evening when it gets dark in Liz's mom's arms because she does not want them to get cold at night. Very cute. Liz is glad for the cats partially because they diffuse the attentions of her mother a little, and as I learn later that is a small part of the reason why they are having couchsurfers over this Christmas this year, to diffuse the stress/annoyance factor of Liz's fam being in such close proximity. Fine by me.

There are two other couchsurfers here, a young, about 23, married couple from New Jersey living in Geneva for the boy, Chris's, internship. The girl, Tory has the extremely annoying habit of saying "that's so amaaaaaaaaazing!" or "it's beeeaaauuuutiful!" in regards to everything she sees or tastes or is shown or otherwise presented with. This translates into her saying one of these phrases about every 20 to 30 seconds it seems like. Not only that but profusely thanking our hosts with about the same frequency. It is this limited vocabulary extreme over-politeness that at first made me feel bad for my seeming infrequency of thanks-yous and fake awe-struck impreessions of things like their fucking SNAILS. There was a quote in Infinite Jest that I can identify with: "...acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else." Seeing as my threshold for things like this, i have found, can be pretty high... sometimes, I do not think I will be fatigued enough in the 2 days I will be in contact with this person to accept her, so I am resigned to silently hating her, occasionally shooting psychic knives at the back of her head from my eyes when no one is looking. Though then I started feeling bad for hating (ok, not really hate, of course, just extreme annoyance, which everyone knows can feel like hatred) this girl for being so Freaking Nice!... and then started resenting her for making me feel bad (it is amazing the multitude of thoughts and emotions that can go through your head in just a couple of seconds of sitting on a couch shooting knivies from your eyes)... and then decided to just accept the fact (fatigue?...) that I really do not like most people, let us just say I have a very refined taste in those who I choose to associate with... though others would, I know call it questionable, it's all relative, and it is ok for me to not like someone for just being too nice. It doesn't make me a bad person. It brings to mind a quote from some speaker on an episode of This American Life, "...I find racism very intriguing, of all the reasons to hate people, why of all things choose skin color?"

Anyway, enough of that. We went to the longest castle in Europe, but was a little disapointed as the castle itself was not over a kilometer long, but all the courtyards and walls surrounding them. Bastards got the moniker on a technicality. We also went to a pilgrimage site which was unique in that it had paintings by hundreds of people who had allegedly received a miracle from making the pilgrimage. So all the walls were covered in art from the early 1900s to the present day.

On Christmas day I get a ride from Liz and Marcus to Munich where I will be staying in a couchsurfers dormroom while he is not there until Teagan arrives on the 30th.