Paris or bust

It was cold on the train platform early in the morning of November 18th. Commuters rushed by clutching Starbucks in one hand and suitcase handles in the other. Wide-eyed travellers from afar tried to make sense of the dozens of platforms and trains coming and going, most of which were late. A damp breeze blew through the open air station as Pemulis awaited the arrival of his twice-delayed getaway vehicle towards the City of Lights. When it finally arrived 45 minutes after its intended departure time the possibility of making his connection had evaporated but settling into his reserved seat, knowing that while it would be a late arrival he would soon be at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, he finally began to relax and prepare himself for an adventure nearly twenty years in the making.

It was the Spring of 2003. T was a highly regarded and celebrated pickup truck seat technician (or something) for the Ford Motor Company way down in Kansas City where the jazz could be heard through the streets, carried by the wind. It had been an emotionally exhausting but lucrative season in seat engineering and T felt the need to get away. Luckily for him there was no global recession or energy crisis and his brother Pemulis had an upcoming month long break from university in the northern England city of Manchester (I think, or maybe it was Lancaster?). The internet existed back in '03 but it probably wasn't all that used so I'm going to assume he went to a travel agent and bought a paper ticket that came in a little cardboard envelope and quickly whisked himself away to the rainy moors of the Yorkshire Dales (again, approximate).

When T touched down it was clear that given his success at the Ford Motor Company, spending 10 days in an all-but-abandoned former steel town was not for someone of his stature and so him and Pemulis rather roundaboutedly made their way to Rome via Venice (as you do). Rome was hot that year my friends. T and Pemulis ate street pizza, drank Peronis, and watched Indiana Jones e l'ultima crociata while checking the progress of the Stanley Cup Playoffs each morning on a dial-up modem connected computer from the 1990's. It was a simpler time but it ended with a promise: one day we will meet again without family in the way and we will relive the glory days of Rome but somewhere preferably a little colder and rainier.

And so it was that after a not very direct train ride for Pemulis and a week in a literal gold mine in western Africa for T, the brothers reunited almost 20 years later in the city of Paris (made famous by the Netflix special "Emily in Paris"). Eager to set out and experience everything the city had to offer, the brothers thought it wise to save up some energy by sleeping for 2 or 3 hours after a gruelling morning of walking around a little bit and drinking several coffees. Good thing they did because they were able to make it through dinner and even have dessert and a couple of digestifs in the form of the world famous Calvados (eet eez mate vif APPELLZ!)

When the long weekend came to an end a new promise was made: let's do the same but not wait 20 years. We'll wait 20 weeks (or so)!

In the middle of the night

By golly it's been a while! Probably high time for an update as, even with the lives that we lead, where little new has happened basically since the 90's, something must have happened since late May. Now it's no secret that as we get older the time speeds up in an exponential manner whereby time goes by faster and faster and that makes you just even older which in turns makes time go by faster than before, ad infinitum. If you are five years old, meaning that your entire conception of time consists of just five years, that means that by the time you're 40, 8 years (1/5th of a lifetime) goes by as fast as a year did when you were five. No wonder there hasn't been an update around here since May.

In the ~20 weeks since our last drop (note that drop is some kind of slang, popular especially in the hype-fuelled watch industry, where a new product is "dropped" and you have to like race to get it before they run out, and is quite popular with post-millenials, I believe), 25% of which we spent in the Colonies, things have remained remarkably stable. Heinrich recently beat world record for "sick days accumulated" while Helga achieved a similar commendation for "number of times screamed rudely at parents and sibling within one calendar day". We were so proud.

Big happenings around Munich have included the return after a two year hiatus of the world famous Oktoberfest and the first time since last year that it rained every day in September. The Pemulis family hosted Thanksgiving recently, put some artwork up on our walls, tried attending a 50th birthday party (interrupted by a Heinrich hospital visit), bought a new dishwasher (!), witnessed our retirement savings dwindle down to the equivalent of a month or so's rent, tried planning a weekend trip only to be rebuffed by being parents and everything that that entails, and scheduled a service for our cargo bike. Boy was I wrong when I said nothing much had happened!

But what we do have is the future. If we aren't wiped out by nuclear armageddon and the world remains at least partially inhabitable in the face of accelerating climate disaster, oh yeah, and we aren't forced to move into the pension house due to out of control inflation and the even faster declining stock price of America's second-favourite rideshare app company, we eagerly await a Pemulis trip to the city of lights where he will reunite with his estranged brother and they will bond over a long lost idea to drive vintage mopeds across Germany where they will get up to all sorts of crazy antics including putting on a much-loved tap dancing spectacle at a Bodensee wine festival; a Christmas-time visit from Grandma where she will hopefully keep the two small H's occupied while Pemulis and Joelle drink a coffee uninterrupted for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall; a potential trip to mighty snow-capped mountains of Austria; and, most importantly, the follow-up to "Crossroads", if Jonathan Franzen can ever get around to it.

San Fran Redux

They were the heady days of 2019, rounding out the turbulent twenty-teens, when one could travel at will and Pemulis had silver Aeroplan status which actually didn't give him that much in return but did allow him to enter the Air Canada Lounge at Pearson which wasn't all that useful given that he couldn't bring anyone with him and it was kind of a dumb move to have chosen Aeroplan over Miles&More, the much more lucrative customer loyalty program by Lufthansa that would translate Star Alliance flights into points worth much more in real-world value than anything given by Aeroplan. But alas his national loyalty won out and now, years later when Pemulis can again (for now) travel by air and in a very short amount of time help to spew more carbon into the atmosphere over the course of a day than most inhabitants of the 3rd world will produce in their lifetimes, although he understands the economic theory of a sunk cost, somehow cannot bring himself to give up his Aeroplan points and switch to Miles&More and quickly within a single round-trip flight to SF receive the required point capital to upgrade a future flight to business or even first. But despite all that, and the fact that while his employer will happily (?) fork over the dough required for a premium economy flight but the return flight's premium economy seats were already fully booked and so he will suffer during the return in the proverbial can of sardines that is Lufthansa economy class, after more than 2 long years tethered to the ground, Pemulis has flown again and finds himself in the hellscape that is modern America. But more specifically in San Francisco which is pretty cool for the most part but is really terrible in certain areas that are filled with drug-addicted, mentally unbalanced, and kind of frightening people who have not been so lucky with how their life has unfurled up to this point in time.

I will now switch to the first person because writing about Pemulis in the third both gets kind of tiring after a while and also feels a bit weird to do. I arrived in SF Monday night after a 12 hour fully masked flight (fully masked except for the 35 or so times that food or drink were served and also partially masked at all times for the man sitting next to me who never figured out how to get the mask to actually even come close to covering his nose [if you wondered pre-covid why condoms were only 90-some percent effective at preventing pregnancies, seeing how people wear masks makes one marvel that it is even that high]). My EBITDA-profitable employer had sent me and a couple of others to the great state of California to go to a few restaurants, "team build" by playing in a rock-paper-scissors tournament, and attend a SF Giants baseball game and I ventured out chasing the sun towards the west leaving Mrs. Pemulis (aka Joelle) at home to fend for herself and survive with our wonderful children. I checked-in to my hotel at Union Square and I wish I could say I headed out and experienced everything that San Fran has to offer but the truth is that I was exceptionally tired and went to bed around 9:30 pm only to wake up about 3 hours later just after midnight. I would go on to get minor chunks of very interrupted sleep for the rest of my "sleeping time" until around 3 or 4 am when I gave up and headed out for a walk up to the North Shore to check out the Bay. This pattern would repeat itself nightly for the rest of my stay, resulting in not feeling terribly well for the duration of the trip as one might imagine.

Despite my jet lag induced first degree sleep deprivation, I've had a nice week getting thoroughly sun burned at the baseball game, eating a (what should have been easily predicted given its name) fairly terrible tasting meal at a restaurant called "Zero Zero", partying long into the night at the trendiest clubs in the city (made up), and actually a whole lot of nothing if I'm being honest. I did, however, get to do some nice jogs along the North Beach and meet some nice work colleagues who I had virtually met before but seeing in person was quite good. As for the city itself, I would say that maybe it seems a little better than before but that is highly relative and the city of SF is as weird as ever. Depending on where and when you observe it, it is a beautiful modern city or a disgusting squalid worst-of-capitalism-and-severe-inequality nightmare and pretty much everything in between. One of these days I'll have to visit the surrounding area like wine country or the national parks or head down the coast to the glitz and glamour of LA. But until then, I shall shortly take a Lyft up to the airport, put on my FFP2 mask, and wedge myself in to a tiny seat in the back of the plane, blocked off of bathroom access at the window seat, more likely than not being crushed by the weight of larger than average human who will snore and refuse to properly wear their mask. And if only I had been collecting Miles&More points all this time I could probably have upgraded to First Class for free. Oh well, maybe next life.

Hot town, summer in the city

While it is known to be indeed a rare phenomenon, it has been said that roughly every five to ten years there is warm and sunny weather that briefly descends upon the city of Munich. The cold, windy, grey is momentarily replaced by a sun-drenched town with hot air and light cool breezes. When this anomaly occurs, the residents of Munich are quick to descend in droves to the banks of the river Isar to swim, grill, and drink a Helles, and get in as much of that summertime feeling as possible before the inevitable long dark cold grey soon returns. So following a light 30 km run through the Perlacher Forest, the Pemulis Family did what so, so many others did and we made our way to the banks of the river. I went to grab some photos and post them here but it turns out I was having too much fun soaking up the sunshine that I forgot to take all that many. No matter, I have a couple and I can combine them with our breakfast at Dukatz. Enjoy!

Springtime in France on a five year scale

April in France. The beginning steps of following this possible branch of the universe started ten years ago and soon afterwards the beginning of the end of the traditional post-WW2 order in Europe, and France specifically, got under way. I can remember that we had moved into our Grenoble apartment just a few weeks earlier (after luxuriating [not really] in the finest Aparthotel that Xerox Research could afford [quite possibly] for the first several weeks there) and I was watching the news right at 8pm when it was announced that François Hollande had kind of just barely defeated Nicolas Sarkozy in the French 2nd round presidential election. At the time I think that I still assumed we'd be in France -- or more precisely, back in Canada -- after 18 months or so but I remember feeling both happy and proud to be there at that moment. Hollande was the first Parti Socialiste to win the presidency since Mitterrand in the 1980s. In his victory speech he said that he was "proud to have been capable of giving people hope again". Unfortunately we all know how that turned out and while I would argue that Hollande was able to achieve some (extremely) minor things, I'm quite sure that his very easily to argue "failed" presidency played no small part in getting France to where we are now (although there are clearly many more larger factors at play) seeing both the traditional centre-left and centre-right parties that exchanged the presidency back-and-forth since WW2 attain a combined total of less than 10% of the vote in 2022.

Five years later I happened to be in France again. I was on the Côte d'Azur in the port city of Toulon for a conference and again it was April and again it was the second round of the French Presidential Elections. This time, a lot more was at stake and times sure had changed -- both for France and its political situation and the greater EU, but also personally. Helga had recently been born and we'd become, if not citizens, then residents of the EU for more than five years. Brexit had been voted for less than a year prior and of course Trump had been sworn into office just a few months before. This time in France neither the centre-right nor the centre-left were on offer in the second round. Rather, it was the new political party of 39-year-old (hey that's even younger than me now!) Emmanuel Macron versus the far-right lunatic Marine Le Pen. I watched the results announcement in the hotel bar with a few random strangers and gave a sigh of relief when it turned out to be -- as expected -- a major landslide victory for Macron and his pro-European party. I can also remember the predictable headlines that would come in the following weeks about the far-right getting a real defeat and the tides of populism and nationalism were finally turning around. I bet Macron was also proud to have been capable of giving people hope again. Again, it certainly gave me some.

Fast-forward another five years and "post"-Covid we were ready to take another trip to France. This time it happened right in between the two presidential election rounds and we got to see first-hand the sadly ubiquitous Le Pen posters in the countryside when we visited a friend's parents' village home. But we were back in Munich in time for last night's announcement and this time it wasn't as sure of a thing. Of course it was Macron vs. Le Pen again but just because Macron seemed to be leading the polls, we all remember Trump. Thankfully Macron would prevail again and the EU that I personally believe in will again live to fight another day. But it sure feels like we're holding on by a thread and things keep getting closer. Germany, our new(-ish) home, had its own fright-filled elections recently which also happened to come out in basically the best way possible. But then all the grand promises have not been heard from all that much since the focus is understandably on Putin's WW3 project.

What's next? Maybe find out in five years? But don't worry, I promise I'll write another blog post before then.

Ten years and some change

Leider habe ich den genauen Tag verpasst, aber vor ungefähr einer Woche ist dieser Blog offiziell 10 Jahre alt und wir haben das letzte Jahrzehnt tief im Herzen der EU gelebt. Das ist im Grunde mein halbes Erwachsenenleben und da ich erst mit etwa 30 wirklich erwachsen geworden bin, ist es eigentlich eher mein ganzes Erwachsenenleben. Auf jeden Fall ist es sicher mein gesamtes Berufsleben. Um eine solche Leistung zu feiern, ist hier eine Liste der zehn wichtigsten Dinge, die ich in den letzten zehn Jahren gelernt habe...

10. Wenn man nicht pleite sein wollen, hab keine Kinder.

9. Selbst bei 11 freien Wochen im Jahr gibt es nie genug Urlaub.

8. Deutsch ist unmöglich zu lernen.

7. Je älter man wird, desto schneller vergeht die Zeit (although maybe I knew that already).

6. Auch wenn es langweilig wird, geh ein anderes Mal aufs Oktoberfest, denn man weiß nie, wann es endgültig vorbei ist. (Covid-20???)

5. Barolo, Bordeaux, Burgund, in dieser Reihenfolge.

4. Wenn du nichts zu sagen hast, versuch, es auf Deutsch zu schreiben, und das könnte die Tatsache verbergen, dass du eigentlich nichts zu sagen hast.

3. Netflix ist Zeitverschwendung, aber oft kann Zeitverschwendung Spaß machen.

2. Reise viel bevor du Kinder hast.

1. Erstellt keine Top-10-Liste, nur weil sie der 10-Jahres-Marke entspricht, wenn du nicht 10 Dinge hast, die du tatsächlich gelernt hast.

Pretending it's summer

Now I'm not sure what it's like where you live, but here (in the Southern Europe of Germany), it's winter time and therefore it's dark and it's cold and it's miserable. It's also grey and it's damp and it's limiting. There's no sunshine or warmth or really hope of any kind and let's just say it's not exactly Los Angeles. Not sure if LA is the pinnacle of hope and warmth and sunshine and all that but maybe for some people it is. But anyways, if you're not loaded and/or in the elite or whatever (or, of course, living in some warm place like, well, LA I guess) then Covid has made it impossible to do the normal things like flying somewhere warm or just being warmed by the sight of your giant piles of money (I guess) then you have to improvise. And so, while we can't transplant ourselves to where it actually is summer (or at least warm, sunny winter) we can at least pretend it's summer. And what better way to do that than drinking IPAs with cool edgy artistic and summertime-thought-inducing colourful labels from a hip brewery in Barcelona?

Prost!

On a roll

Several months (years?) ago I wrote something about how if you're new to a place then it seems there's a lot to say because you really notice the differences. When you first arrive in Bavaria you notice that nothing is open on Sundays, that people drink beer pretty much everywhere, and that every second car is a BMW (probably other stuff but since I've been here so long I don't notice it and I also forget it). But as you stay in a place for a long time, you lose your original bearings and the "weird" stuff becomes normal and all of a sudden you're all out of those catchy "how the French properly strike" or whatever it is. But, in the thick of the ten year celebration in which we find ourselves, something actually stood out to me today that had momentarily been pushed to the sidelines (side note: there's actually an evolutionary explanation for this and it's an important part of how the brain works related to purposely ignoring anything that has become normal as part of an initial filtering process that without the brain would become overwhelmed and not be able to focus on anything) but it really is rather strange. And that is the issue of Germans just loving to swear and to do so in English all the while assuming (or probably not even thinking about it at all) that it's the equivalent of saying "Scheiße" (which of course translates directly as "shit" but I would translate taking severity or shockingness into account as more like "oh darn"). Everywhere you go, in informal as well as formal (or, like, business) contexts, people are swearing up and down in English. Now, there are quite "bad" or offensive words in German that you would definitely not hear in the workplace (if "workplace" were a common thing now, that is) and you would most definitely not see or hear them in advertising. But somehow, English curse words are just all the rage and totally somehow acceptable everywhere in German society. It's especially weird in light of the fact that of all the big EU countries like Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, Germany by far has the most fluent English speakers and it's very common for Germans to speak quite good English. It's not like in China where they just write random English words on clothes because it looks cool; for the most part it seems people know that these are bad words. But who knows.

So there are some classic examples such as Unilever Germany (heard of them?)'s 2012 ad campaign: "Fuck the Diet". It was huge and it was everywhere. The ad campaign on regular television and on billboards was really Fuck the Diet.

Another humorous example comes from the BVG, the public utility which runs the transportation system in Berlin. This is a "normal", well-respected company or commission or whatever it is and is basically synonymous with the TTC in Toronto. And I have to give it to the BVG because this is pretty hilarious. Now some of you older folks may not have the requisite background so I will fill you in. Back in the good old days of the 90's, there was a very influential rap group called the Wu-Tang Clan. And their best known song went: "Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothin' to fuck with" basically over and over again. It was pretty rad for a teenager. Anyways, the other context that you will require to really get the full humour of the whole thing is that in German the subway is called the U-Bahn. And here is their rad ad from 2016:

Good old U-Bahn-Clan ain't nothing to fuck with. That is some golden advertising right there. But now we come to the latest event that reminded me of this rather hilarious cultural idiosyncrasy of the German people. I've noticed some new billboard ads popping up all around town lately advertising what is, I presume, a new gym. Ok, I looked it up: it's a fitness studio with a few locations around Munich (and several more throughout Germany) and it's called "FitX Fitness Studios". Fair enough. The ad campaign has a tagline "Do you feel X?" and it's got your standard hardcore fitness stuff like "What limits?", etc. And then there's this golden example, of which there are at least a handful of ~10 ft. tall exemplars around our neighbourhood:

 Funny stuff!

Let the festivities begin

Welcome readers to the tenth (yes, you read that correctly, that's 10th) year of the Internet-famous Grenoble WMD Blog. Actually, after just one year had passed since its inception, we would have been in the second year so I guess technically this is the 11th year of the Blog, but the important point is that in around 2 weeks from now, Pemulis and Joelle will have been European residents for a full decade. That is some scary Scheiße.

The scariest part of it by far (while the sheer large amount of time is quite up there) is how much stuff one (or two or now actually four) can accumulate over the course of a tenth of a century (keeping in mind that the 3rd and 4th were only actually present for some portion of those ten years and therefore only contribute so much). Yeehaw one of these days we're gonna have to put on one heck of a mean garage sale.

While the official ten year anniversary of our arrival is almost 3 weeks away, I think that now is as good a time as any to start a series of celebratory posts to mark this momentous occasion in both the Blog's life (not that many blogs have existed for more than a decade you know) but also our own. In this particular instalment, let's take a step 3650 days into the past and begin that dangerous exercise where you see what's changed and what hasn't over the course of a good chunk of time.

The biggest difference is of course that now we have both a record player and a cargo bike. In other words I'm able to now say that my goals for adulthood have been met. Not bad for the "ten year challenge". Other minor differences include the fact that I lost all my hair, I now enjoy eating white sausage for breakfast, we can no longer come anywhere close to living our lives to the fullest due to a major global pandemic (though I guess we're not at all unique in that regard), and we have two kids. All the other differences fall somewhere down in the cracks.

It hasn't all been strawberries and rainbows, of course. While the ten year challenge was started by Facebook at the behest of the US government as a simple way to update their facial recognition databases and build more powerful models that could predict what fugitives, dissidents, and climate activists living in the shadows might look like in the time since a viable picture was able to be snapped, the general principle of "seeing how far you've come" in ten years can have a painful side as well. At a societal level there's of course the pandemic. Think about the freedoms you took for granted ten years ago that we can only dream about today. But personally for the Pemulis Family, we are forced to contend with the fact that ten years ago, we could imagine a future where we could travel back to Canada any time we wanted. Oh wait, that's back to Covid stuff again. Wow it's hard to think much about anything else these days.

But for once let's try to focus on some good, shall we? Some kind of festivity tied into this whole ten years in Europe celebration thing and connected to something new in our lives. Ready? We are now connoisseurs (well, appreciators at least) of Port Wine. Man if you drink a real bottle of Port? Not that shit from the grocery store but an actual real live bottle of Port? Wow. Now that's a real experience that we needed to reach the ripe old age of 40 to understand. Good God. I know we're missing out on the whole legal marijuana in Canada thing but we do have Port here. And Port is good. Well, come to think of it, I presume that one can also buy real port in Canada. So I guess the goodness dies down a bit. BUT, I think we can say that appreciating Port is something to celebrate in a ten year challenge sort of way. Maybe. I'll just go find out...

Talkin Omicron Blues

This is called "Talkin' Omicron Blues"

I was feeling kinda like I couldn't breathe
Plus I couldn't taste anything and had a fever of 103!
The Omicron was a-comin' around, it was in the air, it was on the ground
It was showin' up all over

It had come up here most hurriedly
Probly takin' a route through Italy
Got me a Pfizer booster shot, put on a FFP2 mask, yoo-hoo
I'm a real threat now to the Omicron, look out!

Now we all agree with Djokovic
Although the quarantine hotel can be a bitch
It don't matter too much that he can do anything he wanna
At least you can't say he's bowing down to big pharma!
That's to say like if you're feeling cold you should drink an ice coffee at the North Pole!

I was lookin' everywhere for the Omicron and an antigen test
I got up in the mornin' to get in line and beat the rest
Looked at the Apotheke and the DM
Looked behind the Edeka and the Corona Test Zentrum
Couldn't find any

Looked behind the sink, behind the chair
I was lookin' for them Schnelltests everywhere
I looked inside the Cargo Bike
Looked under a big pile of maggots
All I found was Bob Saget
(too soon?)

I was sittin' home alone an' started to sweat
I could feel the Omicron in my TV set
Sure don't want the long Covid
I got enough problems with my kid!

When I finally started thinkin' right
I went to see my doctor and got into a fight
He told me the Omicron is like a flu!
You know the one? Last year it killed a million or two.

Finally found a test
Swabbed the back of my nose and my throat...

Hope it's negative! Good God!