Merve and I were on our way to get coffee when a firefighter stopped us. “We’re closing off the street,” she said. “The Firebird is moulting. His feathers are highly flammable.” There was something sexily competent about her and so I preened just in case. Dating is not easy during the pandemic. Should I tell her beauty could ruin countries, awe fish into drowning in water, and dazzle birds into falling from the sky, and shame the moon into hiding her face behind the clouds? No, I thought, that would be creepy. “Oh dear,” I said, hoping she might have a thing for damsels in distress. She didn’t. “Well, we’ll try elsewhere,” said Merve and shrugged resolutely. And so we set out towards the Bismarckplatz, and although on a normal day the way would lead us straight ahead, now it seemed more convoluted than the life cycle of Aurelia aurita, the common jellyfish. Gaping gorges opened right before our feet, and more than once we stopped in our tracks at the last possible moment, pe
It was supposed to be our real German road trip experience. You can ask what makes a road trip experience particularly German, of course, to which I would have to say that I haven’t got the foggiest. I’m Czech. But I trust Severin and Merve and Thordis to know better. So anyway, we packed our stuff and decided to set off towards Rheinland-Pfalz first. They were supposed to still have coffee in Rheinland-Pfalz. (And chocolate, for Severin) I rode my proud pink bike, the Circe, and Severin ran after us on his limber cat paws. Severin is a cat, although sometimes he isn’t. You always have to look out when you want to talk to him that you don’t surprise him in one of his more feline moments. If you do, he is prone to lick his paws and shake his whiskers disapprovingly. It is in the interests of feline health, however, that I inform you at this point that you should not feed chocolate to normal cats. Severin is an exception. Merve had her gigantic red bike, a veritable beast of s