wherever you go ..

..there you are.

The globe is almost irrelevant.
What with luxury jets that whisk you smoothly, HBO and local gourmet food in tow.
One enters a flying box and exits at the other end .
Poof.. there is passport control and then
in another country remarkably like home. Germany at least.

Staying in a village  (read suburb) equidistant between Bonn and Coln, there are PT Cruisers parked across the street, Desperate Housewives on the television and computer games on the teenaged boys X Box.  Just the local cuisine reminds me that I am not on 42nd Street. Good bread and  many many many too many potatoe dishes and cream suppes. There is Gerolsteiner wasser on the table, and I mentioned how it reminded me of home. I buy cases from Trader Joe's. My hostess told me it comes from a spring down the street. That was nice. It ticked off a memory of staying down the street from the Clos du Bois winery in Healdsburg. Easy, connected.


I have taken the time to do little and less these first two days in Germany. It was  a perfect drizzle of a day. Golden yellow maples against the gray sky, a drive in her Toyota station wagon to the Technical College where she teaches and a luxurious morning of watching students in the cafeteria horse and play and flirt and preen as they would in any such cafeteria in any such college anywhere in the First world.

Tomorrow I spend time in Bonn.. a beautiful city, former capital of Germany. A brief drive thru today reminded me of the French quarter in Beijing. Carefully planted shade trees, well pruned, in front of small tasteful mansions that used to house the embassies before the Wall came down twenty years ago.

Rest, welcome, compare and contrast. What a pleasure to feel at home in the global village.

Surprising since I sought the exotic on my earlier travels. Looked for echoes of the Nazi horrors, felt my Jewishness pulsing from every milimeter of measured body parts. Was so maive as to reenter a following Mercedes whose driver kept patting my breast and grinning when I mumbled: Ich sprechen kine Deutch,,, bitte. Bitte.

There is a difference now...
I know that welcome is all.
I know that I prefer people to geography.
And work to wandering.

So far so good.