At breakfast, writing some notes. The people in this area (Reutte/Tirol) are very friendly. I’ve never been anywhere in the world where surly teenagers working at convenience stores were likely to smile and say hello while serving you. The men are generally pretty handsome, and teenage boys on bicycles are likely to smile at you as they ride by. A teenage boy with his hair dyed red giggled and smiled at me as he walked by me on the main street of Reutte yesterday, and then ducked into a cafe to join his friends.

Our pension (Pension Waldrast just outside of Reutte) has a big friendly and slow-moving dog named Bari. We have a view of two different castle ruins from the balcony of our suite, for all of $55/night.

Another table at breakfast was a group of Americans, who seemed to be veterinarians. They happily talked about things like delivering calves and difficult births as they ate breakfast. I was impressed when all four of them got into a Ford Ka to go somewhere.

Yesterday was basically a blur. Yes, I got to fly business class, and sit in a barca-lounger seat, but we had turbulence over the middle of the Atlanctic (?) and I didn’t sleep much.

One thing I do remember from the flight was having a plastic knife but a real metal fork. What’s the point of that? Americans and their government are stupid.

At the airport in Frankfurt I was surprised to find the baggage claim area had signs that said “Smoke Free Terminal”, although I had seen people smoking in other areas before we got to that place. They have their priorities in order: no smoking, but the airport has a branch of the Beate Uhse chain where you can buy porn and dildos.

We had a rather mediocre lunch at an atmospheric little place in Eberbach, a town most famous for being the place where Queen Victoria was conceived. Let’s not think about proof on that one. The most distinctive thing about lunch was the fact the the preisel berry sauce served with my Hirschbraten (venison) was topped with whipped cream.

We spent the night in Gundelsheim, a very beautiful little city on the Neckar, at the Hotel Restaurant Zum Lamm. The owner/chef, Fritz Schmid, is a good cook and a total wacko. There are a lot of pictures scattered about of him at his various hobbies — cooking, antique cars, etc. There’s a sort of vanity zine about him and his adventures on the table when you sit down for a meal. We were totally worn out, and managed to stay up until 10pm before we went to bed. Unfortunately, we seemed to be staying in the loudest town in Germany. There had been a festival the previous weekend, and people were tearing down the kiosk on our street when we tried to take a nap earlier in the afternoon. At midnight, the bells of the Catholic church down the street rang about 25 times, and then at 6am the bells rang for a good 5 minutes to get people up for mass. Similar, shorter peals o’ bells occured every 15 or 30 minutes after that.

At breakfast we sat under a relief of a 16th century noble, probably to the Wars of Religion, inscribed with the phrase “As he said to him, you can lick my ass.” I just love history.

We then hopped on the Authobahn (normally we prefer smaller, slower roads for the scenery) to head towards the Tirol (Austria). At Sindfeldingen there was an awesome rest stop with several restaurants and fake metal sunflowers at the entrance. We had a quick lunch of sandwiches at another one near Ulm. It was spotless and well-designed, with tables outside for people to bring food they had
brought, or purchased at the cafe.

I’m struck by the amount of activity and maintenance one sees, even on smaller roads and in smaller towns. My immediate response was “this is a nation of busy bees.” Everywhere you look someone’s sweeping up leaves, or fixing the perfect roads, or taking a brush and scrubbing the street in front of a house. (I’m not kidding — I’ve seen the street scrubbing more than once since I arrived.) In the Alps, the roads are immaculate, and it’s obvious even in pretty remote areas that people trim the grass near the roads and prune the trees.

Another thing that strikes me is how active people are here, at all ages. I saw a woman today who must have been in her 70s at least, wearing lipstick and riding her bicycle along the bike path near a highway. Another thing I’ve noticed is how intensely land is used. I’ve seen plowed fields in the cloverleaf formed by the intersection of two Authobahns, plowed right up the to edge of the road.

We’re spending the next four nights at the Pension Waldrast outside of Reutte in the Tirol. When the woman proprietor explained how the radiator worked, James said we’re not usually cold. She asked, “Oh, are you from the mountains?” He replied, no we’re from New York. Given the date, I was glad to see that she didn’t really have a reaction to that bit of information.

We had an awesome dinner tonight at the Hotel Zum Mohren (Hotel Moorish Woman, yes — nice caricature on the menu). They had great wines by the glass, and a fabulous large woman, built like a 19th century diva, waiting on us. We drank red wines from the area around Krems, and had game and plenty of starches. There was a local crowd at the bar, and it became obvious after a while, giving the cruising views aimed at our table, that a number of the attractive men at the bar were playing for my team. Nothing came of it, and we left for a little walk around the town before heading home. There are bike racks everywhere on the main street of the town (which is part of the Via Claudia), and I haven’t seen a chain or lock on any of the bikes. People just ride up and drop them off. Ruette is a beautiful town. A lot of the building are from the 16th century, and there are many Baroque buildings with elaborate wall paintings on the front.

A lot of working class men in Germany and Austria seem to wear earrings these days, generally gold or silver hoops on the left ear.

In honor of 9/11 and NYC, we listened to Copland’s “Music for a Great City” in the car — we brought the CD with us. Pictures of the attack on the WTC, including some pretty disturbing ones of people jumping, are in all the the German/Austrian papers and magazines today. I sort of shivered when I saw the first one at a newstand today, of the fireball from the second plane hitting the tower.

I’m writing notes in the business class lounge at JFK while we’re waiting for our flight to board. Business class is much better than coach! The lounge has free drinks — I’m drinking a very strong vodka tonic — and snacks. It’s a weird crowd. A lot of people are reading that screeching conservative rag pretending to be a newspaper — the New York Post. There is a TV loudly playing some ESPN show with highlights from previous NFL games, and there are cute German and Russian businessmen hooking up their laptops to the phones. There is a certain amount of “privilege” in the attitude of the people in business class. A lot of them have no qualms about talking as loudly as possible in their cell phones, even with strangers sitting right next to them. These aren’t generally the people travelling on business — they’re people with enough miles or money to travel
business class for pleasure trips.

Flyers seem to be dressing better. Is it because summer is over? Or are the tacky people more likely to be afraid to fly now? I haven’t seen a single applique t-shirt. Note to the Arkansans in the audience — I did see a Dillards suit bag!

The bookstore here in the terminal had a book about Flight 93 featured in the window. Who would buy that to read on a plane?!

We’re leaving today for Germany and Austria — Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, and points in between. I may or may not post while I’m there.

On the off chance that anyone here is a fellow geek attending YAPC Europe, that’s what I’m doing in Munich, so send me an email if you’re going to be there.

I give you this amusing post from bradlands.com to entertain you a little while I’m gone — his anchors don’t work, so go to August 13. I found his site while looking at fray.

Here is an interesting link to a 2000 article in the Financial Times, courtesy of Mark Morford, about the fact that American companies like Halliburton and GE have continued to do business with Iraq through partners and subsidiaries.

From Salon’s new blogs, I bring you the reverse cowgirl’s blog — wherein a writer attempts to justify the enormity of her porn collection. So far it’s a bit more work safe than bj‘s site, but we’ll see. Any woman who calls Andrew Sullivan “the screechingest right-wing-flapper homosexual since Roy Cohn” is a woman I want to know and buy presents for.

I’m not normally awake at this hour, but I couldn’t sleep. Forgive the incoherence.

We saw “Take Me Out” — yes the gay baseball play — at the Public Theater yesterday afternoon. I didn’t it expect it to be so good. It’s a great play, and this is coming from someone who could not care less about baseball. It took me a little while to get used to the idea of baseball players with such vocabularies, but I got over it. I think Joe Mantello as the director really “nailed” the play, and the cast is excellent. The John Rocker-type character is, in a lot of ways, the most interesting character in the play. How much leeway do we give damaged people to be… awful? Yes, there’s male nudity in it, and the cast is attractive, but that’s not really the reason to see the play. If anything, it’s a bit distracting from what is a good text. I have to single out Denis O’Hare as the gay player’s money manager — he knew how to “own” the stage during his several monologues.

I really recommend it. If James, who doesn’t even know how to pronounce Derek Jeter’s last name, loved it, excusing yourself from attending because “you don’t like baseball” doesn’t make sense.

There were two women sitting next to us. One was like us — not interested in baseball, but interested in theater. (I can never decide when to use theatre vs. theater.) Her friend was a total baseball fanatic — someone who, when visiting another city, goes to visit stadiums just to see them whether there’s a game or not. One of the two women complimented James on his (slash) No War button, and he gave her one to wear. The other one said, “I would wear the opposite — nuke em’ all!” Is anyone out there surprised when I tell you that the baseball fanatic was the “nuke ’em” lady?

We separated to run errands as we walked home. I dropped by The Strand on my way home. For someone like me, who finds brains sexier than brawn, the Strand is the hottest spot in the city. So many smart, attractive men, looking at books, looking at each other, looking at books…

As I walked home up Fifth Avenue, I spotted Amanda Lepore in a torn cut-off t-shirt and shorts. Wow — I’ve never seen her in daylight before.

Once I got to Chelsea, the burning question in my mind became: Why do gay men who are kind of… lumpen feel the need to wear sunglasses that really only work on someone like David Beckham?

Earlier in the evening we (James and I — he has more photos) saw Kiki and Herb at the Knitting Factory with Glenn, Dan and a few of their friends. Oh my heavens! Why didn’t someone drag me to see them earlier? I LOVE THEM.

As I told Glenn, I think our drag sisters have MUCH better politics than the gay community in general. They can’t really buy into the “but if I act like a straight white middle class male I’ll be OK” version of gay politics. (I thought about linking Andrew Sullivan in that sentence, but I couldn’t bring myself to sully my web site with a link to that miserable excuse for a pundit.)

Where to begin? As Dan said, it’s certainly not what comes to mind when one says “drag act” — it’s much more of a brilliant piece of theatre by two very talented people. Kiki’s politics are great, and political theatre that works is my favorite thing in the world. She hit on 9/11, the idiocy of Bush, his illegitimacy, our obsessions with kidnapped children, and probably some things I didn’t even catch in the whirling chaos that is Kiki and Herb.

Favorite excerpts included:

Shitty things happen sometimes, but that’s not an excuse to do more shitty things.

After a song in which she says she’s tired of crying for victims of this or that, she says: because crying doesn’t change anything.

After she talked about the shitty things that happen in the world, and about the idiot that passes for our President, and received a lot of applause, she said she was glad to hear that she’s not alone, and when they round all of us up, she’s glad she will be with people like us at Guantanamo.

The opening act, of whom I had also heard, but never seen, was The Wau Wau Sisters. They ROCKED. I feel like such a scrawny wimp — they both had bods of death. They gave us rockin’ songs, hilarious repartee, and acrobatics! We bought the CD!

Heard on the way out of the Knitting Factory, from an Ani di Franco-type young woman: “I’m wearing my new sweatshop free panties!”

Jesus H. Christ on a popsicle stick!

It’s bad enough that they have to close the middle of Manhattan for half a day, but do I have to be bombarded with the sound of police helicopters too for the damned NFL party? Is this what NYC is going to become? We’ll be a whore of city like Venice, but not as pretty?

A U.S. Special Forces bodyguard assigned to protect Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks with colleagues after an assasination attempt on Karzai Thursday Sept. 5, 2002 in Kandahar.

Two more.