Back!

Dear Readers,

My apologies for the long lull on this blog. Stearns and I are safely back in the States and have a renewed appreciation for shower heads attached to the wall. We've been settling back in and welcoming to Little Gidding a new housemate, Carrot.

I hope to tell you lots about my trip (and share pictures!) in the upcoming month or so. In the meantime (as a result of Stearns' request that Three White Leopards be a funnier blog [not that she would ever post and make it funny, but that I be funnier...]), here's a short anecdote from Stearns and my time in a Munich hostel:

At my old age, hostels are a bit of a shock--they are loaded with high schoolers who look to be around 12 years old. These kids just run up and down the halls screaming and have no sense of what time in the evening it is. Just after we checked into our Munich hostel, I was reading the internet, and Stearns was standing beside me with nothing to do. Almost immediately a random co-hosteler started chatting her up: "Hi. What's your name? Where are you from? Who's your friend?", etc.

Things got much more interesting when Stearns asked him about himself: "I studied history at UC Davis." (We're Pennsylvanians; we've never heard of that school.) "I'm going to go to law school to be a lawyer." (Ohhhhhh....is that what you go to law school to do? I wanted to go to law school to become a nurse!) Gosh, picking up women by reciting your CV is obnoxious--even more by reciting your potential future CV.