…or maybe it is.
Another reason to LOVE, love, love Germany: apparently George Clooney has taken a second job spinning pizza pie around here! You heard it here first!
Proof below= a close up of the take home box for our pizza. (If I’d known it was made by the loving hands of George Clooney, I’d have eaten it all.)
So there you go: a travel tip you won’t get in any Let’s Go or Rick Steves book. Glad I could be of help.
I know exactly how Pandora felt. Horrified. Overwhelmed. Ashamed. But mostly just panicked.
On second thought, she shouldn’t have opened the box. REALLY shouldn’t have opened the box. But now it’s too late. What to do next? Run and hide? Try to fix the mess somehow?
And me? I’m sitting in a house full of boxes. Millions and gajillions of boxes. 
I shouldn’t have acquired so many worldly goods…but now I’ve grown attached to them. They are my life’s travels and my family memories played out in textiles, art, and furniture, and I’ve dragged them halfway across the world with me. Is that wierd/shallow/materialistic? I have no idea. Most days, I’d say it’s essential to being human, this appreciation of things that speak to your soul. But today I can tell you that it makes for a hell of a job unpacking when the movers dump the accumulation on your doorstep.
It’s overwhelming, the thought of having to unpack and organize it all. But it has to be done before the contents rise up on their own and riotously burst the seams of the boxes. One set of boxes, all full of books, crashed over in the middle of the night–sending the dvds and magazine I’d left at the top of the stack slidding across the floor. The message was clear: Step away from the dvds and get on task! Open the boxes! Free the contents to their rightful place in your house!!! If I don’t step up my efforts at unboxing quickly and efficiently, all the contents are sure to go into a full mutiny on me.
So there it is. I like my stuff, but it terrifies me at the moment.
As Pandora said, many weeks later, “you’ll just have to take the good with the bad.” That’s life.
If you haven’t heard from me in a week, send someone knocking on my door. It’s just possible that I’m lost under an avalanche of worldly goods. You can never tell what will pop out of these boxes once opened.
If you are considering house hunting at a distance–a considerable, oceans-apart distance–just stop right now. It is impossible. We’ve spent weeks trying to do the same. And we should have known better. We did this years ago before moving to England, and I found the perfect house. A beautiful, stately, Victorian row house that was huge and elegant. We didn’t put the money down, but we booked an appointment to see it within a day of landing in the UK.
What we saw online looked vaguely like this:
And the angels sang.
What we saw in person looked more like this:
Only smaller.
(The angels broke into a mournful dirge while I wept.)
It was still adorable, but any hopes of getting our four poster bed through the front door were futile.
Nevertheless, we’ve tried to peek at houses online again before this move to Germany. Just to get a feel for what will/won’t be out there. We’ve been told that the housing market is tight where we are moving. We’ve been told, leave furniture at home, the houses are small and there are no closets. We’ve been told, no worries, there are plenty of large, great houses. We’ve been told dogs are no problem. We’ve been told dogs may be a problem. The sky is blue; the sky is orange. Take your pick. It’s truly impossible to do this at a distance.
Nevertheless, we look at online ads.
Here’s what we hope to browse through:
But you wouldn’t believe how many German sites post mostly these photos:
This worries me only slightly less than it baffles me. If the owner is proud of his bidet, I’m happy for him. However, I can’t understand why we are shown so many bathroom photos and so few living room photos, so few exterior photos. Does that famous German orderliness beget a national obsession with bathrooms? I’d rather not think about that. And I’m sure there is a simple, and more appealing, reason for all of these bathroom photos.
My theory: it’s a sign from God that house hunting at a distance is a potty-brained idea. *Sigh.*
So, here’s the plan. We wait until our feet are on the ground in Germany in mid June, and we scramble as fast as we can to find a place. It’s worked for us in the past–here’s hoping the luck holds.
It is a tawdry tale. A tale of woe. Of unrequited lust. Of temptations to be seen but not touched or tasted.
Of cheese.
Of what?
Of cheese.
***
Sometimes stories don’t travel the trajectory we expect. Oftentimes, in fact. In this story, the Stinking Bishop is not a sinister church cleric–although that would be the beginning of a great tale. No, in this case, the Stinking Bishop is simply a British cheese named after a sinister church cleric. A singular cheese of considerable stench.
Let me preface this story by saying that I am no fan of stinky cheese. On a visit with us in England, my father-in-law once mused, “How can something that smells so bad taste so good?” My answer: it can’t! Nature throws out certain warning signs that we shouldn’t ignore: the glaring red hourglass on the belly of a Black Widow Spider, the earth-shaking roar of an angry lion. These are nature’s way of telling us to run–run fast and run far– we are in mortal danger! And then there is the smell of very stinky cheese–same principle, folks. Why would you want to eat the stuff? But, I digress. I did have a story to tell.
My husband likes a stinky cheese. If it smells rotten and has veins of mold (blue, black, green–he has no prejudice), then he’s in! My basic policy is that any mouth that eats that stuff will not be allowed near my mouth for 24 hours. Sometimes this policy keeps him out of trouble, but other times the cheese is too powerful a mistress.
And so, when he heard of Stinking Bishop–the ultimate bombshell, the Marilyn Monroe of stinky cheeses–he was, sight unseen, smitten. But the stuff turned out to be elusive. To the point that he nearly believed it was a fable, a mirage, a Fata Morgana.
He had nearly given up his quest for the fabled cheese, when we found ourselves at Castle Howard in Yorkshire, England. (Read this aloud in a dramatic voice, and channel all the best scenes from Monty Python and The Holy Grail, and you’ll understand the great and rediculous heart swell that overtook my husband as the following events unfolded.)
After a day spent touring the estate and playing with our children in the gardens, we visited the shop–a sort of European farm market. And there it was in the case of cheeses, shining as if an aura surrounded it and emitting a sound only perceptible to the true of heart–a siren song to draw in weary travelers. Stinking Bishop cheese.
STINKING BISHOP CHEESE read the sign before the humble wheel. You wouldn’t have known you were in the presence of greatness if not for that sign–it was like that scene in Indiana Jones where he has to pick the true Holy Grail from a room full of faux grails. THE Grail is humble, unassuming. As was my husband’s beloved cheese. Or, at least, it looked that way.
As James approached the counter, the shop girl was handing samples of cheeses to prospective buyers. I think James was drooling a little. When his time came, he said, “I’d like to sample the Stinking Bishop, please.” The shop girl recoiled from his advances. Then she leaned over the counter and half-whispered, “Sir, we don’t open that cheese in the store.” My husband’s whole countenance dropped.
He looked at me. “No,” I said. “But,” he said. “No,” I said. Then I leaned, as the shop girl had done a moment earlier, and said “We can’t carry that cheese in the car.”
He understood that I was right. There are some things that are too powerful to be schlepped around in the profane world. And WAY too powerful to sit, enclosed in the tight space of a warm car.
The day did come when he was able to possess the object of his desire. I can’t tell you much about that moment. I was not in the room at the time. I was, purposefully, not in the room at the time. What’s more, we simply don’t speak of it. It’s his private moment: an obsession that I can’t understand, but a conquest that I would not want to sully. Some things are just too powerful.
Travels and Tomes: One Expat's Amblings and Ramblings 