ni.chol.as

I have to make this quick. You see, I’m in a hotel room in Munich writing on my laptop and I seem to have left the charger in Britain. I have four hours of battery life to spread out over four days unless I can, with some small hope, find a shop in this city that sells a power adapter for a Mac Book Pro. Since I could barely manage to purchase a train ticket to the hotel from the airport without a kind English-speaking German foisting her used-but-still-useful stub onto me for half price, I think I am probably doomed.

It’s a nice hotel, this, but it seems to be in close proximity to a church judging by the clamour from the bells that started up about 5 minutes ago. I must have missed it leaving the underground station, but from the sounds of those bells, this is the biggest damn church in all of Europe. It’s 6.24pm, which is a very strange time to ring bells, I’d say. I wonder if I’m missing something and this is the traditional way that Germany marks 6.24pm. Maybe it’s their signal that apocalypse is pending and I should be making some phone calls to loved ones. There was a nun outside the hotel, too. Maybe she’s involved. The TV is telling me nothing. Useless bloody thing. The only English language channel is CNBC which has bold-pin-stripe besuited wide-boys talking about “the bubble, I think it’s reasonable to call it a bubble” in the Chinese economy. I am full of hate for them.

Unlike my last trip through an airport, notable for being made naked by scary scifi machines, this trip was relatively worry free. There weren’t even any kids with Heeleys. I did make one observation at Starbucks in Liverpool Street Station, though. I was grabbing a coffee to take on the train and queued nicely behind a lady who was paying for her purchase. There was only one barista so I was just milling around, really, waiting for her to finish paying. I mill for a bit too long and start to pay some attention to what she’s doing. Turns out I do a LOT of milling: she works her way through 4 different credit cards: all of which got declined by the machine. She was trying to buy a £2.40 frappucino. Maybe it’s just me, but maybe if you have four ramped credit cards, you shouldn’t be spending £2.40 on a coffee. As she turned to get her drink, finally finding a card dumb enough to cast her a line of credit, I saw she was pregnant too. Good job! Maybe she’ll sell it to science and pay off all that debt.

I’m in Germany to see Kana, if you’re wondering. If I have battery or some luck in finding an Apple-stocking electronics store, I’ll hopefully have a shot at writing about it.