Do you speak English?

In the past year, I have put that sentence into use in the following ways:

Spreekt u engels?

Sprechen sie Englisch?

Czy pan mowi po angielsku?

Govorite li engleski?

Habla ingles?

Fala ingles?

Mlutite anglicky?

Parlez-vous anglais?

Beszel angolul?

Ali govorite angleshko?

These feelings are normal.

The other day I hauled my sheets into the house to wash them. I usually do laundry when I'm home alone and the older kids are at school, so it's entirely possible that Pete has never seen this happen. But the other day, they were all home, and he watched me lug them in.

"Did you pee your bed?" he asked.

For the record, "No."

"Then why you wash that?"

And these are the things I will miss when I go. Which is horribly, painfully soon. Especially for the family, considering they have not yet found my replacement.

They were close just a couple of days ago. Even I had approved of Ali, even though I was jealous of her, and she seemed eager to come. But then we got an email from her in which she explained that she just didn't think the pay was enough for the hours she would be working, and that another family has made her a very tempting offer.

It's unfortunate. But the joke's on her -- because whatever family she joins, there's no way her situation will be as good as this one. I want to laugh at her for that, even though I know that a to-be au pair in her position (which I was, just one year ago) can easily make that mistake.

So why am I leaving at all? I just got my schedule for the next two weeks, and I have five days off I didn't expect, as well as the four days I had requested in order to go to Paris. I delighted in that, as I have been delighting in it all year, and toyed around with all the trips I could take during those days if I weren't three weeks away from moving home.

So why am I leaving at all? I love not knowing when I might be rewarded with a break in my work week. I love the flexibility, the ever-changing schedule, the free time. I love not understanding conversations and making half-hearted attempts to learn Dutch. I love bicycles and canals and tulips. I love this family and their extended family and my silly Dutch boyfriend. I love the summer with its long days and casual feel. I love the little grocery store that somehow manages to have everything. I love shopping for shoes. I love to hate the train. I love cheap airlines. I love that working sometimes keeps me moving at 100 miles a minute and sometimes involves watching CSI while the kids all sleep. I love my living space. This is happy. This is ideal. This is familiar, safe, comfortable.

There. That. That's why.

The rest.

There were other things. Like:

* A contemporary art museum in Vienna with some of the best work I've ever seen on the top three floors, and the most disturbing work I've ever seen on the bottom floor.

* Snow in Prague.



* The torture museum in Prague. I know it's gross, but it's fascinating. Let me share. There was a technique called water torture in which the victim was strapped to a board with his/her belly raised up. Then a tube was shoved down the throat as far as it would go and water poured into it until the victim was horribly swollen. Then the torturer would beat on the victim's stomach with a stick. If no confession was obtained, the tube was yanked out of the throat and then reinserted and the process repeated. Most awful? This was considered "light" torture. Therefore, if such a torture did produce a confession, it was entered into court as a confession obtained without the use of torture. "The good ol' days," says Joel.

* Jack and Joel oversleeping and damn near missing their flight back to Amsterdam.

*

* More long walks. More cold weather.

* The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. It was one of the best memorials I've ever been to because it's something you feel and experience, not just look at. You look at it, and it's a bunch of blocks. You walk through it, and you understand.

* Shopping at the Great Market in Budapest.

* Searching for a particular coffee house in Vienna for a long time on a cold night, finding it, and deciding it wasn't our thing after all. Okay, my thing. It wasn't my thing. That was me. I made us leave.

*

* The House of Terror in Budapest -- a museum that documents the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Hungary.

* Plum dumplings in Ljubljana.

* Watching Eraser Head.

* This dog in Budapest.

The long ride home.

I left Innsbruck on Friday night, having bought my ticket the day before. I had a reservation on the night train -- the lovely, lovely night train, where you close your eyes and wake up at home.

Turns out my train leaving Innsbruck was 30 minutes late -- and I had only 20 minutes between trains in Munich. No problem, said the guys at the info desk. The train manager can call ahead and ask them to wait 10 or 15 minutes.

But then the train was 40 minutes late. Then 50.

The train was freezing, so after about 20 minutes the manager told us we could move to first class because the heat wasn't working. I'd never sat in first class in a train before, and with good reason -- for a lot more money, there aren't many perks aside from a footrest and more leg room.

The train manager did call ahead. But then he came back and said, "The train..." and did a little wave of his arm to indicate "is long gone". Damn it.

So, I got to Munich and found out the next train headed in my direction left at 3:23 am. That's a four-hour wait in the Munich train station. I bought some coffee and hunkered down.

I got on the train, which took me to Duisburg in five hours. Luckily, I boarded a little early and spread my sleeping self out on two seats, so no one sat beside me even though the train got rather full. I didn't sleep much -- it wasn't the most comfortable -- although a laughing train manager did have to poke me in the leg at one point to get my attention.

Waited one hour in Duisburg for the train that would take me to Arnhem, where I could then catch a train for Den Bosch. If I had managed to catch my night train from Munich, not only would I have had a bed, but I also would have not had to stop in Duisburg.

But all's well that ends well, and things were well, aside from my being incredibly tired. And considering that's the most negative experience I had on my three week journey, I'd say that's pretty nice.

The hills are....oh, make it stop.

I arrived in Innsbruck after dark (it was six and a half hours by train from Ljubljana). My host, Phil, suggested we meet the next day at noon and he would let me know whether or not it was a good day to go up the mountain.

I awoke the next day convinced that it was not. It was so foggy that I couldn't even see a mountain. But I met him at noon. And he said, "Today's a perfect day to go up the mountain." Sure, it's foggy down here, but those beasts rise above that, and awaiting me up the hill is a glorious sunny day.

Hard to believe. But I got on the bus. And sure enough, even at the altitude to which the bus took me, it was sunny.



Warm, even. I rode the lift up to almost the top.

The Alps. Ohhhhh, the Alps.

People and places.

At one point in my life, not even so long ago, it would have seemed strange, almost horrifying, to me to visit a place and leave a few days later without having seen anything. Nowadays, it not only seems somewhat normal, but I'm also incredibly content with a visit that goes exactly like that.

I was in Croatia (Zagreb is one of my favorite places in the world and I don't even know why) on a Sunday and a holiday, so pretty much nothing was open. I went to the modern art museum and the opera and wandered around town a bit,





but other than that I just hung out with my amazing hosts, Kruno and Neven.



They threw a party in my honor.





We ate, we drank Croatian wine, we watched stand-up comedy. They bought me some burek, which is a Bosnian meat pie. I didn't want to leave.



But then I got to Slovenia where I stayed with Anja. We hung out at a bar with a friend of hers the first night. The next day we went to her university so she could make copies. The day after we went to the castle for about an hour. Other than that, we just sat around and talked. And talked. And talked. I miss her terribly. When I left it was like moving out of an apartment I had lived in for a while, like leaving a roommate I had known for years.

So what did I do in Croatia and Slovenia? Nothing. And it was the best time.

Unquotable.

On Jack's first night in Europe, he woke me up at 3:00 am to ask the all-important question, "How do you flush the toilet?" Three minutes later he came back in to ask, "Where is the light?" So began the list of the Trip's Best Quotes. For the sake of the stupid in all of us, I will leave them unattributed, except when attributing them makes them even more funny. At least to me.

"How do you flush the toilet?"

"Oh, I'm not doing that."

"I can't even stand to look at them anymore." (in reference to honey-roasted peanuts)

"It's gonna be a long time before I eat another sausage."

(three days later) "What's it take to get a sausage around here?"

"You sit on it, you eat it."

"To roll over that one night I had to get up, go outside, turn around, and go back in."

"I used the women's bathroom." (it goes without saying that I do this; therefore it should be obvious that I am not the one who said it)

"She was pretty cranky." (in reference to the woman in the women's bathroom)

"They shouldn't have them out there if they didn't want me to eat them."

"Just because you can fit 15 billion in China doesn't mean you can fit them all in a church."

"It was like a communion buffet."

"Berlin is quaint."

"Peanuts are my favorite thing to travel with. They go everywhere with me."

"I buried this little guy. Almost forgot I had him."

"I usually try to fall asleep with it out."

"Where's the flight station?"

"If that pigeon shits on me it'll be the last shit he ever takes."

"Jack and I are going to look for scarves." (Joel)

"Wrap it in bacon and throw it in the dehydrator."

"You can still get two more blows on it."

"Do you want to take your dress off for dinner." (woman at the table in the corner, we think to her daughter but there was a large column blocking our view)

"I bet you could put a lot of chili in that thing."

"Why do people only want to paint pictures of the little baby Jesus?"

And a Happy New Year!

Jack, Joel, and I rang in 2007 in Vienna.

We had a nice dinner with our hosts, Hanna and Philip, which Philip had prepared. We took part in an Austrian tradition: we melted a piece of lead in a spoon over a candle, then dropped the liquid into water. The idea is to interpret the shape into which it cools in order to determine your fortune for the new year. Hard to interpret, but a lot of fun anyway.

Eating and melting took a long time, so we had to hurry -- it was almost midnight. I'm not sure of the original plan, but we ended up dodging security cameras and hoisting ourselves onto the uppermost ledge of the roof of one of the taller buildings in the city.

Magic. We were surrounded by fireworks, far more than I've ever seen at even the most impressive 4th of July display. It was hard to decide where to look, so you just sort of ended up spinning around in circles. They had started early in the evening and gradually built up to this point and continued until about 15 minutes after midnight.

We sipped champagne, made our way to a couple of parties, and slept until mid-afternoon on New Year's Day.

But no worries. To Jack's delight, we woke up in plenty of time to go to the opera.

East and West.

Hard to believe those guys go home on Friday. The first part of this trip has gone so quickly.

I am here in Budapest with just a few minutes to spare, so I thought I would let you know that all is well.

But first, Berlin. If you know anything about Berlin, you know that it is huge -- eight times the size of Paris, according to my guidebook. Not walkable. We walked it. Our hosts lived way on the east side, but when our bus was not at the stop when we were ready to go, we decided to just keep on going. We did all the Berlin Wall business and took in a fantastic exhibit on the Nuremburg trials. The whole thing becomes all the more strange and horrifying when you break it down into individuals -- some of whom were at least claiming remorse, others who remained until the end convinced that they were doing what was right by their country, their people, and their God.

We only had one day in Berlin. It got added to the schedule when airline tickets there were cheaper and more convenient than the ones to Prague. We walked home that night intending to meet our hosts at a club, but I was too tired and Jack and Joel, left to their own devices, took a wrong turn and missed them altogether. They did not talk much about their night, but they did laugh about it quite a lot. I doubt I will ever know the whole story.

It was a two-hour walk to the train station, which we started before 6 am. The whole stay was so cold. Next time I take a trip in the winter, I am taking it south.