Everyone has a fantasy, right? Marriage, puppies, orgies, the lottery. As for me, well, lately I’ve been imagining lovingly piling all my books into a few cardboard boxes while wildly throwing clothes I don’t need out the fifth story window. Leaving everything else in a pile on the street to join the urban tumbleweed. Locking the door and never looking back.I never get to the part where I go somewhere else afterwards. To the part where I need somewhere to put the boxes. To the part where it’s still a little cold at night to be sleeping on the street. To the part where I have to make a thousand appointments to visit a thousand WGs. And a thousand more appointments and paint purchases and nail holes in new walls before a different room on a different street starts feeling like something like home.

My typewriter problem is certainly not going to make it any easier. (Herman, umm, let’s just say ‘sprouted’ two friends.)

It’s a thought I’ve been kicking around for the last few weeks. Brewing. Fermenting. Not yet articulatable. That’s where the emergency vacation came in. Better get the hell out, I thought, before my nerves snap into a thousand tiny peices that I’ll never be able to figure out how to peice together again.

And Holland, Holland was the perfect choice. As fucked as any other country with a government and a couple thousand conservative fucks, but with the right people, in just the right light, it’s the land of milk and honey. (That’s soy milk, and the stroopwaffel honey, mind you.)

I’d been sitting on the train station steps for exactly three minutes when the pretty punk girl with the bike and the double lip peircing asked me if I needed a place to stay. The first inkling of magic after two nights without sleep and a hazy three-hour recovery train ride. Naw, I told her, I’m waiting for someone. But thanks. Thanks a lot.

Turned out that she was staying at the farmhouse squat in Lent, and that’d we’d meet again the next day on a trampoline at the squatted villa with the empty swimming pool.

B turned up a few minutes later with a pur-dy old maroon racing bike. We recognized each other from the pictures and the stories. Friends of friends. Friends of friends who happened to have sent us both the same patch. The same patch which we were both wearing, hastily stichted to the back of our shirts. Friends of friends with the same bracelet and the same god damn glow in the dark Clear Channel My Ass underwear. Oh North Carolina, you wiley dog you.

We spent the day wandering Nijmegen, looking at stencils, sharing music and stories, dipping peices of chocolate in soy yogurt on some bustling green in some bustling square. Watching a couple of macho types flaunt their urban gymnastic flips to squealing 14-year-old girls poured into too-tight pants. The usual suspects. Getting mind fucked by the new David Lynch film while trying to quietly chew paprika crisps. Falling asleep to Bonnie Prince Billy and the faint scent of lavender.

Everything about Nijmegen was magic, I reckon. The peaceful vacation feeling of being suspending in time and space, of being far far away from problems and grocery shopping and time-to-go-to-works. Holland is just so god damn wholesome. At least it is when you’re staying at a beautiful once-squatted, now-owned house in the middle of town with six other silly funny vegan types, hypnotized by the strange almost-familiar sound of Dutch.

Maybe the word wholesome never would have occured to me if it hadn’t been for the little blond boy at the fleamarket. I was sitting on the steps, old steps leading into a building suspisiosly resembling something out of Harry Potter. I had been waiting for D and listlessly eyeing a basket of mismatched knitting needles when the very small, very curly-haired little blonde boy in very red rubber boots walked straight up to me, put his soft little hands on my cheeks, and kissed me right on the lips.

First the nanosecond of American-style panic: Where’s his mother, and is she going to sue me for child molestation?

Then, awe. I tried to talk to him in German, but he just giggled at me in Dutch, so I gave him a little plastic Nemo until D showed up and asked him how old he was. Five years old, he told her.

See what I mean? The land of fucking milk and honey.

Today I’m in den Hague, full of Thai food, and hiding from the impending end of the spell in the little guest house above my parents’ old college friends’ garage. But the dull ache just below my hip bones keeps reminding me that I have every reason to panic. I’d turn to rituals for comfort, if I had any rituals left, but I guess there just wasn’t any room for them what with Recipes for Disaster and grandpa’s old winter coat hogging all the room in my suitcase. There’s no reason to worry, there never really is, I’ll get off the train in Frankfurt with a feeling of home. I’ll move out of my apartment. I’ll teach my Saturday class. I’ll return those borrowed dishes and find that lost key. I’ll ride my bike to the river and I’ll watch the refletion of the sun setting on the skyline. Hell man, it’s only a ride.

My worst nightmare probably involves some combination of hairy spiders, AIDS, and a brigade of machete-wielding circus clowns. But being trapped in a small room with a born again christian for three hours every day for a week might come in close second.

When I asked him what he did for a living, he told me he was “work free.” Sounded pretty good. Not wanting to ask if he had quit or been fired, I asked him what he wanted to do next. “Well, in the fall I will go to bible school. And then I will go to Egypt to teach people about Jesus.”

Uh-oh.  It’s not that I don’t like Jesus.  Maybe if he and I had met we would have really hit it off.  What with him preaching love and turning over the tables at the market and all.  It’s more like I don’t like extremist Christians telling me that I am, in fact, going to burn in eternal damnation.

“And what made you decide to do that?”

“It’s God’s will. He needs me in Egypt.”

Warning! Warning! Alien vessel at 6 o’clock. Keep him on the radar Scotty. We’ll try to make contact, but these fuckers are unpredictable, and I don’t want to risk an attack.

Sometimes teaching requires a level of diplomacy I never knew I was capable of.

For the first hour, it was easy to keep the conversation to less potentially explosive subjects. What do you NEED to use English for? What do you LIKE DOING in your free time.” The usual blah blah blah small talk stuff that turns English teachers into therapists and intensive training courses, at worst, into nightmares.

“What WOULD you do IF an elephant walked into the room right now?”

“If an elephant walked into the room right now, I would sit on him.”

“Would you sit on him?  Or would you ride him?”

“Oh yes, ride him. Into the city.”

A student with a bit of an imagination is a language teacher’s best friend. Especially considering I’ve already asked this question at least fifteen times this week.

“What WOULD happen, IF you didn’t eat for a week?”

“I would be very happy.”

Well that’s a new one. He’s a normal sized guy, so despite a slight fear of an impending “well I throw up all my food anyways” response, I abandon tact and ask why.

He pauses, folding his hands. “When I first find my faith, I not eat for 23 days.”

“When you first FOUND your faith, you DIDN’T eat for 23 days?”

“Yes, I didn’t eat for 23 days. I was very happy.”

Ok. I suppose I can understand that. I hear fasting can have that effect. Besides, he tells me, you’re only hungry for the first two or three days.

But it wasn’t until we got to “might” that the real trouble started. Since he’s not working, I skip over the “Do you think we’ll have a meeting tomorrow? Well, we might…” prompts and start asking him what he thinks might happen with transportation/fashion/government/the environment in the year 2100.

“I think we might have flying cars.”

“I think we might have better health care.”

So far, so good.

Then, almost at the bottom of the prompt list, “What do you think MIGHT happen with family structures? Marriage, divorce, children, that sort of thing,” I ask.

“Well, I think they might be righter.”

Scotty, we’re going to have to raise that alert from orange to red.

Where do you begin correcting a sentence that has thrown both tact and grammar to the wind? With the grammatical structure? With the subjectivity of a right or a wrong when it comes to family structures? Teach him how to say “In accordance with Christian beliefs”? It was obvious where this was going, but I thought, hell, his English isn’t that great, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

“What do you mean exactly by ‘righter’?” I ask, thanking my lucky stars that Jesus needed him in Egypt and not in my English class for the next six months.

“Righter. For example, homosexual marriage is wrong. I think in the year 2100, it might be righter.”

Damn it Ensen, it doesn’t look like there’s going to be an opportunity for peaceful contact. Scotty! Launch the missiles, we’re under attack.

It’s rained every Monday since I started going to the Ostenbergers house. But today was magical. Not only was I not tired, not only was the sun shining, but I stepped off of the train to come face to face with…an elephant.

Ober Ursel, this sleepy little suburb of Frankfurt, is really, really the last place I’d ever expect to meet an elephant. A wealthy business person commuting into the city, sure. Old women waiting for their U-Bahn, check. Obnoxious kids on their way to school holding the train door open so we cant leave the mother fucking station, every fucking time. That pretty girl with the dyed black hair and her bicycle or the two Thai women gabbing at each other on their way to work, absolutely, but an elephant?

I don’t know what his name was. But I imagined it was Herbert.

The circus lost it’s appeal somewhere around the time I turned 13. It became disgusting somewhere around the time I went vegan. And more than any performance could be, this was the magic of the circus. The quick glance behind the curtain. The scattered caravans in a muddy fields, without lights, without music, without the cries of win this here just a dollar!!! or see the smallest horse in the world!! The performers still asleep in their caravans. Me eye-ing their caravans enviously and wondering how the hell I’m going to find one so I can finally move to Borsig. The rusty still-folded-up rides. The elephant.

It was the least bitter walk up the path through the woods and to the architects’ house I’d ever had. It was the most relaxed I’d ever felt on a Monday morning. And on the way home: a giraffe. I have a feeling this week is going to be full of surprises.