Have you ever seen those dictionaries in the humor section of the book store titled “Woman-English, English-Woman” (or sometimes Man-Woman, Woman-Man)? On the escalator in the train station several days ago I saw a cardboard cutout advertising one of them from the window of the first-floor bookstore.

A pudgy, middle-aged cardboard man in a Cosby sweater stood holding a copy of Langenscheidt’s “Deutsch-Frau, Frau-Deutsch” dictionary. He was smiling, as if he’d finally been given the key to a lost civilization he’d always wanted to contact, but now knew how to conquer.

Maybe I would find these books mildly amusing—and I do assume that they are meant to be humorous—except for the fact that there is always an entry in them that goes something like this: “no means yes, and yes means no.” You’re supposed to laugh and think things like: “How true! Those crazy women! So passive aggressive! Never saying what they really mean!”

I doubt I need to actually point out to you why this is incredibly fucked up, but I will anyway. 1. It furthers the stereotype that woman aren’t capable of communicating what they want, thus leading to a tendency to not take them seriously, and 2. it furthers the fucked up mindsets of the kind of people who rape and/or abuse other people, because of course that “no” meant “yes!” I mean it must have, that’s what humorous books and television shows have been communicating to me my whole life, and we all know there is some truth to every stereotype!

Blech. Barf. Yack. And the dictionaries about men? They translate almost everything a man could possibly say into “I want to have sex.” Sigh. There is still so far to go, and I think we lost the map.

In the dressing room I removed layer after layer of coats and sweatshirts, and the scent of my sweat and my skin filled the tiny compartment. In context, I don’t smell bad. I like the way I smell, my lover likes the way I smell, and the people who I spend most of my time with smell similarly.

In the context of a store full of formaldehyde out-gassing clothing, however, my scent stands out. I wondered whether the other shoppers in the store could smell me. I wondered if they were offended. I wondered if my smell was capable of giving them the headache that the store smell and perfumed-people smell was giving me. I doubted it.

I shimmied in and out of pants, most too tight or ridiculous to actually buy. I don’t usually sweat much, but the store was hot—the employees were walking around in the T-shirts that had already replaced the sweaters on the racks—and I was dressed for outside temperatures. All this is to say that I started to sweat like I had been jogging, and I started to think about standards of hygiene, sweat, and scents.

Once upon a time I showered everyday, but these days I shower maybe once a week, usually once every two or three. As I gradually stopped showering so obsessively, I started to dislike the penetrating aromas of many soaps and perfumes. There are still some I find pleasant, but it’s an area where I appreciate moderation. Excess gives me a headache, and when a group of people run past me on the track for the sixth time, and I smell only their deodorant and shampoo, then, well, wow.

Back then, I used at least five scented products daily. There was the shower gel, the shampoo, the conditioner, and the shaving gel. After the shower there was lotion, under-arm deodorant, and a spray of perfume on the nape of the neck. Oh, and there was also the mousse I put in my hair when I blew dry it straight. That means some days I used as many as seven. How many do you use?

When I stopped shaving my armpits I also stopped wearing deodorant (I’m not much of a sweater anyway). When I stopped shaving my legs I cut out the shaving gel and the lotion (when I stopped shaving my legs, the skin on them stopped getting dry). Not wanting to carry around a heap of bottles when I went somewhere to shower, I also cut out the conditioner (didn’t need it with shorter hair anyway) and the shower gel and used the same soap for both my skin and my hair. I can’t fathom how much money I’ve saved since.

A story from one of my platz-mates: at the doctor’s office she sat down in the waiting room with a handful of other patients. A woman to her right sniffed a few times and became agitated. “What smells like smoke in here? Do you guys smell that? I think something is burning! Maybe we should tell the nurse.” It was just the scent of wood stove on her clothes, unnoticeable at home, but in the sterile waiting room context it stuck out like two sore thumbs.

Another time I sat outside near the bonfire and listened to two women talk about how irritating it was to always come home from our summer concerts smelling like wood smoke. And I wonder, why is it that Summer Rain, Paris Hilton, or Twilight are more desirable scents than Wood Smoke, My Skin, or Your Hair?

Is advertising to blame? (Absolutely.) Is it “civilized” human’s desire to separate themselves from the animal kingdom? (Very probable.) Is it a puritanical desire to repress the sexual? (Maybe. You can read a blog contemplating that here.) Is it that cities mean living in such high concentrations of people that we are constantly forced to come in close physical contact with people we wouldn’t like (a situation that can become especially unpleasant when crammed together on poorly ventilated public transport) and must shower obsessively to make the situation tolerable? (This is probably what helped advertising get its sticky little fingers in the hygiene product door in the first place.)

When I think about the smell of un-scrubbed skin, I smile, and then I think of something Karlsson once said. Paraphrased, it went something like this: “My theory is that there are so many shitty people in the world because everyone showers too much. Nobody smells the way they actually smell, just like soap and perfume, and they end with a partner they never would have been able to stand being close to otherwise.”

An interesting theory, and though I doubt that the children that come from partners tricked by a delicious perfume could really be so shitty, I do wonder what effect a mismatched scent could have on a relationship’s health. (Though I kind of hope science never manages to wrap its stainless steel claws around. I can see it now, “‘Attraction’ Pheromone, Isolated, Perfume Companies in Bidding War for Patent.”)

In the end I don’t know that it really matters which we choose, but I do think it’s important to ask ourselves why we’ve chosen it.

The last time I scrubbed off all the dirt, a few friends came up to me almost ten hours later, sniffed a few times, and asked me what the hell was going on. “I had an interview.” Ooooh, they said, so that’s why you smell like that. The rest of the time it’s skin, unwashed hair, and wood smoke. Home.

One cup of coffee. Just one. You don’t need to drink anymore, Nikki. One is more than enough.

No matter how often I tell myself this, I still find myself with an empty pot beside me, and weird jittery energy that I don’t want or need. One cup of coffee is just right sitting next to the pile of greens and scrambled neighbor-chicken eggs and toast on my breakfast plate. Just one. So far so good. Today, I think, will be a good day, even if it is raining.

It has reached that dangerous time of year when you can’t come inside without tracking mud all over the place, and you can’t really go outside without a coat, but well actually maybe you could, so you do and one last head cold lurks in your lack of caution.

Although I prefer snow to rain when it’s cold, this rain is welcome, because this rain heralds the coming spring. I can barely wrap my head around the idea that next month I can start planting things in the green house. Every year I find myself shocked that spring really will come again.

This afternoon with my little pink umbrella I will brave the city in the rain because I need to buy a new pair of pants. Yes, buy. Why? Because next week I am starting a job where I actually have to show up at an office twice a week, and I do not own a single pair of pants not patched and/or ripped in several inconvenient places. I think you can probably patch pants in a way that would make them acceptable in an office, but I tend to prefer the obviously patched with the pretty hand screen-printed something-or-other from that band that played here last week/artist friend.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my new employers didn’t seem to mind the pink dreads, so I figure the least I can do is scrape a little of the crust off for those two days a week. As of next week I’ll be the editor man for the website I’ve been blogging for for the last year or two (this one). Indeed.

I have mixed feelings about starting a not-from-home job, but curiosity got me in the end, curiosity and the scent of a new challenge. That and the price of plane tickets that I would very much like to buy for Banjo and I’s epic trip stateside next fall, and for the wedding-celebration I so very much would like to be at in July even though buying so many sets of plane tickets goes against all good reason.

For now, however, I must leave you: the kitchen is unheated, my breakfast plate is empty, my fingers are going numb, and I can’t find my fingerless gloves.

This is part sixteen in a serial about the year I spent working as an au pair for a rather rich, rather eccentric German family of seven. You can find an index of the previous posts here.

The twins birthday party had been chaotic and exhausting. The entire kindergarten class had been invited and Anna and I spent the evening herding, chasing, and picking up after them. It was more or less just like the birthday parties I’d been to as a kid, except they opened their presents right away, as people brought them, and there were different games.

Schlagtopf (hit the pot) is the only one that I remember now, a ridiculous game in which one person is blindfolded and candy is hidden beneath a small pot somewhere in the room. The blindfolded person is then given a big wooden spoon and crawls around on the floor hitting everything with the spoon until she hits the pot. Everyone else sits around and laughs and gives bad directions about where the pot and the candy are.

Now it was Jens’ birthday, and there was going to be a dinner party. We (we being the younger kids and I) ordered Chinese food, and Janet instructed me to give the kids dinner in front of the tv, to keep them upstairs and away from the guests.

The dining room had been laid out for thirty people, all white table clothes and silver candlesticks. I had forgotten to get something to drink, and when I walked into the kitchen it had been transformed: four women in cartoonish white chef hats were crowded around counter and oven, preparing the meal. This, Janet had told me, is what she had spent so many hours on her computer for in the last month.

Guests started to arrive around the twins’ bedtime. Franci went quietly, but Jo was agitated, aggressive. At the mention of bed he’d started throwing toys, toppling the tiny chairs and table where we would paint and draw on rainy afternoons. I got Franci into her pajamas, and then came back to try to get him to talk.

“Jo, you know I can’t do anything to make you feel better if you don’t explain to me what’s wrong. Will you try to tell me what’s wrong? Even if it’s hard?”

At first he didn’t react, distracted in his attempt to tip the wooden play tent that sat in one corner of the room, all the while making the same crashing, exploding sound effects he made when he was playing with his little metal cars.

I sat down on the bed and watched him, repeating myself every couple of minutes. “Maybe if you told me what was wrong I could help.” Finally he got out a few words.

“I hate them! My parents don’t love me. I’m going to burn down the house and run away with the dog.” Five years old.

He threw himself face down on the bed and pounded his fists against the mattress. I patted his back gently. There was nothing left to topple in the room, and soon I was tucking him in and singing him another goodnight song.

This is part fifteen in a serial about the year I spent working as an au pair for a rather rich, rather eccentric German family of seven. You can find an index of the previous posts here. These are a few snapshoty shorts I dug out of the ancient and dusty blog archives of yore.

October

Monday morning: extract body from bed, stumble in an attempt to put on pants, pray the caffeine gods make consciousness a little easier to bear. And I used to be a morning person.

Trudge down the stairs and into Jo’s room. Say good morning. On autopilot the words play from the tape somewhere behind your ear.

When Jo wakes up with you sitting on his bed, running your hands through his hair, and whisper his name. He wakes up slowly, sees you, shouts your name and throws his arms around your neck, sleep-warm. “I dreamed of you!”

Hug him back and hope the aliens don’t come back for the replacement they’ve left in Jo’s bed.

November

It was a morning like every other morning had been for weeks: go downstairs, wake up Jo, and get him out of his pajamas and into school clothes.

But that morning, kneeling in front of Jo with his school pants in my hand, I came face to face with the last thing I was expecting: four-year-old morning wood. I stifled a laugh, he pointed. “Look, Nikki! It’s standing up!”

January

“They simply can’t go outside without hats on anymore,” Janet chided on the way out the door. Astounding logic from the woman who dressed her daughter in a skirt this morning.

Despite the lingering holiday cheer (or is that just the Gluhwein buzz?), it’s business as usual in the Cole fortress. Three maids a bustling, two twins a screaming, and an au pair hiding behind the tree.

When I got back from a week in Barcelona, Jo and Franci came running down the stairs squeaking and calling, they were so excited to have me back. Had I missed them too? Their excitement was almost contagious, but in two hours Jo was screaming and toppling furniture again, and it was like I had never left.

March

At first when I told Franci it’s time for a bath she grabbed my hand and started to skip up the stairs. But then she stopped. “Nikki, do I have to wash my hair?”

“Yes. Yesterday you didn’t take a bath at all.”

Before the words were out of my mouth she was on the ground screaming.

“Washing your hair isn’t the end of the world, Franci.” More screaming. “If you don’t wash your hair you’re not going to have any friends.” Now kicking too. If she was clever, she’d have pointed out that the person saying this hadn’t washed her hair in over a week and had friends. Janet’s words coming out of my mouth.

After more yelling, and a chase in which I almost bite it trying to run on wood floors in only socks, I forced her into the tub, which I’d already filled with water and bubble bath. But in the water the screaming and thrashing got worse, and then there was water sloshing everywhere, which finally brought Jens out of the master bedroom two doors down where he had been attempting to read.

Janet had told me that your entrance is really important in ending a tantrum. Make a loud and theatrically angry entrance, and you’ll have them quiet in a few minutes. Jens burst into the bathroom screaming (like father like daughter), knocked Franci upside the head, and stormed out even more dramatically than he had come. “Women!” he declared in my general direction, as if that explained why his children were tantrum-loving brats. In the bathroom, Franci was quiet.

Our eyes met as I walked back to the bathroom, and he gave me a look that seemed to say “I’m sorry, I know, I hate them to.”

April

“Nikki look!” We were at the park and a woman—a midget who I’d often seen strolling through the neighborhood in a decadent fur coat—was standing next to the bench where we were piling coats and snacks, and Franci couldn’t take her eyes off of her. “Nikki, look, the small one, the small one!” She pointed and I pushed her hand back down to her side.

“Franci, it’s rude to point and talk about people like they aren’t even there.”

“But Nikki,” she said, now in a whisper, “she is so small.”

You could almost see the circuits beginning to toast as the gears ground together in her head, trying to comprehend this new being. Small like child. Face like adult. Can’t be child. But small like child. Can’t be adult. Can’t be child. Adult? Child? Childadultchildadultchildadult- childadult. Sizzle.

Local readers! I’m putting on another concert! It’s going to be great! There’s going to be hot chocolate with amaretto (as well as the usual cheap beer and free kicker) for sale to warm your belly one last time before spring finally rears its soppy disheveled head! Haus Mainusch, Staudingerweg 23a, Mainz, doors at 9 pm! Exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point!

If you made it to the Old Seed concert/three-course dinner last month, and liked what you heard, Bird is the band that Old Seed can be heard playing with on his latest record, The Terror.

Bird on Bird: “Bird plays subdued, melancholy songs with a folk-y character, now and then a bit raw around the edges. Kick-back music which allows you to stare, contemplate or to drink a pint by…it all depends on the weather…” But don’t take their word for it. Watch some videos, turn off your computer, and come over.

Lisa Freieck of Knertz Collective (in)fame will be starting the evening with her deliciously spooky-sweet songs.

Freieck on Freieck: “Guided by a gentle and inconspicuous voice which mostly is backed by subtle guitar playing, sometimes interrupted by glockenspiel, meldodica, accordion or other spooky little interludes, she conjures honest, conclusive compositions between a blue smile and calculated irony. listening to her doleful stories one can confidently dispense with the rest of the world for some short time or, in case of getting their point, maybe for a little while longer.”

Lalalalalalala!

Another picture by Mr. Himmel. This is our kitchen. Somehow, in black and white, I love the chaos even more. And now by request (and because I’m not feeling very chatty this week), the answering of a few reader questions.

Would you describe your own personal experience finding these communities and getting a place in them? Did you know someone who introduced you to this community?

I had been in Germany for an entire year before I ever heard the word wagenplatz. I’d called off au pairing two months early so I could go back to the states for Sleeveless’s wedding, and I came back to Frankfurt without an apartment or a plan.

At a party my first week back I met Akv, who told me about how people in Lithuania had thrown stones at her for dressing differently, like a punk, and that she was worried that she had left the roof open on her wagon. It had just started to rain.

The way she explained it, living in a wagon was like living in your van, but with a wood stove and a lot of other people living in vans around you. She had left Lithuania with her dog to get away from her boyfriend, who’d decided to become a junkie. She didn’t bother saying goodbye, just packed up a bag and her dog and left.

When she showed up in Frankfurt she had lived on the street with the Zeil gutter punks until someone told her about the wagenplatz, though it didn’t turn out to be the dream community for her that it was for me.

We became friends, and I came by to visit. We’d sit outside around tables full of dumpstered food and eat and chat and drink amaretto hot chocolate until I had to go to work at 6 (by then I was an English teacher with the occasional night class). I liked to visit but that I could live there never really occurred to me.

Another year passed. I moved to Dresden. I moved back to Frankfurt. I needed a new apartment, but they were all so expensive, they would all mean working more than I had before, paying big realtor fees that I couldn’t really afford. Did I really want that? There were sometimes whole days when I thought that I did.

But really? I didn’t. I barely wanted to go back to working part time, let alone 40 to 50 hour weeks. Asriel suggested I come to the next platz meeting to ask for guest status, and when they said yes I packed my things onto a bike trailer and moved into the guest wagon with the open-able roof that Akv had told me about at that party two years before.

Usually it goes like this: you meet a few people who already live there (or you don’t—it isn’t necessary but it helps) and you come to a platz meeting to ask to become a guest. If everybody says yes (decisions are made by consensus) you move into one of the guest wagons that most wagenplätze have. After a while, however long it takes you to get to know everybody, you come to another meeting and ask if you can become a resident. If you get another yes you’re in.

Did you have to buy a wagon?

Eventually, yes. In most cases you can stay in the guest wagon for a long time (which sometimes turns out to mean years), but it’s better to have your own little house and to keep the guest wagon free for short-term guests.

If I had stayed in Frankfurt, I would have started to search for my own wagon frantically the minute I got resident status. But as I moved to a Mainzer wagenplatz soon afterward, I took my time because my lover and I decided to move into a 7-meter wagon together, and I waited until something free fell into my lap. Now we live together in the 7-meter number, and I’m fixing up an old 6-meter number for myself.

Also, how do you stay in Germany? Do you have a visa, or did you just show up and stay?

Yes and yes. I do have a visa, but I also “just showed up and stayed.” There are some countries where this isn’t possible (as in countries that you move to Germany from), but with Americans, Germany says, just come over and get things sorted out once your here, and we’ll give you three months to do it. So I’ve always just shown up and taken care of the job and the visa later.

The first year I got my visa through the au pair job. That became a visa to stay and teach English. (With work visas you are only allowed to do the job they’ve visa-ed you for. The point is that they will let you stay so long as you can prove that 1. you’re financially independent and 2. you aren’t “stealing” work from a German citizen.) Now I have an interim visa that will soon become a you-married-a-German visa, which I suppose is similar to America’s “green card.”

“Dumpster diving?”

“Oh. No. Oh. I really don’t want to go outside again tonight.”

I say nothing, knowing we are both thinking the same thing and hoping that his voice and not mine will chide him out of bed with me tonight.

“But I guess if we don’t go we won’t have anything to eat tomorrow.” He sits up and starts to slip into layers of long underwear and hooded sweatshirts.

It’s not true though, that we would have nothing to eat if we didn’t get out of bed. He reminds me night after night that it will never be true as long as we live in a community like this. It is hard to start believing in that kind of security, that kind of dependable mutual aid, when you’ve been raised capitalist, when your history books used the term “dog eat dog” so much when talking about life.

We walk because both of our bikes have flat tires and because the roads are still icy. Almost to the first stop we meet someone just returning from dumpster diving. He hasn’t found much, he tells us, just the eggplant and salad and Brussels sprouts laying exposed in his back bike basket. I am surprised that he offers us nothing because I have become so used to sharing food that I don’t even think to ask before eating off of a friend’s dinner plate.

He might have missed something, we assure ourselves and walk on. He had. There are two bags of bread, two small fruit smoothies, and a bag of limes. The rest is already frozen. At our last stop we kiss for a moment so that a man walking his dog doesn’t realize that we’ve actually stopped to raid the dumpster. But when he passes we find that it is empty and walk home.

In the morning I am hungry. I think of beans and lentils and pretzel-dough rolls and all the things I would like to eat for breakfast. The dumpstered bread looks wrong; I don’t know why but I don’t want to eat it.

So I go to another kitchen and take three eggs from the refrigerator. The eggs are from the chickens we live with, and there is dirt stuck in small clumps on the off-white shells. I haven’t eaten an egg in something like three years, and I am nervous. Maybe I won’t like the way they taste. Maybe they will hurt my stomach (there was, in those three years, one failed egg-eating attempt that ended in volcanic pain). Maybe, maybe.

I fry them over easy in margarine and eat them with ketchup and a heap of fried zucchinis leftover from the Vegetable Man (last week I bought a cabbage and our beloved Vegetable Man gave me a head of lettuce, six zucchinis, and seven or eight avocados—thanks Vegetable Man!), and they are delicious, all the more so because I know the chickens they came from.

Photo: Another Mainusch moment brought to you from Mr. Himmel. Yihaw.

Photo courtesy of the esteemed Mr. Himmel. Do not steal it without his permission. Also: abetting the gnomes in their escape from The Cage is strictly forbidden.

If you’re new to this blog, I should probably explain. I live on a wagenplatz in Germany, and a wagenplatz is something like a trailer park, a gypsy encampment, and crust punk wet dream all shaken together. People live in converted vans and trucks and in old wooden circus wagons. If you’d like to read more, I explain in excrutiating detail here and here.

This is part fourteen in a serial about the year I spent working as an au pair for a rather rich, rather eccentric German family of seven. You can find an index of the previous posts here.

My journal entries from that lonesome week in Cyprus are full of embarrassingly adolescent ramblings about a boy I had a crush on at the time. (Embarrassing because he turned out to have the intellectual capacity of a cave troll, while I assumed, for entire days at a time, that we didn’t talk about anything interesting because my German was still too elementary.)

For those around us Cyprus was the escape, the fantasy. I fled the beach for the page, dreaming up dates, jobs I would be hired for, books I would write, countries I would live in, languages I would learn—anything that would transport me for even a few minutes from my daemonic charges. The resort walls were not there to keep others out, no!, they were there to keep me in, and I was trapped there until an angelic voice would speak to me mercifully from above: “Now boarding flight 386 to Frankfurt International.” Oh hark how the herald angels sing!

While Franci became more and more aloof, Joseph became more and more doting. “Somebody has a cru-ush,” Janet sang at me across the dinner table, nodding toward Jo with her head. He looked up from the plastic car he’d been racing down the white table cloth and up at me. “Nikki, I have to poop.” I contemplated strangling her, smashing my wine glass on the table and leaping across the table, but the alcohol had already stunned me into placidity, an escape just as effective as my journaled daydreams. Instead I stood up and led Jo off to the bathroom.

My other escape was the small fitness studio where I ran on my plastic hamster wheel until blood had pounded every last thought out of my head. It was the one and, I am certain, only time in my life in which I will ever have washboard abs. So this is why people in prison end up with enormous muscles, I thought.

In two hastily taken pictures—”I guess I just want some sort of proof that I was really here,” I shrugged as I forced the camera into Janet’s hand—and the only two pictures of me from those ten days, my smile is a grimace.

The three of us slept in the same room, in the same bed; they were both afraid to take a turn on the small cot symbolically placed there upon our arrival and I refused to accept discomfort during sleep on top of the insults and the spit. They spread out, snored, kicked—there was no physical escape. Sleep, my most holy of rituals, was disturbed and cut off each morning too short. All that was missing was the yellow wallpaper, and I would have been ripe for a straight jacket and pills served regularly in little paper cups.

Halfway through the trip and with the theatrical grace that was quickly becoming her trademark, Janet told me to take a day off and go on one of the day trips the resort organized for the guests. As if giving me one day off in ten was a special gift she didn’t have to give me, but would, because she was just that nice. Technically it was illegal for me to work for eight days straight without a day or night off.

Technically. Some of my au pair friends were required to work hours like this all the time, and I was only being asked to do so because we were on a Greek Island. Maybe I never would have seen Cyprus otherwise, maybe I was the ungrateful little snot in this equation. Drink yourself numb! Cry yourself to sleep! Aldiana Cyrpus is perfect for everyone! The words took on a gruesome, futuristic tone, the way the would sound if I’d read them in Brave New World or 1984. And we would be leaving in two days. It was a tome I chanted until it became a prayer. “Two more days, two more days, two more days.”

Nicosia

My mother had wired me some money so that I could take a few interesting trips, and I signed up for Nicosia. Nicosia, I read, was the capital of Cyprus and a violent, tumultuous city since the 60s when it was first divided into Turkish and Greek sections. I could, an Aldiana barbie told me, pay someone to let me climb a ladder and peer over the wall at the Turkish side. (In 2008 a dividing wall was torn down in an attempt to symbolically create unity. Of course symbol and reality don’t tend to drink at the same bars, and the city remains “the world’s last divided capital.”)

But none of the other resort guests wanted to deal with tumult on their vacation, the trip was canceled, and I ended up on a bus to Larnaka instead.

Larnaka

How refreshing it was, to be out of the resort and away from my keepers! How refreshing to see a city whose architecture was influenced by eastern winds. My escape from Aldiana lent an exotic air to everything I saw. The oak-skinned man hunched over and between mountains of fabric in a tiny stone garage, the sandstone church and fort, the ragged tops of buildings that stretched out beneath the fort terrace and away from the graying sea, the Greek-lettered signs.

I wandered aimlessly through town, snapping pictures, inhaling my temporary independence like a fix-starved junkie. Little junk stores seemed as if brimming with treasure, alleys careened with sensual vines, and the old man sitting on the corner was most certainly a seer.

The town was everything that Aldiana was not: crumbling in places, pulsing, a little chaotic, alive. There was dirt and there was magic, there were real people filled with joy and sorrow and ambition. There were no hoses snaking the streets, and so there was little to green the landscape. There were most certainly poisonous spiders lurking in the cracks, and no one said hello to me pleasantly as I wandered down narrow streets.