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making tea with just hot water from a tap Wednesday, September 11 2024
location: cabin 105, Swiss Ruby river boat, Elbe-Havel Canal, Burg bei Magdeburg, Germany
During the night, I woke up while Gretchen was fumbling with her phone, preparing to watch the historic presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. I didn't respond in any way and did my best to go back to sleep, something that, if it happened at all, was fitful at best. Gretchen was mostly quiet during the debate, though occasionally her whole body would twitch or she'd mutter "No!" under her breath. It was hard to tell from this how the debate was going, but it was easy to assume the worst. But when the debate ended and Gretchen went turned off her phone and tried to go to sleep, it seem she did so quickly, which suggested that she wasn't expecially troubled by what she'd seen.
Still, when I awoke this morning and went to the dining room to get Gretchen some food (she'd told me she probably wouldn't make it to breakfast given the ninety minutes of sleep she'd be missing out on), I was nervous to check the news. I sat with the mousey Swedish woman and her mother in the frontmost starboard booth, mentioning that my wife wouldn't be coming to breakfast because she'd stayed up to watch the debate. That led to a little conversation on the subject, but since neither of us had read the news about it, it didn't amount to much. Later in the conversation I mentioned that I am an unemployed software developer, and the mousey woman said that she too is a software developer, working mostly in everyone's favorite ugly web backend language: PHP. Eventually we were joined by Gretchen, who managed to wake up after all. She said the debate had gone well, but that the moderators had allowed Trump, but not Harris, to talk past his time limits. She also thought the real-time fact checking of Trump's numerous lies was insufficient. When I finally read the news about the debate, I saw that everyone was saying that Kamala Harris had given a historically great debate performance, and that Trump's was a unmitigated disaster. To add further insult to Trump's defeat, the pop star Taylor Swift had posted an endorsement of Kamala Harris just after the debate concluded. We briefly discussed these things with Kelly and Brian, who had had their breakfast at a different table.
After Breakfast, Gretchen and I put on warm clothes, grabbed an umbrella (which the boat provides) and went on another stroll through Burg, this time heading southwest from the boat. Weather conditions had changed over the past couple days, with summery temperatures familiar from Eastern North America replaced with the kind of cool that seems alien even in an Upstate New York summer. There was also a hint of rain, which was why we'd brought umbrellas. Gretchen wanted to see the "old" part of Burg, which featured a number of towers. We walked through a series of neighborhoods and through a heavily-graffitied tunnel under some railroad tracks and then along the side of park. Eventually we found our way to a vinyard on the side of a steep hill (the first steep hill I'd seen in Germany), and from there we had a view of the towers of the city and, in the distance in all directions, modern wind-powered generators. From there, we were eventually able to find our way to Unser Libeben Frauen, a church with beautiful black spires, and near its base we randomly ran into Simon and Cathy from the boat, who were walking around randomly, hoping to stumble upon interesting things. They'd already stumbled upon a commemoration of an individual Jew killed during the holocaust: it took the form of a tiny brass tag giving dates and other specific on the sidewalk out in front. Cathy also told us about an interaction they'd had with the Burg locals. They'd gone into a coffee shop and tried to order in English. "Nein!" was the response. It seemed that they needed to place their order in German. So then they asked (probably in English, since they don't know German) if there were any non-dairy milks for putting in the coffee. "Nein!" was the response. [Later I would joke that the grumpy employee had actually been speaking English that second time to say that there were nine different non-dairy milk options.]
Simon and Cathy joined us on a walk up the hill to a squat tower that had once been part of Burg's defences. Later, though, its dungeon was used as a place to imprison witches. (A real problem back in the day, evidently.) We split up from Simon and Cathy after that, finding another tower to marvel at and then finding our way first to the edge of town, then back into its middle (what Cathy calls its "High Street"), where Gretchen found the tiny brass tag commemorating that one Holocaust victim. From there, we found our way back to the Swiss Ruby, passing all the places I'd seen yesterday afternoon with Kelly and Brian. By this point, we were cold and damp from being out so long in the drizzle, and we were both excited to be eating soup.
Food has been exceptionally good on this cruise, though every now and then something is a bit weak, such as the spaghetti they served today at lunch.
Later this afternoon, Gretchen and I attended another ice cream party, though none of the members of our clique turned up for it. Instead we sat near another set of Swedes, this time a husband-and-wife couple about five ten years younger than us from some island near Stockholm (the mousey Swede and her mother, by contrast, come from Gothenburg). Over icecream and coffee, the male half of the Stockholm couple told us about how he likes to go to Finland every year for some big metal festival, though his wife doesn't share his interest in such music so he goes alone. I jokingly asked if Scorpions still plays at European metal shows, and the metal guy said they're consider hard rock these days. "But that's always the case," I said, mentioning that I'd heard an elevator music version of Metallica song. THe metal guy agreed, saying there's always a new band that comes along with a new, more extreme sound, and bands like Metallica start to sound a bit more like Scorpions.
When I was done with my ice cream social coffee, I went back to kratom "tea." I've had to improvise a bit to get water hot enough to pass as tea water when making such "tea," usually by just adding hot water to an existing cup containing the slightly-augmented dregs of my last cup of kratom tea. Lacking other sources of hot water, I've been forced to just run the hot water tap in the bathroom until it is as hot as it can get. Then, the key to a temperature that passes as tea temperature is to first warm the cup (and any dregs it contains) to as hot as possible by running that hot water over the outside of the cup. This makes it so when the hot water is eventually put inside the cup, it won't immediately lose temperature due to the coldness of the cup (an effect that normally always happens when making tea). So the resulting tea isn't especially hot, but it's closer to the temperature of tea made the conventional way than you would expect.
At dinner this evening, we sat in the rearmost starboard booth of the boat's dining room, this time joined by that guy Dave whom Gretchen dislikes. Today Dave mentioned that he's a member of Mensa, which surprised nobody. He also said that there is an even more exclusive club for people with even higher IQs called the Prometheus Society, but that he wasn't yet a member of that. Then Dave did that thing he likes to do, which is to hijack the conversation by mentioning a thing from his life and then wanting each of us to say how they would handle it. The thing in this case was him giving his contact information to somebody (a non-romantic somebody in this case) and then regretting it when that person then tried to get in touch with them. He wanted to know what we would do in this situation. Most people at our table felt an obligation to at least make one social call with such a person, with the thinking being that "you made your bed, now sleep in it." But when I was asked what I would do, I said that I don't even return the calls of people that I actually like.
Tonight marked my second deployment of contraband wine smuggled in a bottle of a brand that is served on the boat. The food was very good and featured a salad with an amazing mustard flavor and skewers of some sort of seitan-based faux meat. (I wonder what they would've done had they still been thinking we were all gluten-free?) When we asked one of the waiters if there were more skewers in the kitchen, he got us five or six more.
A mute swan near our boat this morning.
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The Burg Wasserturm (watertower), viewed from the orchard just to its west.
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Unser Libeben Frauen, the beautiful church with two black steeples.
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Another view of Unser Libeben Frauen.
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Hexenturm, "Witches' Tower," the place where the witches were imprisoned. Originally this was part of Burg's hilltop fortifications.
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A stork's nest atop an old smokestack.
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Berliner Turm, another of Burg's beautiful old stone towers.
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