I am convinced that I am the ultimate drought fighter.

In rainy Bonn everyone kept going on about how great it was to finally get rain after such a long period of hot dry weather. Then I get back to Montreal and hear about how the temperature got up to the high twenties and the sun was shining the whole week.

Guess what…it’s raining.

Regardless, it is so great to be home. Bonn is a city that I would never want to live in. People say it’s a great place to raise kids and I guess that pretty much typifies it. It’s quiet, dull, peaceful and full of sausages.

On a related note I did learn, while I was in Germany, that there is such a thing as asparagus season. Apparently it’s May for white asparagus and boy was it ever a big deal with almost every restaurant serving at least one appetizer, salad and main course with white asparagus.

I ate my white asparagus on the plane and, I’m not sure if its because it’s plane food but I have to say that white asparagus tastes exactly like green asparagus - I was expecting so much more.

So at the cafeteria today one of the dishes was this giant (plate sized) dome of something. It looked like an exceptionnaly smooth giant dumpling. It was served with some sort of brown sauce over the top and a generous sprinkling of poppy seeds. All in all it was rather intruiging but, I only had five minutes to eat so instead I ordered the soup.

I’m not sure what kind of soup it was - dill I think. At least the dominant flavour was dill. Anyway, the taste isn’t the point, the point is that the soup came in the tinniest bowl you’ve ever seen but with the largest bun you can imagine.

The bun to soup ratio was completely off which was oddly dramatically disconcerting to me. You see when I travel I don’t get culture shock so to speak, but I do suffer somewhat from food shock.

Like in Morocco where fish ‘n chips is an entire fish (head, tail and all) dunked in sweet batter.

Or in Thailand where ‘mildly spicy’ nearly blew my head off.

On a completely related matter the night before last I went out for dinner alone and ended up ordering half a chicken (I just pointed randomly at the menu). I threw in a 1 Euro mini bottle of wine and had myself a feast reminiscent of those cheesy jousting dinner places they have in most major ammusement parks.

Germans sure do love their sausages.

Today at lunch I ordered the vegetable soup - so the woman scoops it into a giant bowl and then reaches for a giant foot-long sausage.

‘Oh, um no thanks’ I said.

‘No sausage?!?’ the woman said looking shocked.

‘No sausage’ I reaffirmed

The woman then mimed putting the sausage on top of the soup - just to make sure I understood.

‘No sausage’ I said again

The woman shrugged her shoulder and looked ever so dissapointed as she handed me my sausagge-less vegetable soup.

So my travel plans didn’t quite go as expected. I did not, in fact, sleep for 6 hours last night as I was whisked across the Atlantic. Rather I slept for about an hour. In retrospect I should have expected this - it is the norm for me.

Anyway, I’m not quite half way through the day yet and someone just told me that I look very ‘relaxed’. Comatose is more like it but I’ll go with relaxed.

I got lost on my way from the hotel to the meeting. The lady at the hotel said that it was about a 30 minute walk. I figured she was exagerating. She wasn’t. But my misconception led me to repeatedly question whether or not I was on the right road. My map has four roads. My route had about a dozen.

But I’m here, and all I have to do today is read a few statements.

I’ll get back to you tomorrow when I can think again.

I don’t have much time but…

I went to the post office this afternoon to mail off my Mom’s birthday and mothers day presents (a week and a half early - how great am I!).

Anyway, I was looking at my bill and I was charged $0.65 for a “fuel surcharge”.

What the hell!?!?

Fuel surcharges on mailing stuff - what has this world come to?