prison break from a german work camp

well, emilie and i escaped from jail with only bruises to the ego.

the last i updated we were in london staying at tara's, but about to depart for germany. we left a little later than expected but still with good time, but i led us too far in the sort of wrong direction due to london's crazy curvy streets. so we got on the overground train at the time when we should have been getting onto the airport train. nonetheless, we made good timing to the airport, to find that our plane was delayed a half hour. in security, they stopped my bag (i always manage to leave scissors or something taboo in a compartment that i dont even remember that i have). i left my wrench and hand sanitizer in my carryon so the security guy started looking through my bag. he was very friendly and asked me why i had this tool and i told him because it tunes my instrument. he wanted to see so i started playing my OUT OF TUNE mbira, which is difficult to tune right now because the only other sort of viable tool that i have is a spoon. he was really excited about it and wanted to ask all sorts of questions after he tested my hand sanitizer but we were running late so i told him not to worry about the hand sanitizer and to keep it. when i said that he good very sour and no longer wanted to be my friend. sad.

so we got on our plane and then took a bus through the beautiful broccoli-esque countryside of germany. i accidentally said NAZI really loudly on the bus...whoops. eventually we reached frankfurt am main (city center...120 kilometers away) and walked around for a while looking for maps, phrasebooks, food, and internet. we had planned on hitching to kleve to see michele that day, but soon realized it was too late to go anywhere despite the BEAUTIFUL sunny weather. so we stayed in the city where my father lived for two years and my brother was born.

big hot dogs are delicious. FRANKFURTERS clearly originate in FRANKFURT. the people of frankfurt are called frankfurters...they are big hot dogs.

we found a hostel after getting directions from two german speaking vegetable salesfolk. he drew us a map, that i later realized looked like a giant breast. no couch surfing luck. people might think we are murderers. emilie says we are.

so we got to the hostel where the person at the desk began staring at our money and when i asked him what he was doing he said "bling bling".

we ended up going out to a quiet german restaurant, talking loudly, and eating steak and mashed potatoes and beer. german beer is really yummy and not that strong like my pa said. the little bit of advice he gave me before i got there was "german beer is very strong"

we walked around the city talking absurd pikshers as always, and visiting a church, eating GELATO amazing.

i dont remember anything else other than seeing TONGUE TATTOOS in a toystore that i promised myself i would buy but then got lazy.

we left early the next morning and began our hitch hiking after a long walk in a big circle due to poor directions but of course, absolute perfect timing, because once we got to the petrol station to ask for a ride, we were greeted IMMEDIATELY by a man with red hair named oliver who said that he would drive us about 160 km north. he said he used to hitch hike when he was younger and we had wonderful conversations. elections, university, OKTOBERFEST.

if i was an ox and they ate me during oktoberfest, what you would see on the chalkboard behind my roasting body, would be "SARAH". that's what i learned.

oliver was a really wonderful person and we all really enjoyed each other's company. he pointed out churches on the countryside, told us some history, told us that we could change our careers if we wanted to when we were older...lots of good stuff. he also said that he doesn't know any of the hospitals in frankfurt because he hasn't had to go there yet to which we knocked on wood.

he dropped us off at a petrol station with lots of high school kids and we made friends with them and they almost took us on their bus that was going to holland to sail, but it was forbidden according to the bus driver. but they told us stories of how last year they took a trip to holland they picked up two hitchers because their driver was a standup kinda guy. i talked to the wavyblonde hair guy for a while and he told me about how he and his friend with the dreadlocks hitch hiked last year to go sailing and got rides with truck drivers. he seemed to have a perpetual humble smile and moved slowly with some hidden purpose. i really liked him.

we ended up riding with a german couple. the man is 40 and is a psychiatrist and the woman is 31 and writes for a housewives' magazine. they asked us if we knew of this popular german hiphop band that sings intellectual songs, but told us we wouldn't understand it since we dont speak german when we asked to hear it. we ended up listening to it anyway and both of us fell asleep in the back of the car. we laughed about the shadiness of that later. in my dream, the song was playing, and the words sounded like english words. i was hearing one song to be about rabbits hopping, and in my dream, we were playing with straws and making them fly up int the sky. not too deep.

one of their other songs had a chorus of MEIN KAMPF and for a minute i was pretty sure that they were singing about the nazi party until i realized that they were just singing about their own lives.

we got out at a big rest stop where we used the bathroom for fifty cents and then tried to get a ride for 40 minutes. a really nice blonde couple let us come with them a little ways down the road and dropped us off at a smaller gas station where the people were friendlier, but we didn't end up getting a ride for more than an hour and a half. but at least the people liked us. one family only spoke german and i'm pretty sure the mother tried to set me up with her 18 year old son. strange. i felt sad when i couldnt understand the father talking in german, but then he couldnt understand me in english, and he looked at me like i was the strangest little thing to walk the earth.

finally, a young guy pulled in and offered us a ride to the train a little while down the road, which would cost us about 20 euros. he gave us time to think about it and just as we were about to get into the car, another bunch of cars pulled up, and the first one emilie asked gave us a ride ALL THE WAY up north, a mere 12 km away from where we wanted to go. they were a pair of dutch men with a child's carseat in the back and we talked about the carribean, and various other things.

they dropped us off next to a salvation army bin, and we saw a teenage boy trying to get his clothes into the shute, but needing an extra pair of hands. i helped him and asked if he was going toward kleve, to which he said no, but him and his sister called us back and said that they would drive us to the train in emmerich where we could take a train for three euros to kleve. we got to the station and found the machine impossible to use. the buttons wouldnt push in easily, and it was in dutch until we figured out the english translation button. REALLY FUNNY. we didnt get a ticket because the only ones we could find were for 35 euros.

so the farm people came to pick us up and we drove back to the farm where we saw michele for the first time in a long long long time. we saunaed and told stories of our year and played a little bit of music. it felt so good to sing with her again. i always forget how much i love playing with other people, and then the two of us get together and it is beautiful and our sounds ring out to the highest most pure overtones.

we sang in the sauna for everyone, and by that point i started feeling very strange about the people who we were staying with. the next day we woke up for morning meeting and got assigned to work with johannes from holland to clear out a lot of soil, greenery, and rubbish from this one area outside so they could make it into storage.

the day was so grey and unwelcoming, and there were spiders everywhere which made emilie feel weird for a little while. it felt good to work though, especially doing that kindof labor which i haven't done in so long. not since the farm. i felt in my element.

johannes was really friendly and he sang us a folk tune, and told me his plans for moving to russia. his ex wife is dying from radiation in kazakhstan, and so he is moving there to work everything out, and to find a new woman. he wants a woman with a large family, so there can always be at least one person in the house at all times, so that nothing gets stolen. in russia, they think he is a millionaire because he travels, so when they get drunk, he says, they go and rob his house. not kidding.

i guess when you get older and you start getting robbed, love becomes very practical.

we switched jobs after lunch to work in the garden with crazy phillip. he is a chemistry/physics/agriculture teacher for secondary school and he is ruddy nuts. but so so so so so nice and friendly and fun to work with. our job was to pull an entire field of thistle weeds. really. an entire field of thistles. REALLY. it was very pointy and sticky and hurtful and i got to wheel the wheelbarrow and emilie's finger still hurts.

but phillip gave us fabulous advice that he lives by in school. as a teacher, he begins the year hating his students, and they love him. as the year progresses and comes to a close, his students begin hating him, and he loves them. he says, this makes the parting process easier, and that we should emulate this in all of our personal relationships. he also said that bok choy wasn't bok choy. this is not clear as of yet, and may never be.

while we were working in the fields emilie and i finally confessed to each other that we wanted to get the hell out of that hellhole. it went a little something like this:

emilie underherbreath: we're leaving tomorrow
sarah: yup

but of course, within the next twenty minutes, we had decided to leave right away and not tell anyone but bring some potatoes along. once we decided this, we laughed for the first time in what felt like ten years, and the sun came out after a weekend of rain. this couldbe taken as none other than a divine sign from god that we belonged not to this german work camp.

so we played music that night, i got my second home video taken of me singing, and michele and i harmonized beautifully. i fell asleep early after trying to tune my mbira with a spoon. emilie and i were going to escape at 7 am without telling anyone other than michele and dima, but michele asked us to wait until morning meeting and let everyone know so that they didnt ask her or put any blame on her. so we stayed. i woke up to a really nice message that reminded me that there was love in the world, and went down for meeting. they asked me to help farm and of course i said yes, because my spine is made of jello when people are expecting things of me, and then told them that we would be leaving but THANK YOU FOR THE OPPORTUNITY TO WORK FOR YOU and SPEND TIME HERE...i worded it nicely, but i think they all knew that we thought they were nuts and dysfunctional. emilie then went and told the woman we would be working with (who was obviously bipolar...obviously undiagnosed) that we were leaving right away even though they asked us to stay until lunch and she called emilie a bitch and told her that we were using them, and that we needed to GET OUT to which emilie shouted back GLADLY. so we packed and left. very fast. and once we got off the property the world was full of light and love and possibility again. we got a ride to the autobahn from a german woman listening to american rock and roll. she dropped us off at the median of the onramp to a highway and we got a ride surprisingly fast after singing bob dylan across the road to each other extremely loudly in our best dylan voice.

a german woman and her two daughters on a one day holiday picked us up on their way to the sea and i sat in the back talking to the kids while em talked to the mother in the front. they drove us about 45 minutes away from amsterdam where we ate at a restaurantreststophotel, and made a sign for amsterdam. what we learned here, is that dutch people are SO FRIENDLY. even if they didnt pick us up, they smiled at us and interacted in some way, whereas in other places people prefer to pretend you are not there. this put us in a really good mood and we started doing little dances for people getting onto the highway. then these guys in a big van yelled at us asking where we were going and when we told them they said something as they were pulling away to which i replied YES only to realize that we both thought they were asking "DO YOU FUCK" . it's still not clear but it gave us a good laugh.
AND THEN FINALLY A CAR! oh...a police van. they told us it was not allowed on this street, but that we could go to the gas station a little ways away and so we walked over and ate more chocolate. that's the thing about these rest stops, we end up eating lots of chocolate. it makes the time go by faster.

once again, the people were so friendly, and we ended up getting a ride from a businessman going to utrecht. he dropped us off there and we too pictures with our backpacks in a tiny photobooth. still not sure how we fit. but HILARIOUS. and then went outside where we sat down for two hours and went a little crazy. but we made up good songs and tried to get people to pay us for our music.

everyone rides bikes in holland. more people ride bikes than drive. it's fabulous.

so we commenced walking after sitting like a pair of homeless kids, which essentially we are, and found a gas station where we got a ride within thirty minutes, by a guy in a large van who listened to bob marley, and whose friends drove by on the highway and took pikshers of us to send to his wife.

he drove us right to where we needed to be in amsterdam but a woman on the street said that we had to take the tram so we got on only to find out that we were where we needed to be. the tram driver gave us maps and apologized profusely, and we walked back the grueling two minutes to where we had just been. hilleke, emilie's friend picked us up, and we had a great night laughing and eating a dutch meal of sauerkraut, sausage, and mashed potatoes. in the supermarket, the meat guy started talking to me about hockey, baseball, and his dreams to go to the venues where the new york teams play. we talked about the nyrangers for a while and then he told me that i should say IG BEN MOO to my friend when she wasn't expecting it. it means I AM TIRED. good way to learn vocabulary.

and here we are
with a cat that only drinks when his water is in motion, whose name is dick, which in dutch means fat.

and with a wonderful person, and life is no longer a sad rain cloud.

amsterdam is a fabulous city.