Pure Perfection

The perfect place to be.

For the next few days, I am staying with Katrin, one of the Germans from Polish class, in a town in the southwestern part of Germany called Tubingen.

Katrin is such a good egg. She is a person who is impossible to dislike. Since I have last seen her, she has emailed me ideas for my upcoming visit. She sends me recommendations of places I should go. She was the person who told me about the German transit strike. She gives the impression as if I am always somewhere in her thoughts.

Meeting her on a connecting train to Tubingen (she was coming back home from visiting her boyfriend who lives five hours away), it was like reconnecting with an old friend. It's like time never passed. She possesses a certain ease and comfort that makes me feel like I have known her for years. I could talk with her for hours and never get bored.

Katrin is actually not from Tubingen. There is the place where she was born, the place she lived as a child, the place her parents live now. Tubingen is a big university town, and she is here to research and write her Ph D. If you want to know what it is about, you will have to ask her. It is way above my head. She's really smart. And a better Polish student than me. Not only does she take classes once a week, but in her bathroom is a map of Poland and a sheet of Polish grammar that she can review while on the seat. I tried to review it myself, but it too was way above my head.

I've told you that I love a small town, and Tubingen is close to everything I imagine a small town should look like. With a population of 83,000, it is not really all that tiny. But everything about it just oozes small in just the right ways. There are historical buildings, cobblestone winding streets, quaint shops, people milling about. It's the type of place where on a Saturday shopping, you would bump into all of your friends.

I asked Katrin if she thinks she will live here after her studies, and she says no.

"I need some darkness in life," she explained. Here, everyone has their perfect life in their perfect home, with their perfect university job, where their kids go to school with other kids who live equally perfect lives. It is too much of a bubble. I had to admit it was surreal walking around this place. I had previously questioned if towns like this existed anywhere except in my imagination, and now I know, they do! They do!

A huge fan of Polish Ham, Katrin knew just the place to take me in town: a café for some German cake. We both had the marzipan which was just the right combination of crème, fruits and cake with just a light touch of alcohol.

Her apartment is huge by New York standards, and as she tells me, by the average student's standards living here. She probably has the best view of the city right from her bedroom, where you can see trees and the river and town skyline. She lives with another girl and they are down one roommate, so I even have my own room. I considered putting a sign on the door, saying "Yvonne's Room" but it seemed a little dorky. "Keep Out" a little rude. It was just fun having my own room again.

Speaking of dorky, in Munich, I went to this store that sold all kinds of chocolate to get something for Katrin as a thank you gift and came across this awesome advent calendar made by Lindt in the shape of a Russian doll. But what really sold me was that they claimed that inside the box were chocolates of "mini babushkas."

I almost got the calendar for her but the thing was probably as big as my torso and I was afraid she would wouldn't find mini babushkas as awesome as I did, so I went for the more conservative box of chocolates. But then we were in the supermarket, buying some salmon for dinner, and we not only saw the advent calendar, but mini-babushkas sold separately. We had no choice but to get the minis. They were really good--just hollow milk chocolate--but we considered writing a letter to the company to suggest that they have smaller versions of the mini babushkas inside the mini babushkas. Now that would be something special

Tubingen is nearly perfect, and in terms of a host, so is Katrin. She cooks me dinner. She feeds me wine and cake and chocolate. She lets me do my laundry in her washing machine and dryer (dryers are actually not common in Germany). She gives me warm socks and blankets and asks me every five seconds if I need anything else. She was really tired from staying up late the night before, but despite that, she talked with me until 11 at night to amuse me.

How can you not like Katrin? It's impossible.


Katrin in Marktplatz.


The mini babushkas