Trip Report: Days One/Two - Munich

We arrived in Munich mid-day on Sunday, December 18^th. As always, we were really tired. We’d flown from Raleigh to London and then on to Munich - yet another delirious Heathrow layover in the books! We stayed at the Aloft Hotel right across from the central train station. This neighborhood turned out to be about the level of sketchiness you might expect, but it was very convenient for travel and only about a 10 minute walk from the historic core. The hotel itself was great – dead silent despite being on a busy street, and the room was huge, especially for Europe. It was a bit hipstery, being an Aloft, but on the whole a good place to base the first half of our trip.

After we checked in, we walked around a little bit to kill some time and then went to sleep at 4:00pm and woke up at 8:00 the next morning. Heaven.

Then we set out to explore the city. Bundled up!

 The highs averaged in the mid 30s the entire time we were in Germany, which wasn’t so bad as long as we had our scarves and hats and gloves. We were pretty tired of carrying all that stuff around by the end of the trip, though, let me tell you. After eleven years in North Carolina this serious winter business is definitely foreign territory.

This is the gate into the old city on our walking route from the hotel. 

One of the main awesome things about visiting Germany in the winter is Christmas markets. There are tons of them – even within Munich there are at least a dozen around the city. The markets Christmas ornaments and decorations, food of all sorts (especially sausages), chocolate, fruit, and gluhwein, hot mulled wine served in keepsake mugs. We ran across four markets in varying places completely by accident. The one we spent the most time in was at and around Marianplatz, the big square in the center of the historic old city.

There were stalls selling roasted chestnuts all over both Munich and Paris.

Marianplatz is famous for its glockenspiel in the city hall, which is a metal sculpture type thing does a… performance, I guess? – twice a day at 11:00 and 12:00. We coincidentally arrived right at 11:00 so we stayed to watch. As it turns out, the glockenspiel is pretty boring. 

We watched most of it and were mildly impressed but then we found out later it wasn’t built until 1908, which mitigates the impressiveness pretty thoroughly. If it were medieval that would be one thing, but come on, we had airplanes in 1908! The glockenspiel is the Mona Lisa of Munich. The most entertaining part of it was watching all the yahoos filming it with their cell phones.

Anyway, after that spectacle we walked through the Viktualmarket, with lots of food stalls and vendors. Also very Christmasy.

Here's Ben.

Ultimately we ended up finding our way to the Deutsches Museum, the world’s largest museum of science and technology. As you might expect from the Germans, it was extremely comprehensive. We stayed for at least four hours and I think Ben might have actually been happy there for the rest of his life. They had all sorts of weird stuff.

And of course breast cancer followed me on vacation, in a display about cutting edge cancer treatments (thank you, $692,000!).

We got some good food at the museum, our first of many schnitzels and sausages.

After the Museum we walked back for a pre-dinner break, and then had dinner at Wirtshaus Zum Straubinger. It was a very, very cozy place, a traditional Bavarian restaurant with wood paneled walls and waiters in lederhosen. 

The food turned out to be great, too. Ben got some pumpkin cream soup.

I got beer.

We were both served these balls of some sort of carbohydrate with our entrées and had to re-read the menu afterward to figure out they were dumplings. 

We split apple strudel for dessert. 

Survivor, I guess.

It's been 679 days since I found the cancer. I'm still here and still cancer-free. I had a mammogram on Monday and was going to update the blog before then, since I assumed the results would be bad and, you know, I could get in one last post before I had to start writing about chemo again. But I couldn't get the app to work so I didn't get the post up, and then it turned out that everything was okay. That tells you where my mindset is, though, and will maybe always be. I fully expect the other shoe to drop. The shoe is too big; if you are a person who likes to be prepared, you can't safely assume it's going to stay in the air.

I also just debated going up and deleting "cancer-free," because maybe that's jinxing things to write it down. But I will be brave and leave it there.

Despite all those dramatic things I just said and the hard fact that I'm never not aware of it on some level, most of the time I'm fine. I tend to worry more about things when I'm bored and don't have anything else to think about. Fortunately my new job keeps me much busier than I was in the past so those times are fewer than they used to be. I have also found that I'm much more sensitive to uncertainty than I was before; I always thought things in life generally worked out to be fine, and cancer showed me this is not the case. Bad stuff happens when you least expect it, when you're doing everything right and are completely happy with your life, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. My cancer being a highly treatable Stage IA is not a comfort, because the fact that it exists at all is cold hard evidence: the jig is up. There isn't any reason it couldn't have been Stage IV. Or pancreatic cancer, or MS, or whatever. We are all subject to whims of the universe over which we have absolutely no control.

I swear I meant that paragraph to be positive! Really. But the point is that a fundamental part of my worldview has been proven to be false on a very deep level, and it's difficult to adjust the rest of my life to this new reality. I've lost the sense of innate confidence that I'm correctly interpreting the world and the people around me. I assume this will get better and easier with more distance from diagnosis. It's already better than it used to be.

Regardless, I press on. I only have one more scan at the 6 month interval and then I'm back to once a year. The odds are good: less than a 5% chance of both local and distant recurrence. Of the women I went through chemo with, none of them have recurred, and almost all of them had bigger tumors than mine that had spread outside the breast. Treatment is the best it's ever been, there is no doubt, and it's getting better all the time. But there's still no cure, either.

I want there to be a cure.

I want a guarantee. But I know none of us have that - the problem is, as a cancer survivor, you can't ignore it anymore. Nobody ever really believes some terrible random thing can happen to them. You can think you believe it, but until you get the diagnosis you don't believe it. I believe it. Now, for me, it's happened. It's real, and it can't be unlearned. We are fragile. Everything in our lives is out of our control.

So, uh, what I'm doing is going to Germany on vacation and having lots of cats. I'd like to say I'm doing a better job of being mindful and maximizing my health and appreciating what I have and all that, but in reality I'm still over here eating twelve Starbursts a day and freaking out about how the best way to efficiently serve coffee at the Board of Directors meeting. Just living, I guess. What else can I do? Tomorrow it will be 680 days.

CAT UPDATE

The new cat situation is going great. 

Doki is half the size of the other two, but is the boss of the house and does whatever she wants at all times. She chases Papaya around less than she used to, but the pecking order is still clear. 

However, this one - formerly Oki, now Michael - is our favorite by far. Unfortunately I think half the reason we like him best is because of his face, which makes me feel shallow, but he also has a tiny nervous meow and is very reserved, which I think makes us want to work hard and win his love. He does sleep at our feet every night and if I toss and turn at any point he comes up to the head of the bed for a few purrs and pets. It's extremely endearing. 

Doki likes to wedge herself next to me on the couch. She is very small. We share one cushion. 

Here she looks big but I assure you, she is not. 

This was an exciting moment, as Papaya usually behaves as though she's afraid Doki will kill her. There have been a handful of times they've all been on the bed or couch together, and mostly they do coexist fine, but we have a ways to go before actual friendship. 

All three!

But seriously, look at Mike.

How could we not like him best? Sorry, girls. 

Sully Takes LA

Every time a grandkid turns 5, my mom takes them to LA for a few days for a special trip. This time, Sully is the new 5-year-old, and the trip fell over Labor Day weekend, so my sister and I invited ourselves along. I hadn't been back to LA since we moved away in 2005! Eleven years!

I arrived at LAX on a direct flight mid-morning and rented a car and then sat on the 405 trying to get to the Valley, just like old times. It is really odd going back to a place you used to live after an 11 year break, particularly someplace so distinctive as Los Angeles. I don't know what I expected, but I was surprised at how thoroughly LA is still LA. Smog, traffic, car chases, helicopters, etc. It kept being the same all this time!

The first thing I did was meet my friend Joanna at her house in North Hollywood, and we walked to Pitfire for pizza and sangria, which we used to do all the time when we lived there. Except now she has a five year old son, Kristofer, and I got to meet him too and it was awesome. 

Then I drove to our Cousin Marian's house in Sherman Oaks and got there just as everyone was arriving from their later flight into the Burbank Airport. Then everyone colored! (But not me.)

On Sunday we drove to Pasadena to go to a children's museum, but first we drove by to see my old apartment building, which is just as ugly today as it was in 2005. Good old Madison Luxury Apartments.

We went through the drive-through at In-n-Out and got cheeseburgers! Yay!

Sully, naturally, does not eat cheeseburgers, only french fries & milkshakes.

The Kidspace Museum in Pasadena turned out to be mostly outdoors and was perfect for providing all sorts of entertainment for a few hours.

Mom & Hillary got really into trying to build a roller coaster out of pipes.

Sully got halfway up this wall and then suddenly realized he was halfway up the wall and we had to get him down.

In the evening I went over to see my friend Natalie and her family. They live in Northridge near where I used to work, so there were a lot of hot spots to drive by and see, including Casey's Tavern, where we used to attend Saturday night potlucks with the otherwise elderly regulars, and the convenience store parking lot where Ben lost his keys on the Night of Tequila Shots with Jimmy & Lexie. 

For dinner we went to Follow Your Heart, a famous vegetarian cafe & market (inventors of Vegenaise!), which was my favorite lunch space when I worked at Luminent. It was exactly the same, wood paneling and all. 

I've been thinking about this burrito for eleven years. 

Natalie and I then went to a tiki bar and had some fruity drinks and awesome conversation. I miss my SMARTS friends! There's really nothing like spending time with somebody you've known since you were 9 years old.

On Monday we joined everyone else in LA at Santa Monica beach. Sully was absolutely fearless, running straight into the ocean over and over.

Our part of the beach was actually not that crowded. Amazingly, we scored a parking space right next to the pier.

After a couple hours on the beach, we headed up to the pier, which was unbelievably packed. Sully was uncooperative about posing for a photo.

There were sooooo many people on the beach nearest the pier. Walk down a little bit, dummies!

Sully wanted to play a game, which I felt certain was throwing money down the toilet, but incredibly he made a basket on the first try and won a stuffed animal, all by himself! Labor Day Miracle!

There were hundreds of people playing that Pokemon game on the pier, wandering around staring at their phones. I guess this is me being old, but I would pay a lot of extra money for a vacation where nobody was allowed to walk around staring at their phone.

On Tuesday I had to leave from LAX at 9:30, so I left Marian's house in Sherman Oaks at 5:50am. The 405 was already insane! 5:50am! But I made it in plenty of time.

It was great to see my friends and Sully and spend a little time in LA, but it was a whirlwind trip! Being there made me wish we had gone back before now; I'm not really sure why we haven't. Benjamin is on board with going for a longer trip at some point in the not-too-distant future, so hopefully we can work that out!

Look what I goootttttt.....

Because my mouth moves faster than my brain, we now have three cats. An acquaintance was telling me she had to give up her house and pets for reasons out of her control, and before I knew what was happening I'd said, "I can take the cats!" And then I thought, "oh man, Ben is going to kill me." But then I asked to see pictures of them and when I saw the fluff, I knew it was fate. The next day they came to live with us. 

This is Doki. She is very small and aggressively affectionate. 

Oki is her brother, much bigger and a little more suspicious of us. He's coming around, through. 

Papaya was like this. 

But it's been two weeks and she's settled in for the most part. There is still some minor hissing when one of them takes another by surprise, but in general:

It was a good decision. They needed some medical care as a result of living their first few years as outdoor cats, but it's been really good for me to have something else to focus on besides, you know, the cancer. They are both gorgeous and sweet and funny and that moment when they're all running around demanding breakfast and then sit side by side munching away has rapidly become the best part of my day. 

THREE CATS!