The end of some loose ends

Caught up in errand-running and Christmas shopping and Christmas-wards socialising in the last week, I've been experiencing more of everyday life than usual. Some of it's fun. Among the mundane things I shall miss from Germany are:

• bicycles and thermoses
• self-seating in restaurants
• self-vegetable-weighing and self-grocery-bag-providing in supermarkets
• wearing hair long and loose and frizzy
  
• crumbly spongey sandy-feeling public toilet soap
• shop assistants who get rid of you by answering "you're welcome" before you've had a chance to say "thank you"

Among the mundane things I shan't miss from Germany are:

• unreliable student-dorm internet that's been broken for the last four days

Oh well. Some of the people who frequent internet cafés late on Saturday nights are quite interesting.

Another Friday, another visit to the bicycle collective. Yesterday I went in hopes of repairing the lumpiness of my bike's gait. It turned out, surprisingly enough, to derive from a flat tire. I fixed it, and stayed on to straighten my handlebars, re-wire my back light, and replace the generator that powers it. Now the bike just flies! And of course with the newly-working lights it's visible for miles. I've been celebrating by temporarily eschewing the trams.

Today I daytripped to Strasbourg with a couple of exchange-student friends, to see the Christmas market there. It was lovely -- though a bit more expensive and a lot more crowded than the little Colmar one. The Strasbourg cathedral is just as impressive the second time round.

And I can see why a classmate of mine (whose father comes from Alsace-when-it-was-German) told me rather sentimentally the other day that Alsace is "everywhere in view from Strasbourg Cathedral's spire".