The cable car took us steadily higher and higher up the mountain. The view was spectacular on one of these last-days-of-summer. Showing guests around I too got to see the city from above for the first time.
The new landscape is a welcome alteration to my surroundings. On the mountaintop villages looks like the covers of the Ravensburger Puzzles from the yearly Christmas’ entertainment. The large, heavily titled, green fields holds at most half a dozen cows, making the scenery look like an expensive-butter-commercial (also, cow-tipping suddenly holds an appeal). The city down below is the combination of a cake-frosting-Disney-village and the Italian ‘cool-quarters’ with those fancy wooden window shutters that always held such a romantic ideal in my mind.
In the on-the-top tourist-trap-train the casual conversation floated in the flavor of etymology. Discussing the linguistic core of canoodling one of the linguist guests cooked-up the connection to knödel, with the argument that they sort of “snuggle on the plate”. Not having a bite of that, it turned out that Google (although not certain) also leaned towards such a linguistic recipe.
In the middle of entertaining the guests and trying to rub some of their excellence onto my own work, I could finally pick up the keys to my little hobbit hole. (Oh yes, I got it!) Spending some time organizing necessary evils, moving my belongings and cleaning, the place starts to slowly resemble a home. It is still very much a disaster, but soon the “junk” will be evacuated and a few cozy details added. Upon ‘inspection’, Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, joked that they expected me to “rise in the house hierarchy” and at their next visit I ought to live on the second floor.
As I was signing my contract it was illuminated that my landlady belongs to the category: remnants of the “closest-thing-to-royalty” the German speaking world had. This of course led to a second row of jokes between Don Quijote and myself, of the kind: “let’s marry into the family”.
When I then the other day accidentally ran into one of my neighbours I felt the joke hit me like a bucket of cold water. Like in the first five minutes from a RomCom a-la Notting Hill, a beautiful dog ran up to me in the idyllic little gardens behind the palais. Following behind the dog was, of course, a handsome Italian fellow who curiously approached me. Already madly in love with me and me in it, the dog and myself really hit it off. The body love-language between the dog and myself, was followed by a much more awkward human conversation. My betraying brain decided this was an opportune moment to flash the ridiculous jokes in my face. Like, seriously brain! Don’t you have better things to recall at this moment? The German word for umbrella, perhaps…? Briefly invited to his apartment a sting of jealousy hit me. Wow! I had thought my place was rather charming. His apartment was completely divine. The ceiling, the doors, the bohemian rugged look. Forget marrying into the family! I will focus all my attention on moving up the house hierarchy!