I am rather in love with Stuttgart. Moni’s apartment looks like it came out of an IKEA catalogue, and her friends’ apartments are much the same: clean and bright, simple and uncrowded. The city is full of nice-looking buildings, beer-gardens spilling into the streets with cheery car-workers taking their lunch out amongst the sun and the passersby. You can’t go two blocks without finding an organic food store, and the bakeries have the most wonderful loaves imaginable, full of pepitas and flax and oats and rye, so that the bits on the crust tumble to plate in delicious crumbs — they even have multigrain croissants beaded with seeds.

The city is home to several car companies, but several years ago they did an unbelievable thing: they redeveloped the center of town to be less car friendly. So that even though you see a few more shiny Porsches than usual, there are little pedestrian streets and stairs all over. Stuttgart is also in a valley, surrounded by miles of forest and well-kept trails. The woods have flame-red squirrels and blackbirds in them, and chartreuse chestnut trees that dapple the sunlight and frame the blue sky. You just have to get up the formidable steps, which are even more numerous than Altea’s. The first full day I did a short tromp through the closest parts, and discovered a zip-line to my endless childish delight. And a few days ago I did a four-hour “tour” to the nearby Castle Solitude and back, joining hundreds of Germans at some points, all walking and picnicking and enjoying a day of perfect clarity and humidity. On my second full day, I borrowed Moni’s brother’s bicycle, and together we toured the city from top to bottom (literally), through parks and Epcot neighborhoods.

Moni herself is quite remarkable. I worried I wouldn’t recognize her, but I knew her at once, short-sighted though I am. Her hair is short and dyed red, her skin is freckled and thin like mine, and she dresses and moves and lives in what seems a totally relaxed fashion. She works with a few colleagues to produce short science videos for TV — she does the 3D animations. It’s been nice, the little routine we have going: I wake up to the sun in my eyes and go out for a run… or just climb the stairs, since even that takes half an hour… and I’m back in time to shower and break my fast with Moni. She works while I go exploring (Bauhaus architecture, check; Chinese Garden, check) or stay in her living room cum office to read; or else we go out to do errands, stopping every once in a while to look for good stuff in the inorganics (already some shellac records for a friend).

That’s another thing I like about Moni, she resourceful, and prefers old things — like her crafty manual drill, or the old cash register her dad fixed for her birthday, and her mom’s sewing machine which helped me make a new bag. But it’s not just her, I think, as the recycling bins on every block hint at a general consciousness about being friendly to the environment. Between that and the praise Moni’s friends give to the city, I’m practically ready to move!

Now, there is one more essentially important thing about staying in Germany right now, and staying with Moni in particular, and it is football. Not rugby, not tell-me-when-the-Superbowl-ads-are-back-on-ball, but soccer. Back in Japan, when my dad and I first met Melanie and Monika, we bonded over the World Cup final. Germany versus Brazil. So fittingly enough, it’s currently the European Championship, with a game on every night. And the most exciting match by far has been the one that pitted Germany against Portugal, two teams with exquisite ball control and team coordination. It twisted and turned until the end, when the whole bar leaped out of their seats with cries and hugs and flags — Germany won! Germany’s going to the semi-finals! And tomorrow night, they’re probably going to kick Turkey’s butt, because they’ve got a way better team, and because I’ll be there with Moni in a beer garden cheering them on.

Ole Ole Deustchland!

What do I do about my leather jacket? It’s so sensible and fashionable, and I love it so, but nowadays I feel uncomfortable wearing it. Maybe no one else will notice I’m clothing myself in a dead animal, but I notice! I’m aware with every squeaky bend of my sleeve that this skin was meant for some other creature. The weather is too haphazard to dump it; not until I replace it; not until I find it a good home.

My sandals are wearing out quickly enough, and the fact that they are on my feet makes it less likely that others will notice; other vegans, vegetarians, whom I somehow care to impress. True, these things were got before I became fully aware of their meaning. True, my mass-produced cotton clothing is probably not cruelty-free — people are animals, too.

But somehow that doesn’t make it easier to bear.

In Paris, everyone looks beautiful. The smoke lines on their faces aren’t full of wisdom, they’re full of character. There are the fashions, of course: the trench coats, the scarves, the fabulous boots and cocky hats. But even the girl with striped stockings held up to her butt with garters, even the woman who wore nothing that matched plus garish gold platforms, even the street artist with ruffled shirt sleeves who stood bent scowling at passersby with scissors idle in his hands. They are all somehow beautiful.

---

I was walking through the subway station when I heard classical music wafting down the halls. I turned the corner hungry like a dog straining on its leash. It was like a dream, a holodeck malfunction: before me was virtually an orchestra, violins and cellos at least, their bows dancing in time and the musicians wearing suits and satin in their minds if not on their bodies. They were students from all over Paris, bringing classical music to the masses. And the masses clogged the tunnel, held there by vibrating strings, and I leaned against the staircase railing hoping to lose my parents — and myself — and stay in thrall forever.

---

Once upon a time, even tires were pretty. At the Musée des Arts et Métiers, everything is steampunk. Everything is brass and ivory and glass and wood and designed in minute detail. The astrolabes, leather gas bags, microscopes, bicycles, and printing presses — however utilitarian, they were crafted and decorated as if they were objects of art. Which now, of course, they are.

Will anyone want to put our modern junk, our television remotes with a hundred squishy buttons, in a museum someday? Will anyone want to visit?

---

French no longer seems scary to me. I can almost pronounce half the words half correctly, and I can imagine learning how to spell them someday, too.

The food, on the other hand, is impossible. The French have perfected the art of cream, butter, and eggs (which can also be used by bridge brigands to hurl at Seine river tour boats), using exactly those features of their ingredients that are irreplaceable, unreplicatable. And then they serve only those things. I stand amongst the macarons, an ethical vegan, a little sad.

Not that the food I did eat in Paris wasn’t fabulous. We ate at Bob’s Juice Bar every day it was open, where I filled myself with wraps and smoothies. Maoz taught me how much I need falafel in my life. The bright La Victoire Suprême du Coeur was the first restaurant I have ever been to where the menu items are specially marked “not vegan.” And with Naturalias around, I could almost live in Paris!

Almost… but not quite. There was not a wild plant to be seen within the city limits. Unless you count the milligrams of moss between stones along the Seine.

---

Next time I go to Paris, I will walk without purpose, bring trail mix along, and carry a map of public toilets. And next time, I’ll make it inside the Louvre!

Hans Gregory had enlisted to fight the Enemy. He had not enlisted to die. Every day he spent cowering from mortar shells flying overhead, and every day he hurled a few grenades over no-man’s land. He never saw the Enemy, not the faces of its soldiers at least. For Hans, the faces of the Enemy were the mauled faces of his comrades. He would have liked to turn his comrades into proper friends, but every time he tried to sit down and have a cup of tea with someone and chat about sports, the Enemy inevitably joined in.

He and his fellow rank-and-file soldiers wondered why they were fighting the Enemy in the first place, but no one really wanted to question their hate. Besides, it was always renewed with some new volley of bullets. If their own compassionate leaders couldn’t arrange peace — and their leaders certainly assured the public that they were compassionate — then it must be the Enemy who was at fault. So it was that he spent his first tour of duty — muddy, bloody, and jaded.

When Hans Gregory went home, he found a letter in his mailbox. It told him he was promoted, due to the importance of some obscure scrap of the Front he had suffered over, and also due to the fact that everyone who had played a bigger role was dead. Also, he was needed immediately. Without even making it to his front door, he turned right round and reported for duty. The Enemy was the enemy after all, and the Enemy never slept.

Through a series of unfortunate events — for other people at least — Hans became an army general. He got to have tea with all the other generals, in a little wooden room far away from the Front, and they sat in fine leather chairs and chatted about sports. Every once in a while a man of lower rank would ask politely for some battle plans, and the tea would get cold while they furrowed their brows over maps and enemy communiques. Then the man of lower rank would scurry off with some orders, and the generals would order themselves more tea.

During one such occasion, while they waited in nervous silence for the kettle, Hans decided to ask his comrades why they were fighting the Enemy. He got a series of dark looks, and someone started spouting propaganda quite excitedly. Another someone said, “You don’t… sympathize with them, do you?”

“No, of course not! I hate them as much as you. I can’t count how many soldiers I saw blown to bits by the Enemy. And I can’t count how many of them that I’ve ordered blown up. There’s not much we can do stop this exchange, anyway, I suppose. It’s up to the higher-ups. I just want to know how we started this whole bloody mess.”

“You mean how they started it, don’t you?”

Hans nodded at their hardened faces. He stopped going to the little wooden room after that. Instead he spent more time looking over maps and enemy communiques, and as a consequence he won many battles he never properly fought. And when he finally got leave to go back home, he was a national hero. In fact, he hardly got to his doorstep when a half dozen men in black suits and equally black sunglasses drove up in long cars of a similar hue.

As it turned out, Hans was such a national hero that he had won the election for Prime Minister without even running a campaign. He couldn’t help wondering why he was so popular considering that they were no nearer peace now than they ever had been in the past. When the Front advanced under his command, it just retreated somewhere else.

The black suited men took him to a serious-looking room in an impressive building, where there was a high-backed chair and a heavy oak desk and a polished red telephone. When Hans asked what the telephone was for, they told him it would put him in touch with the Enemy Prime Minister. It took him several days of signing papers and giving interviews before he worked up the courage to pick up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Good day, Prime Minister. How are you?”

“Er… Well. Thank you. Were you this friendly with my predecessor?”

“Yes, actually. We got along splendidly!”

“You mean you didn’t threaten one another, or boast about new military technology, or call each other pig-dogs?”

“Heavens no! Nothing of the sort. Mainly we complained about the weather and exchanged cookie recipes.”

“Cookie recipes?”

“Yes, I have a rather good one for gingersnaps.”

“But if you didn’t hate each other, why didn’t you call for peace?”

“None of our generals would believe us! We tried being subtle about it and made some foolhardy orders, but that just ended up getting more soldiers killed. The people of both our nations hate each other, Prime Minister, and there’s nothing we can do but let them play war.”

“And if we ordered them to stop?”

“My own predecessor tried that. It resulted in a military coup.”

“There’s no point being Prime Minister, is there. There’s no power in the job at all.”

“You’re catching on! We’re enemies, after all, and there’s no use losing sleep over it. Now, how about those gingersnaps?”

Hans hung up the phone. He was a little annoyed. Was there really no end to the bloodshed? He was far away from the shelling at the Front, but he had not forgotten it. He spent the days watching military plans come and go from his desk, and it dawned on him that no one was really planning the war at all. He let those in the field figure out the strategy for their little patch of ground, and they in turn rarely collaborated with one another.

So Hans began tracking the Front. It was not long before he detected a pattern.

Instead of a random series of advances and retreats, there seemed to be deliberate sequences. Some of these repeated at regular intervals, but when he questioned the generals in charge he got a different rational every time. And when he picked up the red phone, he found the Enemy to be just as clueless. This was a strange thing — there seemed to be an intelligence behind the shifting Front, yet the brain behind it was nowhere to be found.

Hans transcribed the patterns into analogue charts, and handed them to the head of his Cryptography Department. He told her they were radio signals picked up from enemy territory, and he wanted to confirm they were just noise.

Two days later, she returned. Her face was full of disappointment. “Well, it certainly wasn’t noise. It took some trouble to decode, but I believe you will find the message just as disappointing as if it really were noise.”

Hans was stunned. A message? There was a language there, even communication? But who was speaking, he had no idea. Someone was using the army as a voice. Yet it was no one he could identify. No human was sending the message, and no human was receiving it. He realized, turning quite pale, that the only ones that could be talking to each other were the nations themselves. Somehow two collections of people had become two sentient beings, and the citizens were just the cells.

Hans realized that the head of his Cryptography Department was still moving her mouth. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

“I was just saying,” she repeated, rolling her eyes this time around, “that the message said: WHAT NICE WEATHER WE’RE HAVING.”

Hans instinctively looked out the window. He wondered what kind of weather nations considered to be nice.

Perhaps you are all wondering what I am up to, what new adventures I’m having in Spain. Since coming to Altea, my parents and I have settled into a regular routine. We all wake up about the same time as one another, between 8 and 9 o’clock, do some quick stretches, and head down the many stairs to run along the shore. We do a mixture of jogging and walking, actually, but my mom is such a fast walker that my dad and I have to jog to keep up. Our neighbor, David, calls us crazy, and yesterday I would have to agree with him — we must have been mad to go running in the pouring rain, and this time I do mean “running,” as it was the only way to keep warm.

Then we walk up all those stairs again, take showers, and eat some breakfast of fresh squeezed orange juice, fruit muesli and oatly (a brand of oat milk), or bananas sliced up with cinnamon on top. The rest of the day is a mixture of reading, working on the computer (or sewing tiny bears if you are my mom), chatting with neighbors that wander past, and walking up and down all those stairs several times to explore the town. The old town is by far the best, situated on top of the hill surrounding the blue-domed church, a mix of terrace restaurants and art galleries set in white buildings and narrow streets. The rest of town is more modern, with cars and clothing shops and “Consum” and “Masymas” supermercados. The beach is lovely, with a long sidewalk or boardwalk extending almost uninterrupted from Altea to Albir, and English-speaking cafes arranged along the entire stretch.

Dinner is a casual affair, something simple and light like chickpea salad and plum tomatoes on pan multicereal, or a broccoli stir-fry with brown rice. And it is always accompanied by Star Trek. Somehow dinner and a show manages to remain special no matter how many times we do it. In fact, this whole routine may sound boring to some, but it is truly not. The daily rituals frame continuing conversations with my parents and the gradual soaking in of the Altean atmosphere. Instead of violently inflicting culture upon myself (and perhaps myself upon a culture), I think I prefer this sponge method of travel. I can sit still, watching and listening, and for a time at least, figure out how to live here.

Lest life get altogether too formulaic, however, we have done several day trips. In addition to the fabulous local Tuesday market, there is a flea-market on Saturdays quite a drive out of town. Last week David took us with him, and we spent at least a hour taking in the booth after table after carpet displaying everything from nudibranch-like polyester dresses to antique bronze braziers. Yesterday it cancelled due to the downpour, but next week I hope Anna, our other eccentric British neighbor, will join us.

We hiked out to the lighthouse in the Serra Gelada one day, and another we spent getting our train tickets refunded and exploring the hilltop castle at Alicante, and just last Friday we walked the painted town and floral bayou of La Vila Joiosa, ending the expedition with a mancerina of dark drinking chocolate at the Xocolateria.

And really, every adventure should end in chocolate.