Dry Ice Factory

Over at theinferior4, Lucius Shepard recently posted ten excellent capsule stories of exotic Christmases past -- although I guess jail isn't an exotic location for everybody. It got me thinking about my own Xmases in foreign lands. There are only three I can remember, not counting the four we spent on Yap when we were living out there (besides which I don't remember those).

1) 1989, Schwäbisch Hall



In 1989 I was in the small town of Schwäbisch Hall in southern Germany. I was visiting my long distance girlfriend, Nahid, whom I had met in May of that year when she and a friend came through Seattle at the end of a cross country trip around the US that had started in San Francisco. We stayed at her mother's apartment in Schwäbisch Hall for a week, then headed up to Berlin, where Nahid was going to the Freie Universität. Nahid's mom, Frau K., had a Hungarian weightlifter boyfriend named Laszlo. Laszlo, who didn't speak any English, was very friendly to me and shared bottles of the local beer, which he thought (and I agreed) was quite good. (When Nahid got back into contact with me a couple of years ago, she said her mom and Laszlo were still together, twenty years later, which made me happy.) I don't remember much about Xmas itself, except that Frau K. talked me into calling home, and my dad answered the phone. I told him he'd love the spätzle, which is a German noodle dish. We'd had Frau K's homemade spätzle that evening, and I was an instant convert.

The other thing I remember about that visit to Schwäbisch Hall was that Nahid took me to a party. Was it on Xmas itself? The weather was freezing, and the party was a surreal "beach party" with sand and fake palm trees in a hall or gymnasium of some kind. I had one of those lonely-in-a-crowd times, since I didn't know anybody (including Nahid, really), didn't speak the language, and was at least nine years older than anybody else there. I mostly drank beer and played wallflower, although there was at least one awkward conversation with one of Nahid's friends. Nahid asked me to drive home, because she'd been drinking too and the roads were icy. Great! The first time I'd ever driven in Europe. Better than that, we got stopped at a roadblock by the cops. Nahid did all the talking, and somehow she talked us through it. Maybe she explained that I was a poor, innocent foreigner who was driving her home because she was tipsy, I really have no idea.

( Two more under the cut )

This 1960 film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's 1951 novel, The Astronauts, was a co-production by East Germany and Poland. A re-edited, re-dubbed version was released in North America in 1962 as First Spaceship on Venus. I've seen that version too, but need to watch it again now that I've seen the original.

The story: An artifact found in the desert turns out to be a recorded message from the planet Venus that was left by an exploratory spaceship that crashed, causing the Tunguska explosion in 1908. A multinational team is assembled to go to Venus to look for the civilization that sent it. Strangely, Venus does not reply to radio messages. When the team reaches Venus, they find out why.

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