There is Currently A Man Destroying our Upstairs Bathroom

...he's taking a hammer and breaking away the tile and concrete that surround the piping. Then, he's destroying the piping, and after that, I assume, he'll determine whether the pipes are broken. I can only guess that he'll conclude they are, but who knows.

When we first got here, everything was very new, and very weird, and very fresh, and I felt like I was bursting at the seams to write about all the strange things I encountered. As I'm sure usually happens, we've begun to acclimate to our surroundings a bit, and there is less and less that I find specifically worth writing about... I'm not sure that makes sense.

On the one hand, our living situation is very romantic, and very much what you might expect from a poet and a journalist living together in Eastern Europe... the buildings are very turn-of-the-century, and partly run-down.. one of us walks to the corner most mornings for fresh-baked bread, to eat with our little thimbles of coffee... crazy young men dressed in black squat on every street corner, smoking. There's even a piano teacher across the street, and so we walk out of our little apartment building to the sounds of Stravinski and Rachmaninoff.

On the other hand, living is living: 90% daily drudge. We run out of peanut butter. We watch the first season of "24" and contemplate buying the second season from iTunes. The goddamn toilet breaks. I'm tired from staying up late last night, and I have to study my Georgian homework, and there's this guy loudly destroying the upstairs bathroom, hopefully to find and fix the leak that made our kitchen ceiling shit concrete last week, and as soon as he's done and it's all fixed, we're going to do two weeks worth of laundry, which, because of airline luggage limits, is practically all our laundry. In these moments, it doesn't feel any different than living in Marshfield, or Burlington, or Oxford, or Columbus, or anywhere else.

But then you look out the window, and see a sixteen hundred year old fortress and think oh, yeah. That's why I'm here.