First the drama…

Okay, so the whole August blogging thing didn’t work out. There is a good reason – no internet. No internet = no blogging. Simple enough, no?

More on that point – the next time somebody tells you about German efficiency, pick up a fork and stab them in the elbow. Why the elbow? Well, they probably didn’t know any better and you don’t want to maim them or anything. Unless you’re some sort of monster or maybe a person who’s been left without an internet connection for a month…they need to know NOT to say things like that.

Right, so we have no permanent internet connection and we live in a suburb that becomes rather scary at night. This means you should watch what you say around me when I’m wielding crockery.

Here’s a summarised version of our connectivity saga:

Some time before we moved into Block 130, we asked our landlords to go right ahead and re-connect their pre-existing internet connection. Re-connect the shit out of it; re-connect it faster than their fingers could type the Internet compnay's number into their phone. We wanted to be re-connected.

Dutifully, on the second of August they called the internet company to make the arrangements.

We expected that by the time we moved in (10-15 August), everything would be up and ready for us. It wasn’t.

We moved into our lovely pink palace of marble and rugs, and there was no internet. Meaning I had to flit through people’s houses and cafes and the local Burger King (the only restaurant in our new area) to do my work. Not good for my waistline...or my sanity...or Mark’s elbows.

Skip forward a month. A MONTH. IT HAS NOW BEEN A MONTH! And still no sign of the internet people (although rumour has it that they’re coming today). In the meantime, we finally gave up and spent money on a USB Internet stick.

This would have solved our problems only my computer has the soul of a 90-year-old man and doesn’t like technology or the internet in general. So it’s been acting wildly and unpredictably ever since we stuck the thing in. Sometimes I’ll be able to Skype, but not check my email; other times I’ll be able to receive email, but not send it or open any webpages.

And it’s expensive. Oh so expensive. Soon I’m going to have to pimp Mark out just to maintain my Googling habits (and they are vast). At least this is the neighbourhood for that sort of thing; we’d probably even get a stolen car in the deal.

Anyhoo…that’s the reason I haven’t been blogging. Not because I don’t want to tell you about my trip to Aachen or Block 130 (and how we’re trying to reform it with leaf-print cushions) or Dumpling, but because it’ll probably take me a day just to put this blog up. Or, if you’re reading it, then we’re in the future and the world is different. Send a flying car back in time to help me!

Update!

Oh wow, so yeah it has been quite a while since I’ve been here. Terribly sorry about that…something about being awfully busy with work and the occasional social engagement.

I’m going to be better from now on. Although, I have to tell you, August is a big month. Big things are happening in August. For one, The Hausfraus (that is Simon, Mark and I) are moving out of Palace de Geyerstraße and into a bigger, brighter apartment. We are so devastated that at any moment any one of us could kamikaze into oncoming traffic or lick a power point. I am not even kidding.

In case you’re interested, I’ve dubbed our new stomping ground “Block 130” (I’m going for a feeling of darkness and foreboding. Work with me please). Although the apartment is quite large and sunny, it’s located on the rough side of town. In Munich terms, this means that when someone accidentally bumps into you, they might not apologise. I’m buying a switch blade and pepper spray for just such an occasion.

It’s also a good five-minute U-Bahn ride from the centre of town – rather than the ten-minute walk we’re accustomed to. So, in other words, in my mind it’s akin to a dirty hovel, if a dirty hovel were a jail cell, if that jail cell was onboard a ship, if that ship was headed for the edge of the earth and if the crew was made up of homeless men with explosive diarrhoea – like the one who squatted behind a bench, which was being occupied by an unsuspecting friend of mine, and let it rip.

I’m expecting a similar scene to play out in our new living room.

We’re also preparing ourselves for the loss of Mussa. We’ve decided that it would be entirely unethical to smuggle him away with us, no matter how much we know he wants us to. And he does. So for the moment he’s blissfully unaware of our pending desertion and has ramped up his visits to include times when we’re not even at home – we walk through the door and just find him contentedly curled up on the bed with a look of entitlement like, “I’m here, I’m dear, get used to it!”.

But it’s not all bad. For one, we are very excited to have found an apartment because we had feared that we might have to adopt Mussa’s technique of climbing through random windows in search of comfort in the arms of strangers. Secondly, the people we’re subletting from are pretty awesome and have made the whole process really easy. Thirdly – and this is a biggie – we’ll have a living room and a window in the bathroom. You have no idea how giddy this makes us – a toilet-window of our very own!

The move is just about the biggest thing in our lives at the moment – especially since we’re in the process of packing and shifting. But just in case you’re bubbling over with curiosity about what else we’ve been up to, here are some recent events in non-chronological order:

1)     We suffered aggression at the hands of a waitress we dubbed McBoobie. She had enormous knockers which threatened to spill out of her inappropriately-sized dirndl during every wrathful move and glare. Her nipples wanted freedom, but all she wanted was our immediate and ultimate end.

2)    We dressed up in costume for two separate gay pride days and I was only taken for a trannie a handful of times, which is flattering by any measure.

3)     I took a solo trip to Regensburg for a weekend to dedicate time to my multiple personalities: Agnes The Shy (who refused to take selfies in major tourist spots), Agnes The Inappropriately Vocal (who made appreciative noises while dining on delicious food) and Agnes The Creative (who made up for Agnes The Shy’s inability to self-photograph by documenting her presence in Regensburg with obscure photos). Should you ever find yourself in this part of the world, I heartily encourage you to visit R-burg. It is gorgeous, charming and everything nice.

4)      I had a confronting, near-naked experience with a doctor while wearing improper undergarments.

5)      We met a strange artistic type on an evening outing to Gärtnerplatz who completely backed our Hausfraus idea. He was an artist who suspected he was bisexual because he had slept with a man and liked it, but was in a committed relationship (of ten years) with a woman. He drank wine out of a crystal glass.

6)      While smashing sausages on a solo lunch outing, I met “Harry from China” and his father. They were delightful and showered me with complements and gifts. Or just one gift, to be precise, but I was blown away.

7)      One evening Simon went out without keys while the rest of us – that is Mark, two gorgeous ladies who were visiting from Australia and I – went home. The following morning we found him peacefully, albeit mysteriously, asleep in his bed. Nobody had let him in and he couldn’t remember how he ended up indoors. Based on havng spotted him leering near the window at odd hours of the morning, we formed a hypothesis that he had applied the Mussa technique and, unable to open the front door, had scrambled in through the only other available opening. It turned out that Mark had let him in. Disappointing.

8)      Cloacas!

And more stuff, but I think eight is a good number, so I’ll leave it there.