Only I could get teary-eyed saying goodbye to my bartender. But Ulla was more that that… she was like a German mother to me. Everyday, coming in or out of the apartment, she’d be there with a smile on her face, making sure that life was treating me as it should. One of the perks of living on top of a pub.

Yes, those are real human skulls behind me. They once held real mouths with real tongues that could taste and taunt and maybe there were green eyes or brown eyes or steele blue eyes in those sockets and behind it all each one of those skulls protected a human brain that once elicited emotions and thoughts and dreams and desires and at no point in the afternoon did I consider any of these possibilities: I was too drawn in to the anatomical wonder of the human body and the process of plastinazation that was going on around me.

Somewhere between then and now I got sick. As in, I-never-knew-my-body-could-produce-so-much-mucus kinda sick. It’s the dangdest thing too — I mean, aside from the seven hours I spent outside in the cold rain on Saturday, the 6 a.m. bedtime Saturday “evening”, the 9 a.m. wake-up call on Sunday to be back out in the cold for another eight hours, all topped off with a train ride that should have only lasted 3 hours, but instead dragged out into a 12 hour, 70€ all-night-odyssee after I fell asleep on the short stretch between Dresden and Leipzig and woke up 3 hours out of the way just outside of Weimar, I’ve been taking really good care of my body.