It takes all sorts to fill a river boat at Christmas time. Generally, though, you only find yourself on a cruise at Christmas if you meet one of the following criteria:
• You’ve lost a husband (husbands, compared to wives, seem surprisingly easy to misplace, the proportion of female to male widows we’ve met being at least 10-0)
• You hate your family
• Your family hates you
• You’re a loser with no friends.

I’m not sure where Cara and I fit on this list, but it seems clear that happy, well-adjusted, ‘family’ people don’t normally take cruises at Christmas. We met representatives of each type on our cruise up the Rhine River (thanks, by the way, to Air Miles, and in turn to Safeway’s incredible 10 x Air-miles rewards program at the pharmacy). We met parents who were avoiding their children; we met children who were sick of their parents; and we met a guy who wore nothing but a muscle shirt and sockless sandals for the entire trip, even outdoors in the snow. We placed him in the ‘loser with no friends’ category, though he could just as easily have occupied a category of his own: ‘scary.’ One thing unified the majority of this motley crew: they were mostly American Republicans. Not that I actually discussed politics with any of them (except with a guy named Larry who was an old hippy from California. I safely assumed we shared a few of the same opinions.) I make this clever observation because most of them were from Texas, spoke too loudly, and looked, frankly, like Republicans. We did overhear one creepy guy wish that he could set fire to Obama. Nothing like evoking Southern lynch mobs to get into the Christmas spirit.

Cara gave me a book for Christmas by Richard Dawkins subtitled ‘the Case for Evolution.’ I found myself hiding in my room to read this book like it was an instruction manual for terrorists. I was somewhat embarrassed by this self-censorship. Certainly, it would be polite to hide a book called something like “Fat and Loud: Why Americans Suck,” but this is evolution we’re talking about here. No one seriously doesn’t believe in it. Except the 40% of Americans who claim that evolution never happened. I also find myself a little confused to be reading it in the first place. It’s not like I’d ever bother reading a book called “Gravity: Could it Really Exist?” Do the Creationists have so much power that I feel like I’ve got to re-read grade four biology?

Still, it was a wonderful week of pampering, clean sheets, unlimited food, and lovely views. Sadly, our boat threw us off in Cologne (remember Fred Flinstone throwing his protesting sabre-tooth cat outside every night? Like that.) From there we took the train to Berlin where we are now spending New Year’s Eve.

And every New Year’s Eve, one asks the same question: have I gained or lost weight this year? Sadly the answer is always the same. Gained. Gained, gained, gained. We’ve been learning a lot about the relative merits of various diets on this trip. In Norway, we learned that the starvation diet works best. Nobody can afford to eat in Norway, and the food is generally not that edible anyway. In the Faroe Islands, we learned that Pylsurs-the only food that we could afford there- might look like hotdogs, but the horrible sugary mustard they’re coated in beggars the culinary imagination. Also, if you’re the type of person to be disgusted by the various bits of pig they put in hot dogs, just think what kind of offal comes from a cod. That too is an effective diet. On the other hand, we learned that one could stuff oneself to the gills, as it were, on fresh grilled seafood in Croatia and still lose weight. Amazingly, in Italy, we learned you could also eat unlimited quantities of gelato and experience the same benefit. In Egypt, we found that gastro-intestinal distress is excellent for weight loss. Alas, then we hit South Africa and an all-meat, all toffee pudding diet. Here, we packed on the pounds like we were taking lessons from the hippos. With my toothpick legs, pancake butt and ivory complexion, I now look like a medieval Virgin Mary. Things aren’t looking much better for 2010 in Berlin. Wine is five dollars a bottle, and our self-catering apartment came equipped with no other cooking utensil than a gravy spoon.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!

A Tale of Two Sandals

I bought my sandals in Glasgow at Millets, the venerable English supplier of outdoor equipment. Millets is the type of store that probably supplied Sir Baden Powell and his hearty boys with canvas tents and leather underpants back in the glory days of institutionalized pederasty. Millets went bankrupt weeks after I bought my sandals, about the same time that those sandals began emitting a most awful smell. I’d wash them or leave them in the sun for a couple of days, but minutes after putting my feet back into them, the smell would return. Food, moisture and warmth: that’s all an ambitious bacterium needs to start a family, and my size thirteen feet supply lots of each. Whatever bacterial culture it was that started as a backwater banana republic in my sandals has now gained first-world superpower status and is ready to supplant Canada’s seat on the G8.

So long as I keep my sandals low to the ground and my sizeable feet firmly wedged in them, the odour is relatively diffuse, and its source is difficult to locate. This is what has saved me so far on this trip from being lynched by a righteous mob, especially once we embarked on our seventeen-day minibus tour of South Africa. My companions on this trip—5 of them squeezed into a van with faulty air conditioning—probably thought they were smelling elephant dung, and I hope they will forever recall that smell with fondness, the way we think of horse poop in Alberta. But removing my foot from one of these fetid cauldrons is like waving a bowl of unwashed tripe around the room and Cara has been making me take my sandals off before we enter any accommodations and watches me as I scrub my feet in the tub.

Two weeks into our tour, we arrived in Oudsthoorn where we bought supplies at the largest supermarket we’d seen since leaving Pretoria. Being unable to find Odour Eaters - possibly because all of the signs were in Afrikaans and I was too embarrassed to ask for them by name - I bought a bottle of Dettol, a bright orange disinfectant that comes with its own Geiger Counter and instructions to ‘consult your physician if mutations occur.’ The instructions were to dilute the Dettol with five parts water, but I smeared it straight onto the blackened soles of my sandals and let the goo settle in for several hours before rinsing the sandals in the room’s garbage bin. The Dettol masked the smell of my shoes in exactly the same way a string vest fails to mask a hairy back. Rather, it gave my shoes an eye-watering pungency, like rotten canvas soaked in gasoline, that was impossible to ignore. I wrapped my sandals in several plastic bags, bunged them under a seat, and spent the remainder of the tour barefoot in the van.

I’m looking forward to spending Christmas in Germany for many reasons, but mostly because it’s going to be cold there, and I won’t need my sandals any further. We’ve chased the summer for nearly six months now, so it’s time to greet the winter, albeit a milder one than we’re used to; my sandals will remain in Cape Town where the powerful North-Easters that blow through here might suffice to limit their destructive power .