In an hour or so, I’ll be reading something from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians for April’s wedding. Her church wedding, that is; here in France, you have to have a civil ceremony first, so yesterday, she and Manu were officially married by the mayor of Nice (as is everyone in Nice, apparently).

Anyway, the reading she gave me is surprisingly churchy, so here is the reading I am going to give here, for me, from a Kelley Link story which I’m re-reading in The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which Terri got me for Christmas.

Your destination is North. The map you are using is a mirror. You are always pulling the bits out of your bare feet, the pieces of the map that broke off and fell on the ground as the Snow Queen flew overhead in her sleigh. Where you are, where you are coming from, it is impossible to read a map made of paper. If it were that easy then everybody would be a traveler. You have heard of other travelers whose maps are bread crumbs, whose maps are stones, whose maps are the four winds, whose maps are yellow bricks laid one after the other. You read your map with your foot, and behind you somewhere there must be another traveler whose map is the bloody footprints that you are leaving behind you.

While we were in State College for Christmas, I went to the Comic Swap with Glenn and picked up a copy of Berlin #13 by Jason Lutes, a comic (er… graphic novel) series that I’ve followed since I saw the first issue in 1996 (I think in Minneapolis when Tim and I were visiting Mike on our way back from Oregon). This issue takes place on New Year’s 1930:

Coincidentally, Terri and I are actually in Berlin this New Year’s. We are going to Nice in a few days for my sister April’s wedding, and as usual, we were not content to just stick to one European locale. Since neither of us had ever been to Germany, we decided on Berlin. We’re also going to make a day trip to Leipzig, today, as soon as Terri gets up from a nap. She woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep, so her nap is actually a good excuse for me to upload some pictures and do a little light blogging.

We are generally not big New Year’s Eve types, so while there was some champagne (and tapas) in our evening, there was little of the revelry pictured above. However, the Germans do seem to love their fireworks. Not only were there official New Year’s fireworks over the central park (the Tiergarten), but people set off their own fireworks and firecrackers in the street, starting at about 6pm and on until at least 1:30am (which is about when we fell asleep).