Sometime between crocheting those cupcakes and today we made a trip to Freiburg with Matti when he was visiting and stayed in a nearby town called Emmendingen. Mads knew straight away that this was our town - for a start, the hotel we stayed at had a giant M out the front. There were 'M's on our pillows. We had soon formed a theory that everyone in Emmendingen had to have an M in their name somewhere. But the real proof that we were destined to go to Emmindingen was when Matti and Matt spotted my genie book in the window of one of the shops in town. I'd known that the German translation has been out in the shops for a while but I hadn't seen it anywhere. And there it was. In the bookshop window of Emmendingen.
It's that blurry yellowish shape in the middle of the picture. Not a UFO. My book. Truly. We went inside and found it on the shelf. Then the bookshop lady came over and it turned out that she'd grown up in Australia. So then Matt suggested that I sign the book and there was a slightly awkward moment where I saw the thought flit across (let's call her) Mary's mind that perhaps I hadn't written it. Perhaps we were just a group of weird tourists who went into bookshops and signed other people's books. I offered to produce my passport but she smiled (a little nervously) and said it wasn't necessary.
And then that was it. First sighting of one of my books in a foriegn land. We left the shop and headed off to the ice-cream shop. Mads had the green nutty flavour. 'Moustachio.'
