Spring — and new/old neighbors..

It's all kinds of warm and sunny today, which should make those of us who are concerned about global warming wrinkle our foreheads in collective concern, especially because it was snowing here not but five days ago. Nevertheless, I cleared a winter's worth of crap from our balcony, planted some sunflower seeds and let some UV-rays damage my skin. Apropos forehead wrinkling, eh?

In other news, we have recently learned that once dear friends of ours (who decided to give up our friendship after we called them out on kind of, well, taking advantage of us and our good natures) are moving back to Frankfurt after a year-long stint pretending to be rich and successful in Wiesbaden.

To go into detail about all that went awry here would be long and boring, but I'll say this much: I hope we don't have to have some sort of awkward moment where we run into each other in the subway or supermarket or park. And this is although — and I don't mean this out of bias — we didn't really do anything. At the beginning of last year, it became painfully apparent that these two friends of ours considered us to be second-rate — and this culminated at H.'s 30th birthday party, where we had been asked to bring chairs. Once we arrived, chairs in hand, we were greeted with, "Oh good, the chairs are finally here!" An A-list friend, who arrived at the party mere seconds before us, was greeted by the birthday boy with much delight and warmth and was promptly served a beer. Anyway.

Many, many things came together for us that made it clear that we were liked by these friends when they wanted or needed something from us (help moving, a car to borrow, etc.). I finally told H.'s wife K. exactly how we felt, but that we still liked them, but we felt kind of verarscht by them. K. said that Björn and H. should go out for a beer to talk about everything, and H. even wrote Björn an e-mail suggesting this. Björn wrote back, suggesting a day and time. And that was it. We never heard back, the two moved to an deluxe apartment in the sky and that was that. But now we've learned that the huge-ass apartment in a city 40 km away from the city in which both work is indeed too expensive for this couple. Well well well.

Björn is kind of enjoying the schadenfreude here, where as I am really just hoping not to have any kind of encounters with them. These are the kinds of problems I never thought I'd have as an adult. Sheesh.