esclavage

In preparation for my European galavanting, I was looking up people on couchsurfing, and then someone coming to Chicago did the same to me. So on Saturday, after waking up in Lakeview and riding down to do the Obama tour, I met up with Xavier, who is French but living in Germany, and gave him a haphazard walking tour of Michigan ave and the lake.

For some reason, watching movies in French sometimes makes me feel like I know nothing of the language (prolly a lot of slang) but having a 3-hour conversation with a native makes me feel fluent--even still after all these years of mental corrosion.

The part that I found most interesting was talking about health insurance in Germany (where he works). He was talking about using his airlines miles to buy an around-the-world ticket, maybe next year, but would have to ask his work for a 6-month unpaid leave to do so. (Granted, he gets 30 days of vacay a year, he could probably squeeze the whole world into 6 weeks.) I told him he could just quit and take the whole year, but he cited health insurance as the primary reason not to quit. Apparently, in Germany, like it will be here in the States, you are required to have insurance, but if you have a job, your employer is required to provide it. But if you don't have a job, you have to pay for it, and it can be prohibitively expensive. Of course, if you lose your job, I'm sure the gov't helps out, but, like in America, you can't be "unemployed" if you just up and quit. I told him "C'est de l'esclavage!", realizing that my little 6-month sabbatical would be lemon difficult.

We ended up at Millennium Park. You can see me and my bike reflected in the Bean; he's taking a photo and is ghosted in the merge of the various photos.