As we’re down to the wire now (thirteen days before we leave for Dresden!) I have a list of everything we still need to buy and take over with us. One thing on the list… drugs. No, not that kind, silly (after all, Amsterdam is only a car ride away). I’m talking about the perfectly legal, over the counter, nyquil-is-god, garden variety pharmaceutical.

Trouble is, from what I’ve read, they don’t sell that sort of thing in deutschland. Supposedly they’re big on homeopathic remedies… and by ‘homeopathic’ I mean “drink 162 ounces of warm beer with lemon & a dash of clove and call me in a week if you’re not feeling better”. Thanks, I’ll pass.

So, after hearing this advice from multiple sources, I set out on a OTC drug-buying spree. I’d need vitamins (apparently another no-no in germany), allergy medicine, NYQUIL, imodium, gas-ex, sudafed, children’s triaminic, benadryl, pamprin (I secretly slip this in Robbie’s breakfast on her extra-bitchy ‘mom & dad, you’re so stupid’ days), mylanta, motrin, tylenol, excedrin… You name it, I figure I need it.

Fast forward to this weekend… armed with a list, an hour to kill and steely determination, off I went to Target. In went a dozen boxes of this, eight boxes of that & enough Mylanta to soothe the heartburn of an entire herd of woolly mammoth. And all was well, too, until I got to the counter to pay. I was feeling pretty smug as they started to ring my purchases… like a soon-to-be expat in the know… when all of the sudden I saw the dreaded ‘manager approval’ flash on the led at the register.

Now this is Sunday afternoon in what was naturally a packed-to-the-gills Target… I could hear the groans of disgruntled shoppers behind me when the ring-upper reached over and flipped the switch for the little red flashing ‘all progress will now be halted until the price check/bad check/other situation is addressed’ light.

Finally, the manager saunters over, takes a look at my mini-pharmacy on the conveyor belt, lowers his voice and says to me “there - are - laws - about - this - sort - of - thing”… only he says it with utter contempt and a long principal-talking-to-the-troublemaker-in-detention tone of voice. I shift uncomfortably and manage some witty retort like “huh?”. Apparently… and no one bothered to tell me this… you can only buy three boxes of any sort of cold medicine/allergy medicine/beloved nyquil at a time due to homemade meth labs or some shit like that. Too bad all my super-secret sources on expat life failed to mention this small detail.

Nooooooooo, instead I have roughly 20 people staring at me like I probably deal drugs to kids on playgrounds. Meanwhile, Iddy is sitting calmly in the cart singing the care bears theme song and waiting for her easy bake oven refill to get rung up. Lovely.

With as much disdain as I can muster I say “Well, I had no idea. You see, I’m leaving the country in two weeks and where I’m moving to these drugs are illegal, so I need to buy them here and sneak them over with my stuff”—— And this is why I’ll never hold public office. I’m a prolific truth-teller and an equally lousy on-the-spot lie creator. There are probably a million excuses I could have come up with…. and any of ‘em would have been better than ‘I want to leave the country with mass quantities of contraband nyquil’… but there you have it. I left Target empty-handed.

When I got home and relayed the story to Jim, he first laughed his ass off, and then told me that cold medicine is used in crystal meth labs, NOT for crack cocaine. We ended up in a twenty minute argument over crystal meth -v- crack ingredients and why it mattered that I get it right in a future blog entry. And even if he’s right (and he probably is…) I’m still using ‘God Damn Crackheads’ as the title of this entry because ‘God Damn Crystal-Meth Heads’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

On this day..

• Fare thee well, Turbo Tax. - 2007