Just a quick couple days in Berlin, where I’m mostly picking up my costume for Conscience.¹ These couple weeks mark the second-to-last time I’ll be in Europe before the end of the year; I’m spending about a week in December, but other than that I’ll be letting my Schengen visa recover.

About time, too. It’s not really that close to running out² but I’ve been in and out enough this year that officials are starting to notice. I was stopped from getting on my flight to Berlin by the Turkish gate agent, who noted all the travel in my passport, called over another gate agent who scrutinized the same thing, then pulled me aside and asked how many days I had spent in Europe. I didn’t know off-hand, so I got to watch them spend 10 minutes trying and work out manually how many days I had left from all the stamps in my passport.

But eventually I was cleared to fly, and I landed in Berlin without any hassles. German passport control glanced at my passport, glanced at me, flipped lazily to a blank page, and stamped me in without saying a word.

Costumes for larps remain the only real struggle of my existence. Modern costumes are easy, as any old thrift shop will do fine. Futuristic is trickier, but a couple mail-order pieces will mostly do. But period? Period is a nightmare.

I’m becoming a big fan of costume rentals. You can do a lot with time and effort in assembling cheap costumes that look great, but that mostly requires being in one place for long enough to work on them. And then you’ve got to schlep the things to your destination. And yes, buying them means you get to reuse them, but I just don’t have much call for Regency outfits these days, even as a larper. You then have to add in the costs for materials and storage after the event. If you’ve got a reliable costume shop nearby, it’s often not worth the hassle.³

The only real hitch in all this is getting in early enough to rent a costume in the location, and spending enough time afterwards to return it. I tend to be at the mercy of friends⁴ in helping with that. I thought about trying to arrange something like that for this trip, but I was zipping through too many places at too fast a clip to make it seem workable.

So I bought my costume wholesale, and had it shipped to Germany. And got carried away, as usual. I can justify it by saying the pieces I’ve bought will be somewhat useful for other roles⁵ and in fact I’m planning on reusing many of the pieces for my Scapegoat costume in a few weeks.⁶ But I’m currently standing in the airport waiting to board my flight with a carry-on stuffed with frock coat and vest and silk suspenders and puff tie with diamond stud and a gun belt with not one but two holsters and I really hope nobody asks to weigh this thing or unpack it.

At least I didn’t have to take off the boots for security.

Next: Madrid (MAD) to Miami (MIA)
Prev: İzmir (ADB) to Berlin (SXF)

Footnotes

¹ The Westworld-inspired larp I first played early last year.

² I’m mostly at a point where days I used six months ago are rolling off as days I’m spending are rolling on, so I arrived on the 16^th with 20 days left and I’ll be leaving on the 27^th with 16 days left.

³ If you enjoy sewing costumes, the calculations change here, obviously. I’m not exactly in a position to do that, though.

⁴ Very generous and understanding friends, I feel the need to point out.

⁵ Do black frock coats ever go out of fashion? I hope not.

⁶ Which means I’ll be dragging these trousers and vest to the West Coast and back, but c’est la guerre.