DAY 279: There was an American sitcom in the 1980s called Perfect Strangers about the mishaps of an American in Chicago named Larry who took in his estranged Mediterranean sheepherding cousin named Balki who suddenly appeared on his doorstep one day. In 1989, Perfect Strangers went into daytime syndication so that teens on their summer vacation like me had something to watch in between morning game shows and afternoon cartoons.

I still remember the first day it came on WABC Channel 7 New York at noon, when they played the pilot episode where Balki shows up at the doorstep of his Cousin Larry's apartment -- not because it was a rerun of the origin of popular 80s catch phrase "Don't be ridiculous" (said in thick, Greek-like Meeposian accent) -- but because halfway into the episode the doorbell rang. On my doorstep were two guys, one named Hans-Georg who was claiming to be my cousin from Germany.

Ha ha ha. What is this, TV's Bloopers and Practical Jokes or something?

Hans-Georg and his friend Rainer said they were traveling cross-country through the States from New York to L.A. and were looking for some trustworthy family assistance since they had missed their tour bus.

Don't be ridiculous.

I called my mother at the office to tell her the strange turn of events of my usually lazy summer days. "Oh, that's Hans-Georg!" she said over the phone. He was the son of my mother's Filipino cousin Tony, who had moved to Germany, got married and started a family with a southwestern German woman named Ursula in the 1960s.

Wow, we have German relatives? I thought. When your ancestry comes from a Third World Catholic country, it's hard to keep track of relatives. I swear I needed five times more room than other students in my class when we had to draw a family tree.

My mother came home and formally introduced the two of us estranged second cousins, and so, it was the first time I met Hans-Georg in my memory -- although my mom had a picture of the two of us together as young children. Three years later after that summer in 1989, I had gone to Germany to visit him and his brother and parents. Seven years later he came to visit in the States, this time with a wife and a two-year-old daughter.

It was "my turn" to visit, not to Germany, but to his new home in Luxembourg, the tiny country about the size of Rhode Island sandwiched in between Germany, Belgium and France. With my iBook and first class Eurail Pass I hopped on the early InterCity Express from Berlin to a stopover in Köln (known in English as Cologne), home of Germany's oldest Gothic cathedral and birthplace of supermodel Heidi Klum, and proceeded by the Mossel River another three hours across the border and into Luxembourg City. I was in the head car in first class and I saw Hans-Georg and family whiz by waiting for me in the middle second-class section of the train.

"He's not going to be in first class," Hans-Georg's wife Tatjana told him. But sure enough, a scruffy looking Filipino-American in desperate need of a shave and a haircut came walking down the platform from the head car.

"Hello!" I said as I approached them. They welcomed me to their home country and asked me about my ride in. "Great," I said. "I think the standard Eurail Pass for people over twenty-six is first class."

"Is that a joke?" Hans-Georg asked. He thought I was being ridiculous.

"That's what they gave me."

Next to Hans-Georg and Tatjana was their now seven-year-old daughter Deborah, who had sprouted like a tree since last I saw her as a toddler. I don't think she remembered meeting me when she was younger, and so, there I was before her, a new face of her father's father's cousins' son. I think that means I am her second cousin once removed, or third cousin, or great second cousin or something like that -- but to make things simple we were "cousins" nonetheless.

LUXEMBOURG CITY, LUXEMBOURG'S CAPITAL, isn't a big city at all. With a population of just 84,000, it's more like Luxembourg Town. In the short ten-minute drive across town, I noticed that most of the signs were in French.

"Some people speak only French, some German," Tatjana told me (in English). "Every day you wonder what language to speak." A country populated with mostly German or French ex-pats, each one usually started conversation in their home tongue and switched if it didn't match the other party -- unless they spoke Luxembourgish, a "low" dialect of German with some French influence.

"Moyen!" Deborah said. Saying "hello" was her way of showing off her Luxembourgish. Apparently it wasn't taking long for her to accept me as family. Soon it was me who was on her doorstep, looking for a place to crash.

The apartment was a nice little place, spacious enough for the family of three, with its roomy living room. In the dining room I had a home cooked meal -- the first I'd had in a long time -- over glasses of fine Luxembourg wine and conversations with Hans-Georg and Tatjana. Deborah, who was too tired to even finish her food, went to bed in her parents' room relatively early.

That night I slept in Deborah's room (picture above). Like Cousin Larry on Perfect Strangers, she had given it up the comforts of her own space for a vagrant cousin that had come to her doorstep -- a real life perfect stranger. Everything had come full circle -- and I didn't even have a catch phrase.