14 July The Hermitage

In the afternoon, we tackled the Hermitage. There are three things you must know about this visit:
1. It was hot
2. The Hermitage is huge
3. It was damn hot
4. The Hermitage has great art
5. It was fucking steamy I tell you
6. Only 3% of the art is on display and none of it seems well preserved so go now if you ant to see this stuff.
7. Still hot as hell

We saw some Rembrandts, Cézannes, Picassos, Monet, Da Vinci (2 of his 20 paintings) and some other great crap that if I list here I’d put in even worse order than I already did. I’m not the biggest painting guy but this shit was for real. I was impressed.

But most of the art was just hanging there on the wall. I mean there were no cords, no glass, and security was a portly old Russian woman fanning herself in the corner looking out the open window. Sunlight hit paintings, and I was certainly afraid for the heat. Apparently, a few years ago, some guy went at a Rembrandt with acid and a knife. They stopped him before he could render it utterly unsalvageable. The Russian authorities wisely put glass in front of this restored painting. But the ten other Rembrandts right next to it are completely unprotected. I could have licked it without consequence.

Ingrid and I left deeply concerned, not only for what we saw, but also for the untold treasures in some vast cellar. If this is how they treated the “best” 3%, what did they do with the rest? I can only advise you, dear reader, to hurry to St. Petersburg to see this art while it lasts.



It would be dramatic to say the sun set on us leaving St. Petersburg and rose on us in Helsinki. However, at this latitude, the sun didn’t ever fully disappear. Sure, it dipped below the horizon somewhere just before 11 and rose at probably 3, but the sky never got fully dark. You might not be able to read a book outside at 1AM, but you could certainly see a nearby island.

14 July

The next day we woke early to catch a bus to Catherine’s palace. Had I written this the day after it happened, I might have told you for sure if it was Catherine I or II. But, for now, I’ll go with II. It’s another big amazing palace with gobs of gold and Versailles imitations right and left. This one even features the Amber Room. I had never heard of it, but that hadn’t kept it from getting apparently quite famous. Anyway, if you like palace type stuff, I recommend this one. Our guide was good, the garden was pretty, etc. Blah blah. See it or don’t, but me describing it is an injustice to everyone.

One point I will pick up on, however, is the evil German soldier. Apparently he is guilty of destroying much of Europe – Peterhof and Catherine’s palace among them. I have no beef with the story of the evil German soldier except that it always seems to stop there. Why did the soldiers tear up the amazing wood floors of the palace? Well, because they were Nazis. Period. Nazis do that sort of shit.

I have uncles who were evil German soldiers so forgive me if that answer seems a bit too easy. Did the soldiers realize they were destroying expensive and beautiful art? Were they ordered to? Were they freezing? Were they starving? I guess we don’t care. They were Nazi soldiers doing what Nazi soldiers do.

It’s a huge pity all that stuff was destroyed. And there is no doubt who is responsible. But the discourse is a bit odd. When we got to Kiel, the shore excursion director spoke about how so much of the medieval part of town had been destroyed by the RAF. It was a pity, but he couched it in terms of it being the German’s fault for building a fleet there. Had they not, of course, the Brits would not have been compelled to bomb it to smithereens.

In this Allied Good Guys and Axis Bad Guys story, however, the main points get lost. The plain fact is that war sucks. It demolishes history, art and culture, in addition to human lives. I care far less about the agent doing the demolishing. Generally those who are strong and want something from the weak, take it. This can mean theft, rape, murder, war and genocide. This is the human problem.

Moreover, when we talk about war between nations, we are not seeing the larger forces at work. Germany and Britain and Russia didn’t fight. The elite from each of those countries forced (at gunpoint or through brainwashing) the average man to fight and the average woman to clean up the mess. These are the people who miss their beautiful medieval town center. I’d say they’d miss their intricate palaces, but I doubt most Russians ever saw those from the inside anyway.

After we finished our tour of Catherine’s palace, we were treated to a lovely chicken supper. They sat our boatload of hundreds of Americans in a small dining room and began serving us. Unfortunately the excellent service and sumptuous food was entirely upstaged by the heat. It was noontime and the temperature outside was nearing 40. Inside we had a couple hundred bodies in a small room with windows nailed shut (presumably against the cold) and no air conditioning. Doing no more than moving their forks to their mouths, people were dripping with sweat. I don’t use that phrase lightly. Everyone at our table had splotches of sweat on their shirts and beads on their foreheads, which would occasionally run down their faces and onto the table or their laps. At some point you just had to laugh and stop worrying about it.

13 July

(written 8 August)

I last left you, gentle reader, somewhere in the Baltic between Tallinn and Saint Petersburg. This episode will be composed along the lapping shore of Lago Maggiore. I exaggerate; I am really 2 km from said lapping shore. Actually, I am in the Locarno Youth Hostel, vaguely responsible for 25 American college students. Two little girls are on the lawn below, counting how many consecutive passes they can make with a – with one of those things you hit with a skinny racquet and it’s shaped like a cone with a rubber tip and fake feathers. Badminton?

Anyway, I digress. Get used to it. To catch you up I need to go back about three weeks. When one travels, as I have remarked often before, time somehow seems to slow. It seemed much longer than three weeks ago. I think this conflation of time and space in the form of travel is related to the Aboriginal concept of Songlines but don’t press me for elaboration on that connection. I sing in the car.

St. Petersburg was hot. Unfortunately that’s the first and last thing anyone can say about it. There are one trick ponies, there are single-issue voters. Our sojourn in St. Petersrburg was a one-adjective stay. It reached 40 degrees. That’s over 100 Fahrenheit. It usually only shoots up to about 22-24 in the summer. That fact, combined with a shitty economy, means, you guessed it: no air conditioning. Plus, this is no airy fairy loosey goosey California dry heat. This is the real McCoyshavic.

Regardless, we had a great couple days in St. Petersburg. The first day featured the fore-referenced S- trip to Peterhof, Peter the Great’s palace. We shoved all my mother’s charges into steamy busses and sat in traffic. St. Petersburg is much like how I left it in 1990, but with some selective polishing. The tourist areas are spruced up but the vast majority of the city is soot-covered grey Leninist apartment buildings. I appreciate Lenin’s attempt to provide adequate housing for all people, but the aesthetic consequences are appalling. Ironically, the tourist attractions are all vestiges of everything pre- and un-Communist: churches and palaces. It didn’t seem like anyone had dolled up a grey block building for clumsy octogenarian American tourists to sample the spectular wonders of the proletariat.

Peterhof is a big palace with lots of gold shit and paintings in it. It’s nice. I recommend it. You have to put hospital slippers over your shoes so as to not mar the ornate wood floors. Our guide had given us all short-range radios, but, as I was in charge of our busload, I had to walk in back and make sure no one got left behind. Not only did I fall often out of range, I was constantly holding back the onrushing tide of a massive Korean tourist group. They could have kicked our group’s ass and I think they might have wanted to.

Nevertheless, we escaped the amber mirrors and Dutch porcelain ovens of the stuffy halls out into the stifling sunshine where we had a few minutes to admire the fountains, which, supposedly, somehow run on gravity. And I am talking about the type that squirt up in the air. I got too ambitious and went all the way to the Baltic shore and had to sweat profusely to get back to the bus.

Ingrid joined our bus for the return and got enmeshed in a conversation with our biggest complainer. I fell asleep in the muggy heat and traffic stench.

About 45 minutes after we got back to the ship, we were due on another bus to take us back into town. Not only were we aware of this, we had made all 63 charges aware of this. We had some minor Lido lunch artifacts with us, but I wanted more so I tried to dart back aboard. Unfortunately, as I was immigrating back on to the ship, and I do mean waiting in line to be examined by a customs official, I remembered that Ingrid had my ticket to the next trip and she was lounging back in the waiting room, legally in Russia. Although only having one shore excursion under my belt, I correctly surmised that without this ticket, I would not get a landing card nor bus ticket back on the Eurodamm. I asked the stiff customs officer (I guess since she’s Russian that’s redundant to anyone who remembers Elton John’s Nikita video from 1986) if I need another landing card to re-enter Russia in 30 minutes. Of course I did and she wanted the one I had with me. Thinking quickly, I said I wanted to not immigrate but to remain in Russia. I was tempted to use the word “defect” but this tough chick had no sense of humor. She told me I had to now embark on the ship. I knew this would mean missing the next shore excursion so I grabbed my passport out of her hand and pushed back against the line. The Americans in line, being proponents of vast personal space, let me through despite the customs officer’s protestations. But I dodged away quickly and was free! Back in the USSR! Well, the waiting room anyway. I quietly and humbly finished my pesto wrap from lunch.

For the evening they bussed us to a big theater in the middle of town. The newcomers from the ship on the bus were clean and fresh smelling in the evening musty air while Ingrid and I stank like we had just crossed the Sahara. It was fun. The 15-20 busses from the 5-7 cruise ships pulled up to the theater and channeled us in like cattle. An accordion player pandered to the audience by playing “America the Beautiful” and “The Saints Go Marching In.” I don’t think his ploy worked.

We sat in the auditorium for about an hour before the performance started. As the wooden seats filled up, the air got warmer and thicker, eventually disappearing altogether. The thermodynamics were well suited to St. Petersburg 360 days of the year, just not that night. I eventually passed out – during the slow number right after the Cossack dancing.

The show was actually quite good. They sang and danced and played “folk” music. It might have been from the Hit Parade for all I know, but it sounded authentic to me. I’m sure the Viking-Pilgrim lady was convinced anyway. The costumes were resplendid in millions of colors and the songs were catchy and fun. I fell asleep during the ballads. They were great but I had run out of oxygen and needed something kinetic to keep me alive.

Perhaps not so obviously, the great convenience, indeed, the principle behind cruise ships, is that my same bed was waiting for me that night. The same bed that greeted me after the Warnemünde victory evening and where I slept after exploring Tallinn. Everything was where I left it, save slight alterations made by Ron and Yus, the stateroom stewards. They might have added a piece of chocolate and twisted a towel into a peacock or monkey for some aesthetic frivolity.

12 July 2010

A cruise is a strange event. The logic is clear: a floating hotel where your stateroom can be in seven European cities in ten days. The food is plentiful, the entertainment abounds, and nearly every day you have a new port to explore. Maybe you can even befriend the Smiths from Des Moines over a Scrabble game.

Yet the socio-political ramifications of this septuagenarian Shangri-la are staggering. The amount of water, electricity, gas and people-power consumed are beyond reckoning. The opulent and corpulent Americans boss around the grinning obsequious crew from Indonesia.

Today my mother and I explored the old town of Tallinn. We sat in the shade of the City Hall and watched an international folk music and dancing competition. An Asian-American woman sat next to us and carefully mouthed to us, “Do you speak English?” I told her we came off the same ship as she did. Tallinn isn’t very big and the ship holds 2000 people. Plus, it’s not real hard to spot an American tourist, especially one of Asian descent. She was shocked I knew. She asked what bus we came in on and we told her we walked. “Oh my God, how did you find your way so far?” she gasped. Well, you could see the old town from the ship and it was a twenty minute walk. Sensing we were experts, she pushed things up a notch. She pointed to some of the folk dancers waiting for their turn to take the stage. “Don’t you think it’s warm for these people to dress like that?” I carefully explained to her that these were folk dancers and that tomorrow they will be dressed much like us. She nodded thoughtfully. “Are these what you call Vikings?” My mother later told me I did a stoic job of keeping a straight face. “No, I think they were a bit earlier and not quite from here.” She nodded again. “I see, so more like pilgrims, then?” My mind raced through all the possible interpretations of that word and I figured the simplest answer was to just agree. She nodded again, clearly edified by our interaction, and wandered off into the crowd with her husband.


People have asked me why I would be ashamed to be an American. If she, or the sparring couples last night at the formal dinner bragging about how many cruises they’ve been on to places like CanneS, were the only American ignoramae other than our former President, I might not feel so strongly. But this exchange in the shade of the Tallinn City Hall was merely emblematic of a much deeper darkness in the aging Empire.

Ingrid and I have been working hard as the representatives of her travel consortium. In fact, Ingrid is haggling with Onshore Excursions on the phone at the moment. We are “responsible” for some 68 people who have booked though a S- travel agency. S- is a consortium of agencies that have come together to increase their collective buying power. Our job has included running around the ship the first day, greeting all our people. It may not sound like much, but you try running up and down a 2000 person cruise ship, locating some 30 staterooms. It took us two hours, and some major patience as a lot of people had a lot of complaining they needed to do. It’s fun to see Ingrid in her professional capacity, assuaging clients’ concerns, fielding questions and listening patiently to how cruise lines discriminate against single people because they have to “pay twice as much per room.” Hmmmm.

Yesterday we hosted a cocktail party where we had to greet people by name, field questions, and explain the free S- tour tomorrow. Of course, I also had the honor of distributing the invitations room by room to said party. But my mother explains the logistics. We are precariously close to having earned this “free” cruise.

Two days ago we were in Warnemünde, which is a German Baltic sea resort. I have heard of such places all my life, but to finally see one was something special. Especially on a Saturday in July during a heatwave – it must have been about 32. It’s fair to say I saw Warnemünde in full swing. The beach was packed, the promenades were full. But it was great to have an afternoon in Germany, especially this particular Saturday. For at 20.30 the third place game between Germany and Uruguay started. After a leisurely supper on the harbor, reveling in my favorite food and beer, I had asked a few locals where I should watch the game. I found my place at the bar and ordered a hefeweizen. Customers greeted the owner informally and by name. Life was good.

I’d never watched a German World Cup final (not qualification) game in public in Germany before. I had never really been surrounded by such partisan fans before. When we, and it was “we,” scored the first goal, the tiny seaside resort town erupted. Die Mannschaft was playing aggressive, attractive football, and everyone in the world knew it. When Uruguay equalized, the mood dampened, but we were still optimistic. A few minutes before half time I had to run for the bus to take me to the ship. The streets, which, 45 minutes before had been almost too crowded to walk, were now nearly empty. Third place game or not, it mattered.

It was the same bus driver who had driven us into town. I had chatted quite a bit with him before. He didn’t speak English and had been a bit lonely driving these ship passengers back and forth all day. We talked about how much Warnemünde/Rostock had changed since the reunification in the last twenty years.

Once the bus pulled up to the ship, I heartily shook hands with my new friend and ran to the ship. The harbor security guys knew who I was and why I was running. I raced right into the second half onboard the Eurodamm. The fans were mostly the non-American minorities onboard, watching the BBC via satellite. The BBC somehow erased the score and time that the South Africans put on the screen. So I was shocked when the people next to me told me it was 2-2.

As is typical of a “neutral” audience, they were strongly anti-German. It seemed a bit annoying since Germany has played some of the most attractive football of the Cup and we were in Germany. But, the game was exciting and colorful on both sides, and, of course, I was pleased with the result. Maybe I’d been a bit more pleased had I been able to stay in that little bar in Warnemünde.

19 Marzo

Here are some pictures from last fall when both my father and Vikas were here.

Thursday, as everyone knows, was St. Joseph’s Day, or some type of fathers’ day. No one seems quite clear on who Saint Joseph was. Maybe he was Mary’s husband, the guy who toted baby Jesus around, but no one is quite sure he was a saint. He might have just been a guy with a donkey whose wife was pregnant. Anyway, what’s relevant is that all the stores were closed and no one was working. This gave me time to assess what needs to be done, and tackle some minor gardening. The list of things to do is as long as it was in October, but the magnitude of work has decreased. Now, instead of replacing a bathtub with a shower cabin, I need to install a towelrack. Things are slowly moving forward now that I have a handle on what needs to happen. I even managed to give Luciano a small bath. Somehow a baby palm lost many of its fronds. Coincidentally, these fronds face away from the street where they could be easily seen. This is good for me as this palm will be a huge pain in about fifteen years.

18 Marzo

If you can spot the Matterhorn and Interlaken from these pictures I took while flying over the Alps on Tuesday, then you are a Schweitzerkenner or Connoisseur de Suisse - I'll get back to you on the Italian version of that.

On Marianne’s suggestion, I went to the Comune first thing in the morning. It was a bit of a risky move, but I thought it worth taking. It turns out that Vikas and I are registered with the land registry as of 13 March! In a mere 19 months after committing to buying La Perla, it is now legally registered in our names. There is a title/escrow attorney in Bellinzona I can recommend against without reservation.

The official at the Comune (which is sort of like a town hall) reminded me that they wanted a report on what work we have conducted at La Perla. Then they need to come by to see if we did anything that would have required a permit. Of course I had been asking all the workers if any permit was required and they had all said no – even those whom ultimately I didn’t chose to have do work here. Luckily the Comune guy is not as high strung as many European bureaucrats can be. In fact, he didn’t seem to notice that all that work was done while we clearly before the property was officially registered to us.

So now I was set to get my long-coveted white license plate. As you may recall, if one has residence, one can obtain a white license plate. If one if an interloper with a short term visa (permesso de soggiorno or Aufenhaltsbewilligung), one will receive a plate with a suspicion-provoking red stripe. These turn out to be large liabilities when entering Switzerland, especially with a darker-skinned person in the car. The only trouble was that my grey card (pink slip car title or deed) was in Luciano. Now Hannes and I had put the battery back in Luciano on Tuesday. However, I had asked Hannes to close the garage partly because I have heard one can get ticketed for having a car visible without a license plate. The fact that the car is parked in my garage is somehow irrelevant. I don’t ask questions anymore, I do as I am told. The trouble is that Hannes had mostly closed the garage door and when I tried to open it, I wound up accidentally locking the heavy door. It turns out that I didn’t have the key. My father’s notes (he was keymaster) indicate that only two keys exist. And Hannes had one and was across the lake working on another job. I gambled M&W had the other so I headed over there.

I had barely said hi to Wälle and he wanted to know my potential status with the DMV, which, as you may guess, has at least three names here, none of them being DMV. I think he gets a perverse thrill out of helping me navigate Swiss bureaucracy. With glee he looked up the name of my insurance guy and gave him a call. Signor Scesa said I needed to get a permesso B or F. According to him, if I went back to Comune, they could tell me for which permesso I was eligible and then he could send the relevant insurance information to the DMV. If this sounds suspiciously easy, let me remind you that I have done this four times now with many of the same characters, and your suspicions are prescient. We had some coffee (I watched) with Diego and Nicki and M&W’s houseguest (not sure what her name is), and I hoofed it back to the Comune.

They were a little less sure of what to do with me this time. They said I was fine to get a permesso B (the better one) if I filled out the form, which, in typically Ticinese fashion, seemed obsessively curious about my genealogy. They are more interested in when and where my parents were born and what religion I was than in some sort of social security number. But, they also told me, I need to register with the foreigner police in Locarno as they were the only ones who could really offer me the permesso B. I knew, however, from Wälle that they take several weeks to process their applications. I called Signor Scesa when I got home to report this to him and he said that in this case (which would have seemed immanently predictable – at least to Wälle), I might as well get the old plates with the red stripe. I agreed bearing the scarlet letter would be better than waiting weeks to be able to drive.

But I jump too far forward. As I came home I got into an appreciation session with Signor Rocca, the painter. He drags me around the house and points out bits of his work that were especially difficult. He launches into a long and passionate explanation of what he did, about 10% of which I understand as he gets very technical and then he emphatically asks me to agree with what good work he’s done. And, as far as I can tell, he’s done well; the house looks great!

This session, however, was interrupted by my appointment with Signor Berri, the tree-cutter. Berri explained to me that he was only able to cut the top five braches because that was all Peppino would allow. So that’s what they were jabbering about in Italian last October! I wanted about a 75% tree reduction and I got about a 15% reduction. The view from the top story is improved (at the moment, but remember that spring has yet to spring here), but his efforts don’t impact the other two floors at all. Moreover, by August, the tree will be exactly as big as it was last August – by Berri’s own admission. Berri did, however, outline two remedies. He suggested that at the end of this year he could trim it again and maybe aim for some additional branches. Moreover, he recommended approaching Peppino’s nephew, whom I think I recall M&W referring to, in a not-so-cute way, as a “lunetico.”

Fortunately, it turned out that one of the keys that Wälle gave back to me was, indeed, the garage key, so I was able to save the grey card. After lunch with Marianne and house guest, I borrowed Marianne’s car to go visit the DMV. By now the sun had really warmed up and it was about 23 degrees or 73 F. It’s a bit colder here at night, but otherwise much better weather than SF. I haven’t seen any clouds yet, but there is a lot of snow in the mountains. In fact, from where I sit to write this I can watch a couple ski lifts across the lake while the palms here sway in the tropical spring breeze. After a 45 minute wait, which is the longest I have ever had there, I was able to run out of the DMV with new license plates in hand!

Upon returning her car to Marianne, we started talking about the palm tree and she stood up from their card game and announced to me and house guest that we should go to the biological park. House guest (surprisingly) and I agreed emphatically. Despite Marianne saying that they always take guests to the biological park, they had never taken me there in my 19 year history with Gambarogno. It really is worth seeing. So, this guy named Eisenhut bought a ton of land just downhill from Piazzogna and made it into a biological preserve/nursery. There are trails crisscrossing the hillside with plants from all over the world, all meticulously adorned with signs naming the plants. There are vast greenhouses that would make my grandfather envious, and plants of all sizes for sale. Apparently the original Eisenhut used to have the preserve open to the public and only asked for donations for upkeep. This never worked, so now his son, Otto, who runs the show, charges 5 CHF. We met with Otto and reminded him about my palms and he said he’d come by and look at them. We wandered around the preserve a bit. Many of the plants and trees are just about to burst and it was beautiful. Of course the big lake and snowy peaks in the distance didn’t hurt. We looked at all the different magnolia tress and how they were all at slightly different stages of bloom. Marianne and I speculated about how excited my mother would be to visit here next week.

When I got home I called Peppino. Marianne was very clear that I didn’t want to talk to his nephew, regardless of what Berri might think. Peppino is gone next week but we set up a time for him to visit the following week so we can talk about the land and the tree. I set up a few more meetings for next week and tried to make some progress around the house. When I finally collapsed into bed, I was pretty darn tired.

17 Marzo

I just hit play on iTiunes and it’s odd to finish the song I started “yesterday” morning as I was packing in San Francisco. The trip was relatively quick and painless actually. It took 27 hours door to door, which, taking out the time change, is only 18 hours. I even got an hour or two of sleep and they played a Woody Allen flick. The Würste I was able to liberate from the Frankfurt airport into my belly were not as good as the ones my father and I found last year, but it was good to be back in Germany, even for only a couple hours. Unlike my dad, I couldn’t down even a great hefeweizen at 10am even if it felt like 1am.

It’s bizarre to travel so far from my home and trespass through three countries, languages and cultures to wind up back home again. Everything has changed but yet I am home again.

Hannes picked me up at the airport and we had a nice chat driving home. We started discussing progress on La Perla but, by the time we hit the mountains, we had abstracted via the hypocrisies of recycling (he claimed that in his hometown near Hamburg they just threw all the recycling in the same incinerator), to the failings of the US, world economy, Angela Merkel, and Switzerland. On one hand, Swiss protectionism annoys him because they levied €1.40 in duties on him last week for picking up cement near his house in Italy and then taking it across the lake to La Perla. They made him fill out four forms only to give him the money back when he drove home that night! On the other hand, he’s sure the economic crisis will put most of our world into the hands of the Chinese. But he thinks Obama is the next Kennedy. I wasn’t able to solve these problems for him but I was glad I was able to keep up after my lack of sleep and not having spoken German in many months.

We drove up to La Perla and were greeted by Signor Rocca, painting the balconies. He was as jolly as I recalled him. He showed me how he painted each beam under the eaves and how they were difficult to paint as they went under the roof. This was en route to telling me he should get paid 2000 CHF extra for all his extra and high-quality work. I’m not sure how much he was kidding. It’s sort of like negotiating with Santa Claus.

Through this interaction I found my Italian where I left it. I still can’t really speak it, but somehow I am able to carry complete and complex conversations. I really wish I knew how it worked. Generally when I am this unsure in a language, I like to plan out sentences in advance. But here I don’t have time so I don’t even try. I called Signor Berri later in the evening to see if we could meet about the tree and the same thing happened.

Berri cut about five or six branches near the top and maybe took out 15% of the tree. It will be the same size mid-summer as it was last, and, unless you stand on the top balcony, you won’t notice a difference at all. Marianne’s dissatisfaction with the work encouraged me to hassle Berri – a task I’ll be enjoying at about 11am Wednesday (if you’d like to take part in spirit, set your alarm!) Otherwise Marianne is fine and she invited me to lunch. She also offered her car to go get my license plates.

Hannes and I combed every centimeter of the house. He really has done great work. Opening the kitchen to the living room was a move of utter genius, by which I mean it was completely plagiarized from Marianne and Wälle. (That was an inside joke to those who have read Paul’s book). Unfortunately, yet predictably, for every improvement, there are now two to four much smaller problems. My work now will be to take an inventory of these bits and generate a to do list for the next month. I’m already feeling my dad’s absence when I think of all the things I know he would handle if he were here. But I should be able to tie most of it up before Easter.

After a few hours of this micro examination of all the fabulous developments, Hannes drove me down the hill to pick up a few groceries. After he left I spent the evening unpacking all the things my father and I packed in October. They seem to have withstood the winter perfectly well in the wine cellar. It’s really amazing how much stuff I have here and I felt my ridiculously light packing in my suitcases was vindicated. I capped the evening with some sausage, pasta, beer, and a Borussia Dortmund game on TV. It’s good to be home!