Saturday 18th of February, 2006
a final tour of the House
8:20 - Get up. Very groggy.
8:30 - Sitting.
9:15 - Breakfast.
In the morning I take a lot of photographs around the house - in the back garden, on the balcony and up the stairs. I suspect that very few will be useable.
The Registrar helps me book a room for H and I in Mendoza before the course - the Hotel Argentino on Plaza Independencia. Standard or Executive? Standard.
Preparing lunch, for the last time in this Kitchen. It's a gift to be able to do something conscious of the fact that it's the last time you will do it. Throughout the day, but particularly this morning, I get echoes of the first time I visited the House, the first time I swept the kitchen floor, cooked a meal and so forth. In those days we ate in the kitchen, and the House moved to the Dining Room shortly after I went back to England.
After Lunch, more photos including some taken outside and down the road. A couple of snaps of Bambule.
I make a final tour of the House.
Ignacio and Jacek depart for the Stoschstrasse, so I decide to leave before tea-time, although it ends up being at about 16:15.
Mariana and Sylvain see me off and I walk to the station, catching a train to Lžbeck without any problems. At Lžbeck I walk into town along the route of the number 6 bus and have a pizza at supposedly Italian place - but do Stagione pizzas normally have quartered boiled eggs on the top? Still, the place is very busy and it's quite good of them to fit me in (I'd passed a number of places I didn't especially want to go into, and I'm not sure why this overstuffed pizzeria called to me, exactly). After eating I catch a bus to the airport and have a coffee in the cafeteria there before checking in and passing through to the other side.
I buy some Niederegger marzipan and Milka chocolate in the duty free. The UK seems to be the only place in the world you can't get Milka chocolate.
Waiting for the plane, reading.
The flight is a little bit bumpy, but not too bad. The ladies occupying the other two seats decide that they don't want to rush to get off the plane and hang back, unaware, perhaps, that I might like to go home.
Off the plane, to passport control, then to baggage collection, then a long wait for the bus to London (there are no trains today, so I might as well catch the cheap bus, rather than the replacement-bus-that-costs-as-much-as-the-train), then tube to Waterloo and walk home from there.
Greet Haruko. Wholemeal scones, catching up and to bed very late.
