On the 36th floor of a tower of a Radisson 'Bluh!' in Lyon, with views over the city. I plan to leave my curtains open tonight so that I can awake to sunshine in the morning. The sign on the door says this hotel room goes for 245 euros a night. All the same, it's a funny mix of really fancy and incredibly run-down. I can see weird liquid stains on the wall (on further inspection I think it is red wine), and the closet clearly hasn't been remodeled since the hotel was built in the early '70s. The doors don't close properly, the paint is all scuffed up. But the desk console is new within the last ten years, probably, and the bed is outfitted as fancy beds are in this kind of hotel, with a simple white duvet cover over the bedspread. And out my window is this:
Turned out that room wasn't so good for sleeping. Uncomfortable bed, hard flat pillows. But, here's what I saw in the early morning hours:
And then the next sunset. Couldn't help but document. Not often I find myself in Europe's tallest hotel.
We are in a more modest hotel tonight, and the window opens, and I'm expecting a good sleep. Tour is funny. I won't want to do it forever. I feel like I'm collecting experiences for the next part of my life, which will have a smaller radius of activity. At least geographically. I like it though, now. Still working it out. What to bring, how many pairs of pants, what kinds of snacks. (Best not to talk or even think of food right now.)
*****
What a funny random life I'm living! Tonight in Perpignan, in an Adagio apartment-hotel, several of us bought food and cooked for each other, and a few others, the orchestra's English-speakers. Finally, a lovely in-house meal. The main street here has palm trees. Palm trees! And on the train, out the window, I saw flamingos. In the wild. Where am I! And to think, not ten days ago I was in Scandinavia, doing whatever one does there. Riding a bike. Cooking at home. Drinking beer. Wine in France, yes, can be extremely cheap. Not to mention the heaps of produce we bought for 5.50 euros. Where am I? Is it weird that I still feel that way? Today on the bus I happened to be sitting behind our Venezuelan percussionist, who was watching clips from the World Series. GO GIANTS!!! I got so excited. Why am I so far away? From everything? I don't know. It's just like this. Well, good night, Perpignan. Sleep well.
*****
We are back in Basel, bass and I. Cold, clear weather. Done with traveling, and traveling mishaps, for a few days at least. The Giants swept the World Series. I made some colorful soup to celebrate since I couldn't be part of the riots. This morning I relinquished my Swiss residency permit. Not without a touch of sadness. The man who deregistered me was the same one with whom I registered, nearly three years ago. I mentioned this, he confirmed, and said he was pleased to be able to close the circle of my time here. At my going away party, my first roommate, Celine, made the same comment -- she had been at the airport to pick me up when I first arrived. Recurrence of circular awareness by native Swiss people. A key to their culture? I'll tell you what is a key, it's called yogurt, and it is so incredibly delicious here.
But maybe these snapshots are not sufficient. It hasn't been clear how to rally a sufficient summing up into writing. I live in Copenhagen, actually called København, a port town. From certain vantage points you can see giant cruise ships in the harbor. I haven't been yet to see the Little Mermaid. One of the main streets is named after H. C. Andersen, the first two letters of which are pronounced similarly to Jose. (Latinos in Denmark! But not enough to make a proper taco.) It is often very windy. It often rains, just a little. I live with my husband in an apartment which we own, on the top floor of our building. We are furnishing it simply, and trying to make good decisions. It is very sunny in the morning, when it is sunny. I noticed, in the first month and a half, how drastically the light changes day to day. In Oakland I was able to tell the time by the position of sunlight on the wall in front of my bed. All attempts in Copenhagen were confusing at best. Soon, I hear, it will be very dark for much of the day. And work? Yes, it is beginning to happen. The city has three professional orchestras, plus the opera. Malmö, just across the bridge in Sweden, has an opera and an orchestra, for which a new hall is being built. I've had a week of work with Andrew's orchestra, and one in Helsingborg, the Swedish just-across-the-water from Helsingør, just a bit north of us, maybe by an hour. Also, I continue to work in middle Europe. Now, for instance. I am in Basel. Cold, clear Basel, preceded by ten days in France, in a variety of climatic conditions. Imagine, packing a bag for three and half weeks in which the weather would range from 65 and humid, to 28 and snowing. I did ok, at least so far. Mostly I don't have to travel with both suitcase and bass. But sometimes. Although I repeated to myself something I'd overheard once, about the cold not being related to catching a cold, two hours in freezing weather waiting for a delayed train doesn't seem to have done me any good. I am sipping homemade ginger tea and looking forward to my hearty colorful soup later. Also two baths in two days. Making up for the bathroom situation back home.
In France it is very easy for me to not get proper food to eat, being a vegetarian (though, admittedly, I did see an ad in the metro for a sort of veggie burger, so maybe things are changing?) and after a week of miserably eating large portions of bad food, or small portions of not much at all, I was extremely hungry. I ate a few bites of chicken off a friend's plate, out of desperation. And then I decided to be content with less, and specifically not to overeat, even if I wasn't sure when the next meal would be. Oddly, this helped me to be less hungry.
One of my closest friends in Basel is quite pregnant. I will go to see them tonight, and bring over that colorful celebratory soup. We have spent a lot of evenings together, over the two years of our friendship, watching movies and cooking and drinking wine. Sometimes three or four times a week I'd be over at their house on Oetlingerstrasse. Before long, there will be one more of them, maybe not for the wine drinking but for all the rest of it.
And language? How funny to be back in Basel, surrounded by Schweizer Deutsch (Shveetze Dootch!) while preparing to begin to think about learning Danish. I'm reading a book written by a linguist, about the ways in which differences in language are reflections of differences between cultures, and have noticed so far the appearance of many a prominent Danish linguist. From a country of 5 million on a good day, it seems surprising to have such a wealth of language studies but maybe it has to do with the silent letters (33%!) hiding among, to the American ear, a host of very foreign sounds. Which reminds me of something else, a German friend of mine was watching television with his grandmother, and someone from the US was interviewed. The grandmother asked, 'Do they really speak like that? RruRruRru!' Ha. Yes. We do.
You know, in Denmark we have these really serious windows that do a decent job of keeping the heat in, despite their size. But these old Basel windows, while charming, aren't quite cutting it. Though they're not even comparable to the windows at Monte Vista, rattling in their frames as the wind blew through. One of them even had a tiny bullet hole (the work of a BB gun?). Good old Oakland.
What else? A beautiful morning in Lucerne,
delicious Korean food (& kimchi!) cooked by my friend ZY,
a burrito in Dublin,
colleagues in Dresden's Frauenkirche,
winter out the train window,
and boy, aren't those long shadows for 3 o'clock??
