Towels

Today is the day that we learned that you can grow asparagus on Mars. Honest. I am not making this up. I mean, when Uncle Beeb says it's so, it's so, right?

Mars soil supports life

Anyways, a quick update on affairs. Affairs are that I left for Italy yesterdaynight and am not returning till end of August. As a sidenote, Italy btw is incredibly hot... I am currently adjusting to temperatures of 30+ centigrades. As it stands, the bottle is my new best friend. Litteraly drowning my so called sorrows ;)
And we are talking water here...

Oh water and wine of course :) Just had a cold glass of something called 2007 Moscato d'Asti, a sweet white very fruity wine I found in the fridge of my beloved -who is not-so-happily working right now-.

Now to continue, a recap on yesterday flight-of-hell. In this post I will not mention the delay, the being latest in the last boarding group, the two persons I was squashed in the middle of and the tray table of the guy next to me. Neither will I mention the elbow battle, the teenagers behind me playing with cigaretlighters, the woman who could not do anything else then pushing my chair and the-guy-who-pretended-to-have-traveled-the-world-to-impress-his-two-ten-year-olds. Instead I will focus on, joy-of-joys the checkin line.

My dad and I arrived at the airport to find a long-long-long (did I mention long?) queue to check in. I normally check in through the web but this time, leaving for 2 months, I had to pack a suitcase and thus had to go through the normal procedure. This clearly showed the differences between me and my dad. I started remarking that next time I spend the 15 euros for priority boarding and he said that by waiting I save 15 euros. Typical :) I am still not entirely sure I wanted those 15 euros.

The queue in itself offered an endless amount of entertainment though. Most of the drones were there for holidays and carried 6 to 8 bags -for I mean a 2-3 week trip? I packed one bloody case for TWO months!- and insisted that the extra 1x1m. suitcase -you call that a case? I call that a trolly- could easily fit as handluggage onboard. The checkin clerks were not so convinced. So you have the enjoying sight of a fat sobbing woman and an annoyed husband starting to unpack bags and dumping stuff at the airport in the middle of the queue -of whom most tried desperately to act normal and pretend not to see-. We were treated on babyblue towels, pink slippers, more towels, towels, towels and night robes. The sight bordered the surreal and reminded me of Douglas Adams' Hitchikers Guide.

"A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta ... wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat ... wrap it around your head to ward off noxious fumes ... any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the Galaxy, rough it ... win through, and still know where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with."

So I fancied they were headed for some quest in a far away, distant and fearsome location -like, like growing asparagus on Mars- only to realize that that night there were only EZ flights to Milan Malpensa, London Luton and Gatwick. Of those three Milan is by far the more exotic one, and I didnt encounter them on the flight.

So at least they brought towels. To London...

In Memoriam AF

Yesterday we should have remembered the birthday of one of Holland's most famous and wellknown writers. Although she wrote only one book virtually everyone has heard of her. Her work became one of the lasting testaments of a war of which so much has been written. Lots of briliant books and so much utter crap.

Hers though is briliant.
It is briliant because it describes her daily life, her growing up, her teenage years under the most extreme circumstances

Yesterday Anne Frank would have turned 79.
We all forgot.

And that's not only because there are soccermatches going on.