So many days on vacation and so many experiences potentially lost to the fog of being busy all the time. But here I am to write these posts letting us account for each day covering the important moments. Maybe, like Jutta, we all suffer from a kind of dementia where the new information coming in takes precedence as we try to figure out how to deal with the new day. If yesterday was packed with things relatively mundane, why put importance on them and elevate them into long-term memory? But when we can return to even a fragment of the minutiae, it often happens that a flood of impressions arrives with the hint. We’ve seen with Jutta how an old photograph or piece of music aloft forgotten memories, how will this work when blogs with hundreds or thousands of photographs along with the text accompanying them can bring context and intense reminders to people?
Our lunches with Jutta are never brief affairs, as we typically end up spending between two and three hours camping out at our table. This being Germany, nobody cares how long a customer occupies their place in the restaurant as it doesn’t affect a tip when everyone is earning an hourly wage that isn’t dependent on our largess. There are differences in service for sure, but one difference I don’t miss over here is the server absolutely ignoring you once you’ve settled your bill. So, we just sit in the sun, take our time, order more water, Coke, or coffee, and enjoy chatting. By the way, the talk rarely takes aim at the weather other than maybe the briefest of observations regarding the current moment. Sports and TV are also off the plate unless the ladies are talking about a documentary or something from the news. We do talk a lot about family, travel, and the people we are watching.
After three hours on the first course, it’s time for ice cream, more coffee, and mineral water over at a corner Eis Cafe (ice cream parlor). I think we only spent about 90 minutes here before starting the slow walk back to the assisted living center. While Jutta has greater mobility with a walker, she’s still nearly as slow as any sloth or snail, moving nearly imperceptibly, requiring nearly 30 minutes to get her somewhere that it would take anyone else maybe 5 minutes to walk. Writing this feels like an exaggeration, but I’ve made the walk of 100 meters (300 feet) to the Main River and 260 meters (850 feet) to the restaurant we visit so many times that I have a pretty good sense of the average to get between places.
And with that, it’s time to make the walk back to the facility, passing this bear we pass nearly every day we’re in Frankfurt.
That giant teddy bear has a friend nearby who, weather allowing, is blowing bubbles non-stop.
We are dropping off Jutta back in her room, where, in one relatively small room, she’s hanging on to the mementos that bring her joy. From the photobooks I put together of some of her travels to the map of Indigenous peoples across America, including the Navajo rug, she wove herself on one of her many visits. There’s some furniture she cherishes, along with various photos of Stephanie, Klaus, and Katharina, just enough to warm her heart that her family is out there, hopefully doing well.
With the portable toilet that’s been ever-present on the right side of the street now gone, I just had to take one more photo of this sight. We walk by so often, and both love how the old-fashioned bridge connects the two sides of government offices that occupy this area.
Time for shopping now instead of waiting until the last day as we usually do. The first stop was at Blutsgeschwister for a bag to replace our worn toiletry bag and a new umbrella, both with the same gnome design.
Well, this is embarrassing. It’s December 2023, and I’m moving through a bunch of old posts, rechecking them for grammar mistakes and links that have died, when I discovered something wrong with this post. That part of what’s wrong is that from the bag above, there was some missing text, and all of the subsequent photos and text from here down. The photos had been uploaded, meaning that there was text here at one time, but inexplicably, it’s all missing. I searched for cached versions and checked Archive.org, all to no avail. I do know that we were in MyZeil near Hauptwache with Caroline searching for a perfume that was beguiling her as she smelled it on the streets as people walked by.
I’d know these clothes anywhere; we could only have been shopping at Gudrun Sjödén.
The guy who worked here at Red Wing Shoes was incredibly helpful in doing a thorough measuring of Caroline’s feet, both of them. Unfortunately, they didn’t have her size of the Iron Ranger boot in stock and couldn’t have it in before we were to leave Germany, but the service was amazing nonetheless.
My memory is thin here, but the photo was likely chosen as I had something positive to say about the festive nature of this busker ensemble that was getting their groove on here in the main shopping area.
No photos of dinner, family, or anything else followed this billboard in the subway advertising cigarettes. While it’s tragic that we apparently lost about six hours of a day on vacation in Germany, in the scheme of things, it’s nothing as our documenting of over a thousand other travel days is a treasure trove of otherwise forgotten moments.