Ok, finally.   

Ugly beauty: This happened on the way home from the office.  On the train, I was sitting in a compartment facing backward, aisle seat.  Diagonally opposite, in the same compartment, sat a woman by the window.  Mirror image of us, in the opposite compartment, two women.  Both women facing forward and sitting by the window had been in the train before Liestal.  The woman in the other compartment was of considerable beauty.  Then, a bunch of children came through, talking, erring around the carriage.  The lady got restless.  A mother sat down directly opposite me – I doubt she was connected with the school class that walked out into the next carriage.  Her daughter didn’t sit on a seat, but on the baggage rack.  The lady got huffy.  The daughter made noises, then expressed fear as we entered the tunnel, and it was then that I realized she must have some developmental retardation.  That didn’t mean she was dumb, though: she tricked her mother out of her seat by saying she had to go to the restroom, then changing her mind and sitting down in her mother’s seat.  Her mother asked the lady if the seat next to her was available, to which the lady replied yes, and removed her bags from it with an audible huff of exasperation.  The mother asked if something was wrong, which the lady denied; she proceeded to furiously send out text messages on her phone.  The mother ignored it and spent the rest of the short ride playing with her daughter across the aisle.  Then, in Basel, the mother and daughter moved toward the stair leading down first, but the daughter apparently was hesitant to step on down and waited to let a number of other people pass.  The lady, standing between me and the mother, turned around, her face twisted in disgust, and walked past me to the other exit via the other carriage with the words, “Die isch doch nid ganz bache.”  It seemed to me at that moment that there is no blacker emotion in the human heart than disgust for another human.  I don’t think I’ve ever so clearly seen how someone apparently beautiful can be ugly. 

The annulled itinerary and the exit row: I arrived at the Zurich airport in time to check in and stood in the business queue, one of the perks of being a frequent flyer.  The lady at the counter took my ticket and passport, entered everything into the system, and then informed me that my flight had been annulled on June 4th, along with all the subsequent flights of this trip.  She said that Swiss couldn’t do anything, even though it was a Swiss flight, because it was booked through Lufthansa, but she wasn’t too certain they’d be able to help either, and with those encouraging words she sent me over to the Lufthansa ticket counter.  There, Mrs. Daniela Ghirlandi typed away at her terminal and somehow managed to reinstate everything and got me on the waiting list for my flight, which we found out at the Swiss counter was two overbooked in economy but with two free seats in business and five in first.  So, I headed to the gate with a slim hope of a business class seat or perhaps even better.  Unfortunately, some other flights were late and seats opened up in economy, but fortunately, I got 30J, aisle seat, exit row, more leg room than I’d ever want, and a friendly flight attendant to chat with on takeoff and landing. 

Die Herbstzeitlosen: This was a Swiss movie I saw on the flight, mostly cute and entertaining, but with some big plot holes.  Then I fell asleep. 

Raskolnikov (and bifstek s kartofelom): I read Crime and Punishment on the train ride and while waiting, and made some nice progress.  One of the characters, Svidrigailov, at one point is described as eating a beefsteak with potatoes, which is one of my catchphrases from my long gone Russian class, because it illustrates the use of the instrumental case (hence s kartofelom).  And it’s actually a Dostoyevsky catchphrase!  How cool.  Note to German learners: there are six cases in Russian, so don’t complain too much about the four in German! 

Pants just above the maximum: One Asian lady I spotted in the next queue at customs was wearing high heels and tight pants, and the pants kept sliding down millimeter by millimeter until they were so close to her maximum girth that I expected an accident at any moment.  But none happened, other than cleavage that nobody wants to see. 

The Bangkok airport: It’s a new structure, an oval glass tube, held up by a network of metal tube struts spiralling around it, creating triangular sections on the glass structure.  Some of these are covered with a woven material, which breaks up the immensity of the structure into simple units and at the same time provides some shade from the sun.  The inside is a simple concrete multi-storey structure that broadens to the top – overall a good compromise of looking good and not being too expensive to build.  Best of all, it feels light and airy, like an airport should. 

The taxi driver that took me from Changi airport to the Riverview hotel drove so fast I was glad I had a seatbelt.  He passed on every lane, swerved between cars, accelerated only to slam on the brakes again.  Every now and then he’d talk to me and I wanted to tell him to focus on what he was already doing badly enough, but I just looked out the window and watched Singapore zip past.  I’ve had two other drivers since who also seemed to think that F1 couldn’t come to Singapore soon enough. 

Claude’s timing: I’d only been in the hotel for about 20 minutes when Claude called to inform me about the weekend plans.  As you might guess from not having heard anything from me since, we filled out the weekend pretty well.