May 22, 2022- The Farewell Tour

 

I’d seen some instructions that the COVID test had to be within 24 hours of scheduled flight time (11:30 the next morning)  and some saying any time the day before was OK.  I decided to be cautious and wait till T minus 24 hours so I walked to the train station hoping to get a Sunday London Times.  The newsstand wasn’t open yet so I picked up the Suddeutsche Zeitung from a vending machine and enjoyed it out on my balcony.  There was  a lot of interesting material in it and I was pleasantly surprised how much of it I picked up with a little help from my German-English dictionary app.

Today’s  was the real COVID test.  With trepidation I got on the app and put the second test kit in front of me.  The process was a lot easier after yesterday’s practice run but it felt like waiting on the results of a pregnancy test.  Watch it like a hawk as the test solution with the nose swab samples creeps up to the top of the test strip, see the top pink line materialize, pray that a second pink line (indicating a positive result) doesn’t appear below it. Only one line.  I was going home tomorrow!

I headed out happily into the sunshine.  I planned to walk to the old city but with no “must-see” destination and no timetable.  It was wonderful.  Many businesses were closed (darn- I couldn’t buy that Maserati bicycle)  so there were not as many people.  I stopped in the Food Market and picked up a shrimp salad for dinner and had a delicious strawberry ice cream cone.  I realized that this was an area where I’d had dinner with work colleagues on my first trip when a coworker suggested I get dinner at a stall marked “Pferd”.  I’d taken German in college.  No, I was not trying horsemeat.  I couldn’t find the stall this time.  Horsemeat is still legal to sell in Europe provided it meets standards and is properly labeled but I still wouldn’t have tried it.


Detail of fountain in gazebo above- made entirely of shells.


The famous animated clock in Marienplatz.


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