A Kind-of-Naughty Tuesday

Life has gotten better since my last blog post, thanks to a programmed day of indolence: on Tuesday I skipped a morning class, didn't do my university homework, went to Dussmann with a friend and then read a romance novel in French translation for the rest of the day.

My indolence didn't avenge itself too badly on Wednesday: the professor cancelled the afternoon class due to her indisposition, for example, so I ended up being able to do one of the two readings (a short story, "Maya," by the Soviet author Vera Ingber) at leisure. And I feel fresher, and have happily shed the feeling of being stuck on a treadmill.

At Dussmann we ate cake, drank something hot (fresh mint tea for me), and talked, in the basement café. Afterward we roamed around the Christmassy displays on the ground level and first floor, including the English Bookshop section. I bought a book to give as a Christmas present — and a package of plum, passionfruit and pomelo-flavored mochi sweets, imported from Taiwan, to share with my family at home. I was tempted to skim through the first chapters of a few English-language books, since I've been thinking of casting a vote in the best-of-2025 book competition on Goodreads. But this would have forced my friend to wait. Besides I'm already listening to an audiobook recording of one of the contending books, Finding My Way by Malala Yousafzai, online.

It was not too crowded in the bookshop when we arrived at 3 p.m. But by the time we left more than two hours later, it was busier. Winter has begun to displace autumn, so daytime temperatures have often been below 5°C in the past few days, and shops feel more like refuges from the elements than like mere capitalist repositories. On Monday I cycled to university gingerly, as I didn't trust the glossy pavement; that said, except at bridges it seemed like there was no black ice, and the main perils seemed to be the smooth or rotting leaves on the asphalt and — as usual — the antics of all of us who were sharing the roads.