May 15, 2012 at 0:00

My room has generally been very quiet but tonight there are people out on the terrace even at this late hour. I can hear someone talking and also some impressive cackling. But it is good to hear people enjoying themselves especially since I am not at all sleepy. I'll be up for a while yet what with having had a 4 hour nap in the afternoon, now technically yesterday. After finally meeting my nephew at the airport, we drove to Bratislava to visit my sister Marika who had back surgery very recently. It was a warm sunny morning. I took in the scenery, now completely foreign to me, through the haze of my up-all-night-travelling fatigue. Once we arrived at my sister's apartment, the excitement of seeing her and also the sight of her post surgery made my fatigue temporarily disappear. We had some bread and cheese (that I had packed for the plane) and grapes, etc., and spent a couple of hours catching up while my niece prepared lunch. Lunch was an excellent soup with dumplings, the best schnitzel I have had in a long time and 2 different kinds of very tasty potato salad. And yummy dessert. Then, in the afternoon, my nephew drove me to my hotel. The hotel is lovely, the people are very nice, the location is great, and the breakfast plentiful. I recommend the place highly. I unpacked and, though I was practically fainting with fatigue, I decided to go for a short walk to get some mineral water. I headed in the direction of a big shopping centre. On the way, just around the corner from the hotel, I came upon Comenius University, where my mother studied for her PhD in English. It reminded me of our second day in Canada, when after spending the morning at the Department of Manpower and Immigration, we all piled into a taxi to go and talk to the people at the Board of Education because my mother wanted to find out right away how to get a job teaching. She tells the story that when she told the people there that she had a degree from Comenius University, they corrected her by saying "no, no, it's not comenius university, it's communist university." I guess we couldn't expect people to know about Comenius and the university in Bratislava that is named after him.