29/07/24
listening to: bleeding muddy water - mark lanegan band
holiday! big holiday roundup! well, the roundup is big, the holiday was pretty small. but very nice. fancy hotel by the beach, room with a balcony with view of the sea. quite a big room too, plenty of space for armchairs and a coffee table to watch the sea and sunsets even with the balcony closed. drank our tiny teas and ate our cookies and stroopwafels there. and our snack-meals-from-home - cherries, dark bread, ham, babybels. the nearby store had loads of fentiman's, so we had two big bottles of that and a pine drink. there were also a beach-restaurant dinner and drinks and breakfast. plenty of bubble teas and one or two fast-foods. like the fries which got me head smacked by a thieving stinking (literally) seagull.
(the other bird adventure was a pigeon laying an egg on our balcony. it was gone the following morning - maybe a predator? or it just rolled off? poor pigeon kept coming back to investigate and sit on the "nest" - some dried flowers).
overall we went to like... three witchy stores, three guitar stores, and two book shops. without much success in either place. but it afforded us plenty of opportunities to just browse, walk around town, and back along the shore, wading in the waves and collecting shells. new experiences, new places.
there were quite a few books i wanted to investigate in the first bookstore, but there was an awfully-coughing woman (everyone else unmasked, of course) and it just wouldn't do. couldn't find the same books in the second bookshop but i got something called the paris review, a quarterly literary magazine. i like that idea. here's your stuff to ponder for the next three months. i wonder if i can find it here, too.
biggest highlights:
overall, a great success. all trains were on time and we didn't have to wait too long on any changeovers. a station worker was warning us that due to high traffic some trains refuse to stop on our desired station, but we didn't have any problem reaching it or catching a ride out. it was pleasantly cool, with the one gifted day of sunshine and swimming. the only thing i missed was a clear sky, to see if more of the stars were visible. i don't mind the red line of wind farm lights we got instead, far off in the distance. eerie in a sea-appropriate way.