I find it a bit odd that I haven't hardly been online allweek. I'm at Sarah's now, but the last few days at Harnisch's were jammed full of stuff such that I didn't have much time to sit around.

Thursday As. and I drove the departing Aupair to Hamburg, where she was to spend the night with Asita's uncle and take a 5 AM taxi to the airport for her flight back to Australia. I decided to come along and we left midmorning, intending to spend the day in the city. From the appartment where we left the car we walked for over an hour to the city center along a large lake flanked by unbelievable mansions with mini golf courses for lawns. These are now expensive appartments, but to imagine these were once single family (plus servants) dwellings is quite impressive. We eventually made it down to an exhibit on ,,Hamburg Sound,'' the German contribution to Beat and early pop music, featuring the Beatles' two years in the city and their influence on local music and the music scene as a whole. Asita had never seen a jukebox before. We spent the rest of the afternoon in a cafe eating ice cream, shopping a bit, and hanging out at the apparmtnet. Asita and I returned that evening, me driving her old 4-speed on the Autobahn at midnight.

I tried to do one of everything last weekend, in the hope of eking a few more memories out of a short period of time. Saturday consisted of jogging, dinghz sailing, riding, and--lying flat on my back on the couch for several hours due to a splitting headache. I'd stopped drinking coffee the Wednesday before and had suffered three days of light but constant headaches. Three hours on the water without sunglasses probably added a measure of sunstroke to my woes, and the dull throb turned into pounding as soon as I started jumping. That meant I was not quite so amusing at Sunset as the evening previous, much to the children's disappointment. But Sunday passed pretty well and´Monday completely without headache, and I am still not drinking coffee despite the fantastically cool coffee machine here. Perhaps I will return to one or two cups a day in the near future.

Sunday we went to the town next door for a footrace, where R. came in as the first woman for the 10k,and 11th overall out of 77 runners. Really impressive. We went sailing in the afternoon (yay!) with Nangi. I spent the evening going for a walk with R. and chatting. Monday involved collecting my possessions from throughout the house, packing, buying A. a birthday gift and some chocolate for the girls. All of the sudden I was hectically trying to grab my laptop and find my sunglasses and put on my shoes and there I stood at the train station.

It was wonderful being up in Hfn, as lovely as I remember, the people as nice as ever. It was a bit odd to go into my old room after the other aupair had left--my posters still hung on the walls, my shoes stood in the cupboard, my books on the shelf--such clothes as I had left have been worn frequently by As. Always a strange feeling, to see a resurrected sweatshirt on someone else, haunting me like the ghost of Christmas past.

The kids are still the same, and yet different. As. is now driving, is 18, and at that stage where many requests are greeted with either passive resistance (for the fifteenth time will you please....?) or outright refusal, making life somewhat more complicated. R. is taller than I am, slightlz, still thin as a rail, energetic as a 4 year old on cocacola, as horse crazy as ever but in many ways more mature. S. wears pants sometimes, is at least six inches taller, doesn't go sailing and volunteers some times to help with the dishes. They are all sweet, wonderful kids, though they are dipping their toes in the waters of puberty and teenage rebellion, with which I didn't have to deal as I was with them.

Inthe end I found my place with them and was sad to leave, but this time I'm not quite so far away. I hope to come up there for November, perhaps Christmas, perhaps New Years. We'll see.There is also hope I can come with on next year's sailing trip. I also left a large suitcase and my violin with them, which I will retrieve in November when Christopher drives to Mannheim, about 1 1/2 hours from where I'll be.