Our trip continues to go well. Yesterday we stayed in town. I had intended for us to take a walking tour of the Old Town, but we arrived a little too late. I didn’t worry about this as we have today and tomorrow to catch it. In addition, I am trying not to have any one thing that is a must. This outlook seems to be working.
We do continue to have little surprises. Yesterday morning at breakfast, Kate went back to the buffet table for something. When she returned, she walked directly to a table where a man was sitting. She started to put her plate down on the table in the seat where his wife had been sitting. He saw her and looked puzzled. His wife was also returning from the buffet table and was immediately behind Kate. She, too, looked puzzled. It was then that Kate looked at him and realized that she was at the wrong table. She said, “You’re not my husband.” The three of them had a brief conversation before she headed to the table where I was sitting.
Before heading out to catch the walking tour, I realized that we did not have Kate’s sweater and figured that we had left it at the Italian restaurant the previous night. I assumed that they would not yet be opened and planned to drop by later to pick it up. Since we missed the tour, we went to the Samuel Rosengart Museum. It contains his and his daughter’s private collection of Picasso, Klee, and a number of other well-known artists of the same period (Monet, Pizarro, Chagall, Renoir and more). This was a great experience. Kate loved it. As we were checking out of the museum, the receptionist asked for the badges we had worn showing that we had paid. Kate didn’t have hers. Then I realized she didn’t have her jacket. I remembered that we had sat down to watch a video about the museum and that she must have left it on a chair. We went back upstairs and found it.
From there we went by Valentino’s and picked up her sweater. Then to a nice lunch along the water front where we ate outside. We walked around a little while and visited a Catholic cathedral near our hotel and then came back to the room for almost 2 hours. Then we went to dinner near the KKL (the building that houses their concert hall and art museum) where we attended a concert by Jonas Kaufmann, a rising star in the opera world. There we had a couple of other mishaps.
After taking our seats about 15 minutes before the performance, Kate dropped a bag of mixed nuts on the floor. A bunch of nuts fell to the floor in front of her and slid under the feet of the woman in front of Kate and the seat in front of her. There was nothing to do but let them be until intermission when the people had gone to the lobby. Then I cleaned them up.
While the performance was going on, Kate got very upset with me. I am not sure what started it. What I remember is that after each of the first pieces of music, she commented on how good the orchestra was as well as the singer. I thought I acknowledged her enthusiasm, but a little while later when I made my own comment about the performance, she said something about my trying to keep her quiet during the performance. I must not have given a sufficient agreement when she expressed her enthusiasm. I do know that I am not one to talk during a performance like this and that I try not to encourage her to talk much either. By the time the concert was over, she had forgotten all about it though she did ask if I was mad at her for dropping the nuts. I assured her that I wasn’t.
After the performance, we slipped out while most of the crowd was still applauding. Once again Kate dropped the bag of nuts, this time spilling a much larger quantity. At this point there was nothing to do but move on.
