One evening while Elenka was conversing with one cousin or another and I was contemplating a knot on the side of a tree trunk I heard her say to herself, "Twelve and twenty, twelve and twenty, why do I always mix these two numbers up?"   Jolted from the knot, I said, "Twelve is dvanásť, twenty is dvadsať."    She looked at me as though maybe the knot in the tree had given her the proper translation and began speaking Slovak again. Without ...

  In Toronto, a good portion, maybe thirty per cent of the populous, spend the day with plastic bottles or metal cylinders of water in their hands. In Berlin, roughly the same number of people carry open bottles of beer. Almost none of the Germans seem drunk, and hardly any of them are overweight. Would we Torontonians gain the same result if we ditched the water and took up the hops and malt?                        *** Elen...

Just returned from 3 months in S/E Asia.Mühldorf  Schönbach

 I saw my first ever seahorse - seepferdchen in German - while diving a Karst wall near Ao Nang in the Andaman Sea a couple of days ago. Renate Schoenbach and her daughter Julia - pronounced Yoolya - from Deutschland have joined us in Thailand. They've decided that my German language skills need some work and have placed me in a course of study. I've found over the past week that this sometimes gets in the way of what I'm trying to write or say. The ...

 I was just listening to Elenka who was having a Dionne Warwick, "Do you know the way to San Jose," moment. A few days ago we found ourselves at the bus station in the Andaman coast town of Ranong where you catch the ferry to the island of Koh Phayam. It had taken a far-too-fast five hours to drive what should have been a six-and-a-half hour journey from Prachuap Khiri Khan, over on the gulf side of Thailand. We were travelling in a 15 person mini-bus and I fel...