It’s our last day in Europe. I was waiting for a bus to take me to the National Tile Museum, when I began to feel increasingly sick to my stomach. I headed back to the apartment and got there just in time.

While my body was hunched miserably, my mind ran the inventory, as they do in this situation: what did I eat this morning? Nothing but oatmeal and mint tea! What could be wrong there? And it came to me: I made the oatmeal with the last of the almond milk. The almond milk that’s been in the half-fridge whose door doesn’t shut properly so that nothing gets very cold. The door that we discovered open a couple of inches when we got home last night, to an apartment that was in the mid 80s at least. Yeah.

I hope it was that, anyway, and not some bug that’s going to be with me for the next 36 hours, because I’m going to spend a lot of those in taxis and planes and I really, really do not want to be traveling while sick.

I’m recuperating and hoping I’ll be able to go to the museum a little later. In the meantime, I’ve sprinkled this post with some of the tiles from the buildings in the neighborhood.