In the car or let’s say taxi from Berlin to Amsterdam I read a collection of short stories by the Dutch author Maarten Biesheuvel.
In one of these stories, he quotes the first lines of Nabokov’s “First Love”: “In the early years of this century, a travel agency on Nevski avenue displayed a three-foot-long model of an oak-brown international sleeping car. In delicate verisimilitude it completely outranked the painted tin of my clockwork trains.” I have never read “First Love” but I’m going to do that soon.
Shortly after arriving in Amsterdam I won the “Libris Award” (again a kind of Dutch Booker) for my novel Tirza.
The food at the Amstel Hotel was very decent, and my amante liked one of the waiters a lot. (So did I - I usually like waiters.)
We all went to bed early. Sleeping is so beautiful.