Winter is coming

Another wonderful morning: clear sky, cool breeze, swallows flashing past my second-storey windows.

Sunrise this morning was at 5:50. I am amazed at how quickly the days shorten after the solstice: not yet a month, and we have already lost more than an hour of daylight in the mornings. This amazes me afresh every year.

I will arise and go now, and go for a walk on the Blauer Weg.

[Three hours later] Well, that was very pleasant. I walked in the woods for an hour, then cut downhill to the Südheimerplatz and took the streetcar back. I was thinking about Venice (inspired by Noorster's photos), remembering early mornings drinking cappucino and watching swallows and schoolchildren swoop past. It was not yet 8am, and despite its small-town spirit and agricultural past, Stuttgart is not an early-rising city; where might I find a café already open?

On a hunch, I stayed on the streetcar past my usual change-to-the-bus at Schreiberstrasse, got out at Österreichischer Platz, then walked to a nameless square in the Gerberviertel, where the Café Eberhard had indeed just opened as I got there. I sat down under the plane trees and spent a pleasant half-hour practicing dolce far niente. Plenty of swallows to watch, not much traffic, and the cappucino was pretty good; almost a fair substitute for the Campo San Polo, were such a thing not completely impossible.