Since there are, fortunately, no screens and, unfortunately, no siblings, how can a kid occupy herself in down times on vacation?

In the past 10 days, our kid made copious amounts of bead jewelry, paper dollies with large paper wardrobes, and sea shell decorations.

Today, she made this installation as a surprise for me while I was at the conference:

These are all bookmarks. Except for the toilet paper rolls which are there to give a 3D aspect to the installation.

Without screens, children’s creativity is free to flourish. I highly recommend.

Your progressive beliefs are a religion of sorts. Only your God isn’t in the heavens. You moved God into people. Everything that was clear, intelligent and necessary in religion, in your teaching is foggy, invented, and utterly useless.

– Volodymyr Vynnychenko, Balance (1912)

Vynnychenko was a best-selling Ukrainian writer and the Prime Minister of the Ukrainian Republic in 1918. Balance was one of his early novels where he tells about the lives of revolutionaries exiled in Paris. This isn’t one of his most accomplished novels but the portrayal of last century wokesters stuns with its continued relevance.

Vynnychenko was such a sincere socialist that, as he shared many years later, he believed that when socialism arrived, there would never be bad weather again. When the long-awaited and passionately desired socialism finally came and culminated in the only form of government it can possibly culminate in, which is Stalinism, Vynnychenko was compensated for his life-long fight for socialism with exile and a complete erasure of his name and work in Ukraine. Even now, much of his work has not been published.

He was a writer first, though, and in his literary work did not show progressives as any better than they were. Even in 1912, when he wrote Balance, Vynnychenko offered a devastating portrayal of his fellow socialists. Spoiled children of rich parents, they engage in acts of adolescent rebellion that include sexual perversions, satanism, and all sorts of addictions. They are physically and morally degenerate yet believe themselves to be carriers of superior morality. The depths of their condescension towards “workers” whom they strive to “liberate” are unfathomable.

In 1912, the phenomenon of spoiled brats clamoring for a revolution was new. Nobody could say for certain how the story would end. Today, however, we do know. Maybe it’s time we started learning from the mistakes of the past.

Food continues to be a problem. Klara won’t eat anything on offer, and nobody opens for dinner before 8 pm, which is terribly late for our provincial souls. We were rescued today by an Indian restaurant which opened as early as 7 pm and offered such good food that Klara agreed to eat some plain rice and 1,5 cubes of chicken. This is her 6-month ration of chicken, so I’m happy.

Whoever starts opening for dinner at 4 pm for the tourist crowd and offers American-style kid menu in this city will make buckets of money.

On a positive side, N bought his first Spanish book that he plans to read in the original. It’s by the only Spanish-language author known in the post-Soviet space in the 1990s.

In the photo, you can see a very fancy hotel (on the right) where I stayed once but never again. The personnel was so obsequious that they talked to guests as if we were on the verge of expiring of some horrific disease. I’m not used to be treated like a precious porcelain of the Ming dynasty, and it all felt deeply uncomfortable.

I was walking around a local bookshop and was enchanted (pun!) to find a beautifully edited collection of books by Elizabeth von Arnim:

I had no idea she had been discovered and translated into Spanish. Such joy!

Von Arnim is an excellent author and I recommend her books in any language.

Turns out that retirement-age men getting completely naked on the beach is a new trend here in San Sebastián. We saw another one today. He got so desperate that he started climbing gigantic boulders by the pier with the goal of towering over the bathers and ensuring that nobody failed to see him.

The overwhelming quantity of Palestinian flags now started to make sense. People don’t know what to do with themselves in the midst of unrelenting opulence and beauty, and they experiment with ugliness to break the monotony of placid enjoyment.

Shop attendants and receptionists in France are, indeed, stereotypically and almost comically rude. I’m starting to think they play it up on purpose to delight the tourists who are eager to have the real French experience of proverbial rudeness.

My French exceeded my wildest hopes, though. One woman was so taken in that she addressed a very animated speech at me that I understood only very vaguely. At the height of my linguistic enthusiasm, I immediately bought a French book and started reading it. Which, as we well know, is my response to any eventuality that befalls me.

Photos don’t begin to transmit how beautiful the views actually are. Unfortunately, the bus trip to France from Spain was so jerky that we dedicated the first hour in the country to a competition in projectile vomiting. But it was worth the trouble because this is the most stunning place we’ve ever seen.

Klara is unimpressed with the views. “Yes, yes, I know,” she says sarcastically. “This is yet another most beautiful view on the planet. Can I have another ice cream while you are at it?”

Ice cream here has an absolutely Soviet taste, which is a high compliment.

We crossed into France, and things are looking up already. No Palestinian or rainbow flags, I’m speaking French everywhere and everybody understands, and for the first time on this trip I had a tasty meal in Europe. We went to a touristy place and had a salad, and that salad changed my entire philosophy of life. I wonder what their haute cuisine is like if a small touristy joint does such sensational food.

N had something they call “bagel with smoked salmon”, and he laughed for 15 minutes because that was no bagel. It was much closer to ambrosia than anything else.

We can’t get used to Spanish mealtimes, and N ended up having to eat an atrocious dish called pig ears. Because that’s what it is. His good cheer over being on this trip made him say the dish was fine but it was a typical Spanish horror of food.

We are off to France tomorrow. Let’s see what’s going on there in terms of food.

2 men arrested in strangulation of 12-year-old Houston girl whose body was found in a creek https://t.co/TtbfXL7mBz

— The Associated Press (@AP) June 21, 2024

These men were recently apprehended at the US border had released into the country for reasons nobody can explain. Why it’s hugely necessary to let people in first and process their immigration cases much later remains a mystery.

In the meantime, references to the origins of the mysterious “men” who rape and murder their way through the country are being removed from reporting. For instance, it took forever to get out the fact that the rapist and murderer of Rachel Morin was hiding illegally in the US from murder charges in his native El Salvador.

There are more cases than one can reasonably list. Here’s a kidnapping and rape of a child by a dude who crossed illegally from Ecuador. Nobody knows what his antecedents were because nobody cared to find out. He was simply brought in and unleashed on the children of New York, two of whom he proceeded to attack with a machete, kidnap, and violate.

Does anybody know why milk and eggs aren’t stored in refrigerators in grocery stores here in Europe? I spent 20 minutes searching for milk and disbelieving the shop attendants who kept pointing me towards unrefrigerated aisles.