What does one do on a Sunday? Why go to the Flea market of course. There on the very first stall was a cherry stoner. One euro and one pleased friend. What luck. Maybe it was because she'd gone to church first. For my part, I went to visit the perfect white bowl with which I have been having a distant love affair, and my breath caught; it wasn't there. Oh no. I registered the fact of its' absence, but my eyes continued to search. Feeling a pang, but knowing it wasn't meant to be, the phrase, ‘we were only ships passing in the night,' entered my head. Nothing will stop me coming back of course, in case it reappears. Will I continue to search the world's flea markets for a perfect white porcelain bowl priced less than thirty euros, preferably at twenty euros? Yes I still think it was too much. Twenty-five euros may have weakened me. The possessive stallholder kept us apart. He was obviously right that it would happen. Someone did pay thirty euros. But we have our history, that bowl and I. Ships that cross in the night.
From there we went to the Chapel of Reconciliation, the Mauer Wall Documentation , and the Hamburger Hof Contemporary Art Museum, where we saw the William Kentridge video installation. Somewhere just before this my blood sugar level must have dropped as I felt that I couldn't move another step. Fortunately the Felix Gonzales-Torres piece of the huge pile of shiny wrapped caramels was still on display, and crunching away on several made me feel better. Even more recuperative was the unmissable Kakao Cafe for the most sophisticated hot chocolate in the world. This, along with an attractively modest Indian meal on the way back to the studio, brought my friend's visit to a close and from the Haut Bahnhof on the overnight train to London, back she went
