This time, after attending the Berlin Film Festival following three years of COVID, I visited several friends in Europe. Friends my age and older tell me I must visit them while I’m still able to, so I was in carpe diem mode. I visited friends in Berlin, Bayreuth, Oberwalgern—both smaller towns in Germany—and Amsterdam, and each visit was intensely enjoyable. 

Addie de Wolf and Joost Zeinstra find Amsterdam “too much,” and have moved to a lovely house on the outskirts, in Duivendrecht, with a splendid garden and a stream at the garden’s edge, with goslings bobbing in it all day. They had most generously made plans to take me out every day. We went to the Introdans’ Bach, with four contemporary dance choreographers choreographing to extracts from the 18th century music composer Johann Sebastian Bach. Next was the Big Treat: the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, the biggest collection of Vermeers worldwide, specially brought together. Then there was the Amsterdam Klezmer Band concert (East European Jewish folk music), and a superb walk along the Wijk aan Zee, a village on the North Sea coast. I always feel funny going to the sea, all dressed in woollies, but they still had snow in early March. It was all a heady rush.