Paradise Lost, and a retrospective regarding yesterday...

Okay, took some pictchas on my jouney to Gamlitz yesterday. This is the main hall of the train station in Graz. I can never figure out what the artist meant.... ganglia or netroots. It's a mystery, but always sort of makes me uneasy.








Some of you will remember standing on these platforms, but everything else is much improved. Elevators take you down to a corridor, and you escalate up to the main hall. (Note to the Venerable... those bloody stairs still exist. But no one uses them, and all I can remember is ... your knees, the luggage, and the bloody stairs, and cursing inwardly that no one had thought to install an escalator. You wouldn't believe the progress on that.)



So I caught an S-Bahn to Ehrenhausen, south-south west of here. The 'S'
means 'schnell', (fast),which is a fata morgana. They stop everywhere, and are commuter trains. The fastest ones are labelled 'express'. So it is sort of like riding the busses on rails, but the seats are comfortable and no, no smoking cars to be found, so I brought a book.







New stops have been added in the twenty years since I travelled this route. This is on the outskirts of Graz, and I don't know WHO on earth designed the exit, but it looks like and entry to the circus. As there is a mega shopping mall nearby, it probably fits...









Well we got to Ehrenhausen, which is tiny, and a five minute walk from the train station to the main square. Which, of course has a city hall...








And I had to find the bus stop somewhere on the main square there. There was only one person out there... a five year old boy at one stop, and I asked him if that was the one for Gamlitz, because I didn't see it on the timetable. I still don't know what the kid said, because the dialect there is so brutal... well you don't wanna know. So I spotted an adult, asked him and it turned out what I needed was across the street. Swell. Wrong-way B. Oh well..



And as on all main squares, there was a church. Built between 1752 to 1754. Lots of face lifts, obviously.











The main square is overshadowed by the ruins of a castle, and a mausoleum. I just learned that Ruprecht von Eggenberg is interred there. And many of you have been to thePalace of Eggenberg in Graz, when visiting me.






I tried to zoom in a bit.







I finally got to Gamlitz after about a ninety minute public transportation journey. And knew from Google Earth how to get there. This facility isn't even two years old. And I thought, 'errm, this doesn't look so swell...






Till I got in. Man he's got a single, private bath anyone handicapped could dream of...








Everything bright, lots of light wood, and yup, there he was...









And a flat-screen teevee on the wall.

The staff were so nice, because I went out a few times for a cigarette, and saw how they handle all their seniors. And had a little sigh of relief inside, because the care is stupendous.

However... his sugar level (569!!) hasn't gone down, and today he has to go back to a hospital. A nursing home isn't a hospital, after all... This morning he called me and cried, because it has gotten so crass, he is being transferred immediatly. He felt like he was being shunted around, and I had to talk for a long time with him to convince him it was for the best. I think he felt very at home there, even after a week and a half, and hadn't gone into his usual rants about the staff, or feel they were out to 'get' him. And I have the sneaking suspicion that he is about to lose his remaining foot. It was terrible, and I don't feel 'cheerful'....

The one thing that got me through yesterday was stopping in Leibnitz on the way back, and seeing my ex-colleague, and meeting her family. They probably expected I would do a drama queen number on them. But it was like a breath of fresh air. We talked about a lot of things. Her husband asked me about health care reform there, because he doesn't understand what the problem is, and I was off and running. We had a very intensive talk about that, and about many other things. It was a perfect ending to a very upsetting day, and that was balsam for my soul.

And I tried to be bright and 'charming'. They made it easy for me. For which I am thankful.