I made it back to Arizona with all three luggages! I’m still a little sad Switzerland is over. Zürich and the people I met there seem worlds away from the deserts of America. I am glad to be back home though becauuse for the first time since January of this year, I feel ready to settle down into my normal routine of studying, running, reading, baking, and cooking.


On another note, I read my first book in months on the flight from London to Phoenix: Murakami’s Killing Commendatore. I thought I would struggle to read again after so long but actually I could not put the book down. I bought it in Amsterdam intending to read it in my inifinite boredom of my room in Zürich but could never bring myself to. I’m glad though I read it this late because the events of the book are inextricably linked to places I visited in Prague and Vienna.

For one, Commendatore refers to Il Commendatore of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Menshiki mentions how he watched the opera in Prague, the site of its original premiere in 1787. Funnily enough, I saw the exact theater where that took place and remember that placed conspicuously in front of the theater is an iron statue of Il Commendatore, a tribute of the citizens of Prague to Mozart.

Tomohiko Amada lived in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss, or Nazi annexation of Austria. I visited the balcony where Hitler announced this when I was in Vienna and also the State Opera House Tomohiko frequented as a young man there.

Coincidence that every European place in the novel was a place on my Central Europe tour that struck me? Perhaps.