“As a child,” a Danish friend tells me with a smile, “I lived in so many countries that I never properly learned any of the languages.” “But,” I frown, “how about Danish?” She shakes her head: “Not even in Danish am I entirely at home.” Now I raise my eyebrows: “Do people in Denmark ever notice it?” She laughs: “Only the blind!” As a nurse, she works with very old and severely impaired people. “The blind often shake their heads when I tell them that I, too, am Danish.”

Addendum I (November 13, 2016)

Sofie Aller is my friend’s name. Together with a couple of friends from Denmark, she owns a house in Motovun. They have been trying to sell it for years, but without any success. Ever since the last financial crisis, the real estate market in Istria is dead. Anyhow, why am I coming up with my friend’s name so many years later? On one of my uncharted journeys through my writings, I realize that I am liable to forget many a name as time goes by. Alas, I have lived in too many places in my seventy years! And I would hate coming across this piece one day and racking my brain in vain about the name. Sofie Aller it is. Hooray!

Addendum II (November 30, 2016)

As I just learned, Sofie and her friends from Denmark had managed to sell their house in Motovun a short while ago. It went to their next-door neighbor, who had wanted to buy it all along, but who had offered too little for it in their opinion. Apparently, they got much less for it then they had hoped for, but the house is out of their hands at long last. As of late, every sale in the hilltown of which I am aware has gone for at most a half of what the owners have hoped for. The boom of the first few years of the new millennium is history by now. In the meanwhile, the prices have fallen to between a third and a half of their peak values. Peekaboo!