Stop at the tourist office to pick up a bus schedule. They're available online but a hard copy is handy, and besides I'm suspicious that updates may not occur regularly enough. A suspicion similar but opposite to that of the young woman working at the tourist office. She checks online because, she explains, they don't tell us when there are updates. We should be the first to know but they don't tell us, so I look online for the latest. None of which prevents unrecorded changes or drivers attempting to finish a route early in order to enjoy a relaxed coffee, but it's a start.
Pick up the news of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo online first. Totally appalling. The magazine is thoroughly offensive (although, as Flo once said about Andy Capp, "'e's 'orrible but 'e's fair - 'e's 'orrible to everyone") and it's not subtle, or even reliably witty, about the offensiveness. But in the end that isn't even a part of the point. Not only was the response overkill, in the most dreadfully literal sense, but free speech includes the right, although certainly not the obligation, to be offensive.
Equally distressing, in a completely different way, are photographs of Syrian refugees facing our storm of two days ago which has, in the Middle East, become a snow storm. Families living in primitive tents trying to clear snow from them and children in flip flops. There have been deaths and will, no doubt be more. And who is to blame here - terrorists, Syrian politicians, or westerners who want to turn their backs - and especially North Americans, nations of immigrants who are able to ignore these refugees in their hundreds of thousands.
Evening reading provides a little light distraction. An article on perceptions of time explains that Americans and northern Europeans perceive time as a linear quantity, fast disappearing and not to be wasted, southern Europeans and Arabs tend to be focused on people and events - why would you let a schedule dictate? And in much of Asia time is cyclical - people die and are born and seasons repeat. Perhaps most unusual are the people of Madagascar, who see the future flowing into the BACK of the head. One can look out on the past, view and review it, but the future is unseeable, unknowable.