I am recently returned from a two week speaking trip in Europe, starting in Paris (nine hours of jet lag) and ending with a night spent in Heathrow airport; I had missed my morning flight to London from Madrid due to forgetting that the UK, unlike the Schengen countries I had been traveling in, counted as a foreign country and required getting to the airport two hours in advance, which meant I could not get to Oxford in time to give a talk and spend the night in a hotel there. Spending the night in an airport reminded me of travels as a graduate student a very long time ago, except that then it was a rail station, the Bahnhof im Salzburg, shared with some English students whose reaction to my reciting a bit of Dylan Thomas was 'My God, an educated Yank.' At home, we buy Coke Zero and Diet Coke in two liter bottles ' less expensive and more convenient than 12 oz cans or bottles ' and consume several a day. When traveling I try to pick up a couple of two liter bottles for the...
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