It turns out the three ladies who run the Italian deli are sisters. This is kind of obvious when you see them side on. They all have the same nose, so to speak. They're from Calabria, right down in the bottom south west corner of Italy, which sounds like quite an exciting place. I think they were trying to tell me there's no electricity and you drink spring water straight off the mountains. One of them also told me that Genoa, where I'm going next April, is a very nice city.

The Hausmeister "fixed" my shower by banging a lot of limescale from inside the nozzle into the shower baisin. The water comes through a bit better now, but it's inexplicably still not hot, like it was the first few days I was here. He suggested I descale the outside of the shower head as well. The water here is really hard. In fact it's well hard. It tastes beautiful, but even when you boil water in a pan it leaves scale.

Nozzle. What a silly word.

I'm entertaining Eduardo for dinner tonight. He wanted some good English food, so I'm making Indian. Finding the spices was much harder than it is in Britain, the ethnic non-Germans here are mostly Turkish or Arabs. So, it's easy to buy seasonings to go on middle eastern and North African dishes, but I can't find Tumeric anywhere. Eduardo comes from the Rioja area of Spain, so he's bringing round a bottle of what he promises is the finest red wine Spain has to offer, which should be pretty good.

Watching cricket in Bangladesh sounds like a lot of fun:

...former captain Nasser Hussain was caught behind off Talha Jubair for 22.

He could, however, have claim to have been slightly distracted after play was held up when a killer cobra was found in the crowd.

Several spectators averted a possible attack by battering the four-foot snake to death with chairs.

(from BBC Sport)