I’m type A and cultured. I have been in this country for 11 weeks and I am far more organized here than I’ve ever been. I think it’s the air, or the bread…perhaps it’s the mineral water. I never really drank mineral water on a regular basis until I got here. I went to the opera last Friday night. (Who thought I’d ever say that last sentence?) I actually enjoyed it, despite my lack of knowledge of what the story was about. I saw Mefistofele, an Italian opera (with German subtitles for all of us who do not speak Italian. Unfortunately, there were no English subtitles for us who’s German is crap!) at the Frankfurt Opera. I was able to understand the subtitles; I knew what all of the words meant, and was able to understand it sentence by sentence. The problem was the big picture was totally lost on me. So, I’m going to search for a synopsis of the story now to try and understand what I saw. Thank goodness I had some idea of the Faust story. I was telling Cornelia (the Frau of the houseJ) about how I was going to see this show and it was Italian and involved Faust. She then tried to convince me that I must be terribly mistaken because it was just not possible. So, when I was watching the show, I figured out I was not mistaken and Faust was clear and present. At the opera, I met a UST alum, (which is the reason this all went down in the first place, since he invited me there) and got a little tour of all of the backstage ‘going-ons.’ Now, when I saw Les Miserables in London, I thought I had witnessed the largest rotating stage there was to be seen. However, I was informed by the horse’s mouth that the stage for the Frankfurt Opera (the very stage I walked on) is the largest rotating stage there is to be seen. The sweater. So, Cornelia as lovely as she is, gave me some of her daughters sweaters, as her daughter is studying somewhere in the former USSR now and doesn’t need or want them anymore. As I could only fit so many things in my suitcase and would rather not spends tons of money buying sweaters I’ll throw out before I come home, blindly accepted them. However…there is…this one…interesting…uh…really interesting sweater she gave me. I’m not even sure what to say about it. I mean, there was a clear and definite reason as to why the daughter left this sweater behind. That’s for sure. The sweater is no particular color. I think the knitter was one of those people who like to please everyone because this sweater has every color in it. So, the up side to this interesting sweater is that it will match with everything? I guess. What I can’t figure out is how this sweater got out of a store. In my four years at a university, learning about business among other things, I have racked my brain trying to figure out how it happened. Who was the decision maker? Was it the advertising? Was it an impulse buy? Was it an amazing coincidence of the P’s of marketing that moved someone to bring this particular piece of clothing home? Perhaps, I should go back to school and figure this one out.