Status Updates From Een winter in het Zuiderland

In the hotel the traveller finds a battalion of Englishwomen of mixed ages - you may have met them in other novels. One finds Rome underwhelming, she visited the forum and the baths of Caracella and saw that they were just a lot of old ruins.

The traveller, a woman on her own, is forbidden from entering the catacombs in Rome unaccompanied. Everyday sexism being a peril of 19th century tourism.

Having finally escaped Nice, the author reaches Genoa for Christmas before traveling on to Pisa. The leaning tower is a disappointment as it doesn't lean far enough over.

The narrative is still stuck in a hotel in Nice. This is rather like being in an Agatha Christie novel without a murder.

The hotel guests ask each other if they are going to church in Sunday morning. Oh God, don't they have anything better to do with their time?

The traveller has to cross a square in the dark to reach he hotel, but she is not afraid because she had her umbrella to protect her from dogs. Personally I would have thought that trying to beat a dog with an umbrella is an effective way to ruin a perfectly good umbrella...

Travelling by train from Dijon to Lyon the author remarks that the impression from the countryside is of depopulation and loneliness which seems a modern observation - but she is travelling through a near monoculture of vineyards - the kind of landscape that is very busy only at certain times of year

Nice