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I met up with Masako-sama this afternoon for tea and a light lunch. I spoke some really bad Japanese. She's surprised at how much I can say, but I have a huge amount of trouble understanding her (her English is okay, her Japanese I have trouble with). It might be a dialect thing, but I don't think so; I think I'm just out of practice. I agreed to go down to the Altstadt with her later on to see the memorial service. And off we went.

I'll have no trouble remembering the guy I met while walking now. I ran into him this afternoon at the Frauenkirche. He says to me, "Aso, Amerikan ist back. My name Wagner. Dises ist mein broder und familie," while waving towards a book on a table. I helped him light some candles on a small shrine in front of the church to get a closer look.

Well fuck...

He was pretty misty-eyed and, well, so was I. War is a bitch, and now we want to enter another one.

I remember him a few months earlier, riding his beat up bike in the cold, making muscles and laughing at how strong he was. He talked about digging through Dresden and rebuilding one of the churches, though much of what he says doesn't make sense (lack of language). I'm glad he can look at me and have gone through what he did, and still laugh sometimes.

I'm heading back for some more pictures of the church interiors, I hope tomorrow (so long as this twinge of a cold doesn't turn into a real one). There are some pretty hardcore memorials about Hitler, the war, and the destruction of Dresden.