Germany update

In all the recent excitement with naval gazing posts, photo based posts, New Zealand posts, and Oz posts, I may have slightly forgotten to report on the here and now of my current life. I am still in Germany, with just under five weeks to go before I head south. A few things have happened in the last couple of weeks since my return from the UK that are worthy of a brief mention.

I ate some Christmas cake. This is not a massive deal for most people. Normally you sit around with your folks, and eat it after you have stuffed yourself to the gills with all the other Christmassy stuff. Unless you don’t celebrate Christmas of course. Anyhow, one of the disadvantages to long term travel is that some of the times of year that would traditionally involve spending time with family become times of the year where you are reminded of the distance between yourself and loved ones. Last Christmas, my parents were in Wales, and I was in the middle of nowhere in the South Australian outback. My mum baked me a tiny Christmas cake, which she had lovingly preserved, and she presented it to me when I popped over this August. So I brought it back with me to Germany, and ate it. As the picture demonstrates. It was excellent, of course. I did have plans to take it with me to New Zealand, but after reading about their seriously intense quarantine regulations, I decided I’d forego the potential of hefty fines and consume it in the here and now.

The house I’m living in held its annual party, an excuse to thoroughly tidy the place, invite a lot of people round, and drink large amounts of beer. As, from what I can tell, a thorough tidying including gardening only happens once a year, this was a fairly major task. Still, I am pretty good at any kind of gardening that involves the destruction of weeds and the trimming of vines, so that went fairly well. As did the party. It turns out that the tradition over here is for the party hosts to provide the alcohol and some food, and for the party guests to turn up with more food, and sometimes, more alcohol. There was, therefore, an absolute pile of excellent food and wine to get through, which took us a number of post party days to get all the way through.

We have been to another wedding. I reported in more detail on the last wedding we attended here. This one was a slightly more relaxed affair, with less formal speeches and games and more focus on just having a terribly good time, accompanied by lots of beer and piles of bbq’d meat. A BBQ at a wedding folks! The good times just roll on.

My dear other half is continuing the seriously long process of sorting through a lifetimes  accumulation of stuff. Part of this process will culminate this weekend, when we head to a pair of flea markets to attempt to pawn these things off on unsuspecting passersby. Presumably someone is going to be interested in empty bottles of liquid cocaine. My contribution currently involves digitising a lot of video and audio into a more portable format. I have a lot of coffee to help me with this.

That, therefore, is where I am. In the few weeks remaining to me before we leave, I am hoping to visit Berlin, as spending four months in Germany without making it to the capital feels like a violation of some sort of rule. Otherwise, it’s sorting, relaxing, and preparing. Largely I do the middle one, and Vera does the first and third. This seems to work…