Good Bye

Happy new year to everyone!

Now slowly getting back into routine. I am almost a bit depressed today about that. So many things happened. So many plans had been made. And now as if nothing had happened we are going back to normal.
I like to get into this state of desiring something with all my heart and at the same time being completely happy with what we have and content to settle with it.
It is a good exercise.

We had a great holiday. Worked a bit, discovered the most beautiful wild beach behind our house. You only need a 4×4 to get there and we got stuck in the sand twice but only the last 50 meter. It is like in the first part of the surfer movie Endless Summer, when they walk over the dunes in Jeffrey’s Bay and there ist this empty, endless beach with this amazing blue sea.

We had a lot of happy time with friends and family. Food and fun.
We love this place. Even though we neglected our garden and never managed to plant a vegetables or flowers. Now poplars are growing everywhere. We both thought that for this year we want to settle down. Have a place as a home base from which we move. For years now every place has always been temporary and I am longing for a place that is home. A place that won’t change and where we always come back to.

Now, after nothing has changed I am thinking about cutting my hair short. I only let it grow to tie it up. Who needs that lot of hair.

And I am going to leave this place. It felt so lonely. I less and less wanted to go there, rather stay in real life. I realized I stopped emailing my friends and lost contact with them, and that was the opposite of what I intended. Good bye and thank you for your love and attention and beautiful and suporting comments.

Bye bye

The City of my Dreams

I often dream about a big city. It is the city of my dreams. Literarily. I always cry when I get there. It feels like coming home. Often I would call it New York, but it isn’t. The city of my dreams looks completely different. Not even nice. And completely strange. I always wonder why I have such an affinity to that city and at the same time it is almost repulsive. Huge Buildings, wide and empty streets with lots of empty space. You almost can’t walk there. It is too big. It is a city on a hill. I have to climb or drive a long way up to the top. Last night I sat in a highrise building on top of the hill. I looked out of the window and cried because I finally got there.
I wonder why this place keeps coming back and how this place that I have never seen before and which doesn’t look like any place I know always looks alike and how I can be so moved and feel so at home when at the same time it feels so strange. Even in my dreams I wonder.

Good Bye Zoé (former Ashley)

Zoé

Managed to eat nothing more yesterday. Except a small bag of jelly babies, which I downed all on my own on the streets, while walking the dogs.

A tragedy occurred yesterday. I heard Luzies silent scream and was very alarmed. Silent screams are always a sign that something really serious has happened.

I ran to her room, there she stood in the doorways, head bowed, crying. I thought she had hurt herself and wondered why she was on her own, while Sven and Anton were sitting in her room, next to the hamster cage.

The hamster had been murdered! Luzie found him in the cage, slit open, intestines hanging out and ants crawling over him. The cage door was closed. A mystery that nobody could explain.

Luzie was crying hysterically. She was under shock. She went into my room and lied on my bed. I lied next to her, taking her in my arms. After a while, she asked me under her sobs: Can you please get me my DS? I got up and brought her the requested.
Sven buried the hamster and two minutes later, Luzie was playing as if nothing has happened.

Earlier that day she told me about school. All the prefects had been on a camp on Monday.Today they handed out all the things the little ones had forgotten. She told me amused about one girl that had forgotten two T-shirts, a towel, her bathing-suit and a boy who had forgotten his trousers and his shoes. (How can he forget his pants?)

Luzie didn’t forget anything. She is past that age. I remember when she was in grade 1 and 2, how she and her friends always forgot everything. It was a drama when we couldn’t find her blouse or skirt or shoes of her school-uniform the next morning after she had spent the afternoon at her friend. I almost forgot.
Every mother was upset about it. When I picked her up I went trough the whole house of her friend to collect her stuff. The other mothers did the same. We thought they would never learn to keep their things together and they did. Just so.

Same with Anton. First thing he does when he comes home from school is to take a shower. He says he can’t understand how one could live without showering every day.
I remember he lived very well without showering for weeks until recently. Kids just change. They grow out of things. You are always concerned about how they would ever learn not to forget things, brush their teeth, wash their hair, shower .. until you give up and than they just do it by themselves.

La Vie Est Formidable

Wieder zurück. Schon seit ein paar Tagen, aber ich brauche Zeit ganz anzukommen. Es war ein großartiger Monat. Ich möchte mich bei all meinen wunderbaren Freunden bedanken, die uns so großartig aufgenommen und bekocht haben!
Es macht mich glücklich und traurig zugleich, so nah gekommen aber wieder so weit weg zu sein.

Mein Kopf ist ein vollgesogener Schwamm voller Eindrücke und Ideen. Er ist so schwer, daß ich ihn kaum herumtragen kann und ganz langsam bin im Denken und im Reden.
Ich lag die letzten Tage im Bett und habe die aufsteigende Erkältung bekämpft, die seit zwei Wochen versucht zu ihrem Recht zu kommen. Jetzt hat sie es endlich begriffen: Sie hat kein Recht.

Hier ist Sommer. Richtig Sommer, mit 30 Grad und allem. Um halb acht wird es dunkel, um 6 Uhr morgens geht die Sonne auf. Alles wächst und blüht wie verrückt. Der Garten ist überwuchert. Es ist überwältigend. Vor einem Monat waren die Temperaturen hier ähnlich wie in Deutschland. Verrückt eine Zeitverschiebung von einem halben Jahr.

Mein Hirn hängt halb über dem Äquator, aber bald wird es ganz hier sein und das ist gut so, weil ich es nämlich brauche. Noch liege ich herum wie unter einer Glasglocke mit dem betäubendem Geruch und der Wärme des Sommers, Vogelstimmen und kann es gar nicht fassen wieder hier zu sein..

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I am back again. Since a few days but I need more time to arrive completely. It was the greatest month! I want to thank all my wonderful friends for their great hospitality and the delicious food they cooked for us!

I am sad and happy at the same time. Having been so close and having moved so far away again.

My head is like a sponge, full of ideas and impressions. It is so heavy that I can hardly carry it around and I am very slow in thinking and talking.

I spent the last two days in bed trying to fight down a cold that tried to get it’s right for the last two weeks. It finally got it: It hasn’t got any right.

Here is summer. Really summer. 30 degrees and all. The sun sets at half past seven and rises at 6.30. Everything grows and blossoms like mad. The garden is overgrown. It is overwhelming. Only a month ago we had about the same temperature as in Germany. It is crazy having half a year time difference.

My brain still hangs half above the equator, but it will soon arrive and that is good because I need it here. I feel like under a glass cover and still can’t believe to be here again.

our bed in cologne

beautiful autumn leaves on the balcony in Cologne

Near the Rhein Ufer in Köln

View from the Rhein Bridge

Steps in front of the Philharmonie in Köln. The Dom in the back.

The Dom

Sven auf der Domplatte

Bruder Klaus Kapelle build bei great Peter Zumthor. Unfortunately it was closed on Monday, when we arrived.

Sven in front of the Zumthor chapell

Brussels. Foto by Toni

Life is great. Kitchen in Brussels

Berlin

It is interesting to see my home town after three years. Some places are still exactly the same, others changed completely. There is the former west part of the city where time seemed to stay still. Tempelhof, Steglitz, Spandau, Neukölln. Some areas seem neclected like the former eastern parts which are advancing now. The city is still divided but now just the other way round. There is still more than one Berlin. That is exciting and frightening at the same time.

The old Berlin:

Our bedroom in my mother in law’s apartement in Schöneberg

View from the window

The sandpit at nearby park Viktoria-Louise-Platz

The fountain at Viktoria-Louise-Platz

Sick in Bed

Luzie and Hamsti

We all spent the last days more or less sick in bed. We had a strange headache flu. The weather was grey and stormy with occasional rain-showers. But the sun made a short appearance every day. The best place to be is in bed anyway so we all were quite happy.

We will leave for Germany in exactly two weeks. That was quite a surprising change of plans, which makes everything much easier. But it also came fast. I am not fully recovered yet and I fret the long flight, especially now, not feeling my best.

I talked to Debbie yesterday and she said, how she loves long flights, to look out of the window, to go somewhere far away and I thought, that is the right way to look at it. I always fret flights and maybe that is why they always were fretful. From now on I will look forward to this journey!

The kids and Sven haven’t been to Germany since three years. Anton is almost double his size now. They hardly speak a sentence without using an English word. I wonder how they will feel. Whether they see it as a familiar or a foreign place. They are very excited.

Both were born in Berlin, but they only lived there permanently for two years, since they can remember. A woman told me about her grand children who live in America. She said, they are so American now. When she visited them, they told her to let them do all the talking in the shops, because people might not understand her ( South African English). That made me think whether my children are more South African than German now. For me they are German with no doubt, but I wonder how they will see it.

Luzie asked me where we are going to stay. I said, we will stay with Axel in Kreuzberg. She looked at me disappointed and said: But I want to stay in Berlin. (Kreuzberg is one of the most famous parts of town). It is definitely time to take them for a city tour and make them get to know every part of their city of birth. Otherwise they might take away our German passports.

I am excited too, but I have mixed feelings. I always had; longing to go back to a place that used to be my home knowing it is not my home anymore. A place I love but where I don’t want to live. I have to change my attitude. I have to look at it as going to my most favorite holiday destination

I love to live in South Africa but I don’t like to think I will live here for the rest of my life. But I think it is more the thought that I don’t like, spending the rest of my life at one place.

Hailstorm

The wheather went crazy the last days. Storms and rain and wild sea. It felt like the roof would be blown away any moment.
On Sunday it was even hailing. I have never seen something like that in South Africa. It looked like snow. Anton was excited. He took a shovel of hail and put it in the freezer (against my will). Now we have a plastic bag full of hail blocking the ice box. Who knows, maybe someday we will find use for it. For example, sucking hail balls on hot summer days.

Family Life

After Anton has spent the last two days at home because of a strong headache that occurred primarily shortly before he went to sleep and especially in the morning when he woke up, Luzie took a day off to catch up with her school projects. One about Malawi and the other one about Robert Sobukwe, founding leader of the Pan Africanist Congress.
She had little breakdowns from time to time which brought Sven to the edge of his nerves, who had to finish a radio play.

While I had breakfast in the sun to warm up, I discovered this little path, made by our animals in the garden.

Later these children in their school uniforms knocked at the door to ask for permission to pick the fruits from our trees, which are yellow and very sour and I forgot the name.

Loosing Myself

Sven found our video tapes the other day and I looked through all of them. The kids dancing in our Berlin apartement, on rollerblades on the Gendarmenmarkt, Luzie missing her upper front teeth and so much blonder than now. 5 years ago, before we moved to South Africa.

I enjoyed going back in time but it also made me sad. I thought it was because these children are gone forever, these times will never come back, but I also remembered how desperate I was at that time. I saw all these happy moments on camera, the beautiful children, summer in berlin and remembered I wasn’t really there. In my memory, I am absent and I remembered how much my life was determined to wait for something to happen: A new book, a new place to live, the children to get well again, winter to finish, summer to start, the children to grow up.

It seemed as I was always at a place where I was not. Was not or if not. If only… I could be happy, if not… I would feel much better. I had an overwhelming feeling of regret not having enjoyed every moment, realizing how happy they were and that they will never come back. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy my life, we had a great time together, but my underlining feeling was that of being somewhere else in my mind, not being where I should be, not enjoying what I should have enjoyed as much as possible. I worried too much. I looked into the future or into the past while I missed the moment.

It was painful to realize that, but it is also freeing to know that I live differently now, that I have learned to be in the moment and appreciate more what I have.
It was so sad looking back and realizing what I actually had and how little I was able to enjoy it. What a waste. At the same time I was grateful for everything I have right now and I told my husband how much I love him and appreciate him and I know how much he missed me in all these years where I withdrew myself.

Life now feels so much more real to me, I feel soaked, drenched with life. I stopped waiting for things to happen and I think it is because I came out of my snail house, where everything was about me and where I thought I had to take refuge to not loose myself, and instead opened myself as I never did before. And taking the risk of loosing myself, I did find life.

Smoked Plastic-Nappies

Most South African houses don’t have any heating, except a fireplace. That makes winter so hard, even it is not that cold. You have to get used to wear layers of clothes and wrap yourself into blankets at night to stay warm.

During the day we move with the sun trough the house. Like the cats, we search for the warm spots. The sun is our only heating. In the morning it would be Luzies room. In the afternoon it is our bedroom. I try not to miss any minute of sunshine in my room. Only than I can open the doors into the garden and lay on my bed with the sun shining on me.

Except on Fridays. That is the day when our neighbor burns his twins plasic-nappies. He makes a fire right next to my bedroom-door behind the wall, and when I am lucky the wind doesn’t blow in my direction. The smell is awful. The twins are only a few months old, so this will go on for quite a while.

But he is convinced that this is the most ecological way to get rid of the nappies, because they disintegrate not in 50 000 years. He says.
I don’t know what difference it makes wether they rot at a place where they don’t bother anyone for however long, but I am not so sure about the air-pollution.

Maybe someday it will rain smoked plastic-nappies. Like frogs in the movie Magnolia.

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I am getting lost in style blogs. Really enjoy looking at the pictures of people in all different places of the world. It is a bit like travelling. Capetown, Munich (love these picts!) and Berlin. Love the Budapest style.