Well, guess what:
Life does not actually end when you get married, though this may never have occurred to miss Jane Austen. Not that I want to bitch on her, I love her work, but I am slightly out of her range now. Unless, that is, I turn into a Mrs Bennet or Mrs Jennings at some point and happily rejoin the cast of some of the best novels English literature has to offer. But not yet. I pray I will keep my wits for a little bit longer. Perhaps I could go through a Willoughby phase first? Or a Miss Bingley one? I might even settle for a period of mindless Lydia Bennet-style fun and games. After all, one could never believe she gave up her playful ways after marrying Wickham, now could one?!
However, my silence (to which faithful readers of this uninteresting blog should be accustomed by now) might have provoked a contrary view. Olaf and I got married in secret, told everybody, went on our honeymoon, told the world about that and then fell silent. That is what it must have seemed like to you. No more, though, I say, No more. I refuse to sink into the background and resign myself to a life of housework, mindless chatter and ordering the servants around. For one thing, we don't have any servants, not even a cleaner - which annoys the hell out of me. And I do enjoy mindless chatter every once in a while...
After our fabulous - and I do not use the F word lightly - honeymoon, it took us a while to settle back into our lives again. I had not really got used to Berlin in those 7 months I lived here before we left and that became painfully obvious when I got terribly lost on a route I had taken several times before. It also did not help that everything was covered in a thick layer of snow and ice - a layer that would not leave until early March. I had somehow thought winter would be over when we came back and I was exceedingly surprised when we experienced a 50 degree C drop in temperature when we landed in Frankfurt where it was -20 (as opposed to a lovely 30 degrees in Thailand). Our shirts froze to our backs, our flipflops slid down the stairs and I almost immediately went belly-up.
Once we had got over this unpleasant surprise, Olaf went right back to work and I turned out to have very little to do for a month. I had missed the big start-off of courses in January, which had all been given to teachers who had not made the brilliant decision to leave Berlin in the busiest month of the year, and was stuck with the leftovers. I mainly survived on private students that month but it did not really go anywhere.
We had, however, already booked a nice weekend of catching up Milan. Olaf had to go for work - but unfortunately got stuck in a blizzard in Washington and did not make it to Milan until Friday - where I joined him for a weekend with friends. People were hugged and kissed, stories were exchanged, XL cocktails were had at La Hora Feliz and I felt right at home again. We had of course brought several people some presents, a picture of the most awesome of which, snake whiskey from Laos, you can see on Olaf's blog. I do believe we impressed with Massimo, which is exactly what we had sat out to do.
Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end - and yes, I have recently rewatched the two concluding episodes of Dawson's Creek, which is what reminded me of this quote. As business was very slow, I spent most of my days applying to schools, watching lots of films and doing tons of yoga. I feel I am actually getting somewhere with my routine, although I realise I still have a long way to go until I can myself anything but a beginner. My teacher is satisfied with my progress, even though he casually remarked that if I learnt all the positions I don't know yet and did the whole series of exercises it would take me up to three hours to do the whole set. So much for progress, I am apparently extraordinarily slow!!
We did finally manage to meet up with Nicole and Pieter for a night of traditional Dutch curly cale stew (boerenkoolstamppot), which had been planning since before we left for Southeast Asia. As expected, it was delicious and even seemed to be an incentive for the winter to end once and for all, as the temperature rose and all the snow and ice suddenly melted a few days later. I have never in my life been so thrilled at the sight of pavement as I was that day.
When I finally did get some work in, I was asked to do two different courses for two different schools starting on exactly the same Monday. One was an 8-day intensive course and the other an extensive 200-hour course that had to finish in three months. Unfortunately, they were not only overlapping, but I had organised to go away the weekend before and not to come back until Tuesday. I managed to work something out with my one school and had good hopes to be able to postpone the beginning of the other course at the other school. After all, I had written the course programme that had landed us this course at the owner's request and she had guaranteed me I would get the course. She could not really have expected me to be available as of the next Monday when she called me the Friday before. We agreed she would get a substitute for the first for lessons after which I would take over. When the student was happy enough with the sub teacher, however, she suddenly decided the sub would get to do the rest of the course as well, completely disregarding the guarantee she had given me and the effort I had put into preparing the course. It wasn't the first time she had done something like that and you can imagine I was quite pissed off. Since that school is also relatively far away and they don't pay that well, I am going to give them up as soon as I find something better.
But let's turn to that weekend away. My friend Stephanie and I decided we had not spent enough time together for the last three years and that we needed to be somewhere we could properly catch up, i.e. a place neither of us knew anybody. This was the perfect excuse to visit a city we had never been to before and we settled on Barcelona. And it was exactly what it was supposed to be. We had long talks, good tapas, lovely wine, cheap sangria and not enough sleep. Even the blizzard that suddenly hit us and kept us locked up in a modern art museum filled with videos of men cutting logs while shouting 'I'm making art'$, revolving chandeliers and typewriters being slowly covered in snow wasn't able to change that. Check out my pictures on Facebook. Thank you, popje, for a wonderful weekend. And yes, do let's make this an annual event!
We have had surprisingly few visitors lately, probably due to the unappealing weather we have been having. It gave us time to explore the area around Berlin a little bit on the weekends. We met up with Nicole & Pieter to visit Wittenberg, the town where Luther nailed his 95 theses to the Castle Church's door. Wittenberg's tiny city centre was cute enough and Luther museum very informative, but its location in the middle of some industrial zone did not endear it much to us. Last weekend, Olaf and I finally went to the Bode museum and explored the numismatic collection, the sections on Italian Renaissance sculptures and French and German baroque art as well as the Byzantine collection.
As of this weekend, though, we should have some more visitors. My brothers are flying in tonight and I am looking forward to this very much. As spring is here, I would like to welcome more of my friends to our diverse city, and our lovely apartment of course.
Oh, btw, I was surfing the Internet and I found an article in which someone wanted to 'sunrise' his argument. That made smile. Or bellow with laughter, rather.
