Easter etc.

Well, Easter was lovely. We walked around Park Sanssouci in the sun, played lots of trivial pursuit, had some lovely Ethiopian food as well as some Thai specialities, drank way too much and had some good conversation. On Easter Sunday, we had a little Easter brunch at our house, where Olaf's parents introduced my family to their age-old tradition of hitting each other on the head with boilt eggs in order to break them. I had been made aware of this funny tradition before, fortunately, but I must admit it left my mother and her boyfriend flabbergasted...

On Easter Monday, after our respective family members had left, we decided to start something we had been planning for a while, which is cycling the Berliner Mauerweg (Berlin Wall Trail). This is a road consisting of mainly old patrol roads and paths through forests following the former Berlin Wall. It is a good 160 kms in total and we are doing it in a couple of legs. On Easter Monday, we cycled North to Mauerpark and then followed the northern perimeter to Staaken (the most western part of West Berlin). Here are some pictures:

 In Park Sanssouci

The Friedenskirche (Church of Peace) in Park Sanssouci

 At the actual Schloss Sanssouci

 Somewhere North of Berlin along the Berliner Mauerweg

 Pretty pink trees along the Berliner Mauerweg

A former GDR watchtower from the death strip

For more pictures, click here.

The weekend after that, our Portuguese friend Marta came over from Porto with her sister. It was great to see Marta again! We always spent a lot of time together in Milan, but we have not seen her enough since she moved back to Porto and we moved to Berlin a bit later. It was great to catch up!

The weekend after that, Jaap came over to Berlin with his new German girlfriend Nicole, whose Dutch turned out to be excellent. She even helped me kick some serious ass at the Dutch game of 30 Seconds!!! We also went to the C/O gallery to look at a photo exhibit about Berlin just after the war and had some lovely drinks at Oststrand. The time for Schöfferhofer Grapefruit-weizen has returned!!!

They left quite early on Sunday morning, which enabled us to do the second leg of the Berliner Mauerweg. This time, we went back to Staaken and followed the Mauer South along some of the lovely lakes in the Havel, such as the Grosser Glienickersee and the Wannsee. It was very strange to imagine that a number of these picturesque lakes were off limits back then because they actually formed part of the border and border fortifications flanked the parts which are now quiet parks on their banks! Also, we discovered some very nice biergartens along the way, which might be one of the reasons we did not actually cycle that far that day...

May, by the way, has arrived in all its glory. The weather is lovely, a steady 20-25 degrees depending on the day and it is great to be outside, to cycle, lie in the park and sit in the biergarten enjoying a cold hefe. Life is good, why can't Berlin always be like this?

This weekend, my mum is taking me to Madrid for my birthday (though neither of us knows which one) and I cannot wait. I have got two more classes today and one tomorrow morning and then it is time for an overkill of architecture and museums, sangria, Spanish tapas and lots and lots of Spanish wine!! See you when I get back!

Reflections on spring and Easter

In reference to my concerns about a Jane Austen-deprived existence and the dilemma arising from it, as related in my previous post, I am thrilled to share with the world that I am now the proud owner of Wordsworth's The Complete Novels of Jane Austen. Crisis avoided and future secured. I am confident I will still be able to enjoy her books and identify with the main characters just as I did before. After all, all it takes is a little suspension of disbelief. That should put that menacing question to rest, at least for a little while.

April has been treating us rather well. After a fun weekend with my brothers (for pictures click here), during which the weather was alright and we actually had our first beer outside in the sunshine with our coats on and it was still not too warm for my older brother Hascar to run the Berlin half marathon in 1:21:?? without dying from the heat, spring seems to have really set in. We have put our winter clothes in storage and I occasionally do not even need to wear my jacket anymore during the day. Last Friday, I actually spent part of the afternoon in the park enjoying the sunshine, wearing nothing put rolled up jeans and a t-shirt - though I must admit Olaf thought I was rather foolish to do so.

Just yesterday, I was invited by a former student of mine to a lovely lunch outside at a fancy Italian restaurant and the sun was so bright we actually fled into the shade at some point! She was one of my private students who initially contacted me in November to practise some Dutch with her, as her boyfriend was looking for a job in The Netherlands and she was planning to go with him. She had never studied Dutch before and had only recently started using an old Teach-yourself book. She had expected to have at least 6 months or so before anything would happen, but at some point in December her boyfriend suddenly found a job in Amsterdam and our deadline got a lot tighter. She quit her job and decided to devote herself to the study of the Dutch language for three months while looking for a job in The Netherlands. Flash forward three and a half months, 30 hours of conversation with me and a pile of Dutch books read, and she has reached a very high level of Dutch, found a Dutch-speaking job in Amsterdam in her own field, at her own level for an even higher salary than she was earning in Berlin! I believe I may consider her to be a success story, mainly due to her own efforts applying herself relentlessly and only slightly because of my interventions...

And, of course, it was Easter weekend. Not only was this not particularly unwelcome to me, because I have already had so many days off lately, but I have also been substituting a lot of course for colleagues of mine who took advantage of this period to visit their friends and family abroad. Which means that, though I may not have that many courses of my own to teach, I can at least earn some dinero these weeks - but not on public holidays!

Olaf's old studymate Jochen came over for Easter to introduce to his (to us) new girlfriend Viola and we had a very good time though. I even got to practise a little bit of Italian with Viola (who is Venetian) and we got along fine. They mainly did their own thing though, which left a lot of time for Olaf and me to spend together, which is always nice. It also gave my mind the opportunity to wonder about one of those eternal questions of life that surface every now and then. What does Easter mean? And, more importantly, what does it mean to me? Even though I am not religious at all, I suddenly got the strong urge to go to church on Easter Sunday, an urge I was only able to suppress by promising myself time to analyse it quietly. I do not suscribe to many modern-day Christian values nor support the Roman Catholic Church, though I have always been interested in Christianity from a historical point of view. Those of you who remember me from my college days know my fascination with the early church and how it developed into the secular organisation that it is today, which culminated in both my bachelor and my master theses. It has always been a profound theoretical and academic interest though, coupled with a healthy curiosity as to why people choose to believe in something which defies logic and has never been scientifically proven.

So, what was it that I felt the desire to do that Sunday? Though my conscience forbids me to blindly believe in the Christian God, or in any other god(s), goddess(es) or defined or undefined primary mover, I have never excluded the possibility either. I may not be able to distinguish the hands of a primary creator or omniscient driving force behind life, the universe and everything, but that does not mean he/she/it/they do(es)n't exist. My inadequate mind might simply be unable to understand the intricacies of the creation which God (let's call him/her/it/them 'God' for convenience sake, just because it comes naturally to me without any without any bias towards whether this actually is the Christian god) has laid out in his infinite wisdom. Or perhaps, I am not seeing clearly. Or maybe I have not been given the tools to discern the truth with. Or perhaps, I am in possession of these tools but have not learnt how to use them or realised that I could. Whatever the reason, there might just be such a thing as a God and he might just possibly be watching over me. And to tell you the truth, I don't mind that idea at all. Which is why I believe I can honestly call myself agnostic.

I am not going to pretend I will ever resolve this paradox and I certainly will not bore you with it here unless I do or come into some more interesting information. I am just wondering whether what I experienced on Easter Sunday was part of an unconscious desire to figure it all out and decide one way for now and forever. Should I give up completely and declare myself an atheist. Or do I secretly long for an existence on a higher spiritual plane - or at least a spiritual experience? The feeling has passed and I am happily going on with my life but the memory of that moment is still fresh. Does it really all come down to this scary little basic question? Do I want to be a believer?