Spring is here!

Well, as it turns out, several sappy romantic costume dramas and a couple of bottles of wine later, I happily drifted off to sleep to wake up to the return of love. That was a good morning!

And a good week, as it turned out. It was the last week of my most lucrative month ever and I am proud to report that I actually made more money than Olaf in March!! OK, it was my gross income (as a freelancer I only pay taxes at the end of the year) and his was net.... but still, it was a feat to be celebrated! One needs these little feats to be proud of, doesn't one...

Anyway, we had the weekend after that to ourselves and spent it doing our tax returns for 2010. I do not say it very often, but Germany truly is a great country. As a freelancer, I can deduct basically anything from taxes, from any books I order on Amazon (for class purposes, of course!) to repairs on my bike (my means of transport to get to my clients) and from topups for my prepaid phone (it's my the only phone I have and hence my work phone) to every single public transport ticket I have bought over the course of the year.

Oh, and have I mentioned that spring has started? My brothers came over last week, because my oldest brother Hascar wanted to run the Berlin half-marathon and Ward decided to taggle on, and it was a gorgeous weekend. We visited several beer gardens, cycled around town and spent several delicious hours on our backs getting a tan in a number of Berlin's excellent parks, while catching up and exchanging the necessary family news. Sitting in Prater Biergarten on Sunday afternoon, after Has had run the half-marathon, we had eaten ourselves into a stupour at brunch, after shopping for vintage items at the Mauerpark flea market and getting a tan in the park itself while listening to the open-air karaoke in the background, we ended our weekend talking about the past and reliving memories of growing up, the decisions we made and the challenges we faced, a conversation which I really enjoyed and which has got me thinking. In short, it was very good to have some quality time with my bros!

On a sad note, we had to say to goodbye to Pieter and Nicole, who left to go on their magnificent trip through South America and will most probably not come back to Berlin afterwards. The city feels strangely empty without them, I guess it is important to have a little bit of home with you when you live abroad - and they were our own little piece of The Netherlands! Have a great trip you guys, I look forward to seeing you in June!

After a little vodkafest to inaugurate Mira and Oles' new place on Friday, we were persuaded to organise a little impromptu cocktail party at our house last night. It was a lot of fun, although we were afraid nobody was going to show up for a while! In the end, it was a select group, but that did not mean the cocktails tasted any worse!!! It also meant we spent this morning lounging in bed and only barely managed to get up to start cleaning the house. But that's all done now, which means it's time for another little trip to Prater!! ;-)

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?