living life. german style.

guys, i wish i could honestly apologize for the silence, alas i cannot. life in hamburg is, well, full of life. at this point it is everything i wanted it to be and never thought it actually could. things are falling into place in a way i never imagined possible and at a speed that is a bit mind boggling at times.

first of all there is a lot more hours in a day here. daylight hours that is (yes, even compared to a cape town summer) so i get a lot more done. because even when i am sick (which i was a few weeks ago and i tried) i cannot go to bed at 9pm when the sunlight is still streaming into my room. but regardless of the hours, i want to do a lot more. i have plans and meetings and projects and friends and … a life. i have become not quite a different person here, but a different side of me has come out to play. in the land that has the cliche attached that everybody is grumpy (which is so not true!!), i am not grumpy anymore. not annoyed. not irritable. how that happened, i don't know, but i am starting to appreciate my own grace to handle things these days.

the weather has been horrid for the most part and i don't even mind. i have borrowed one friend's boots and another friend's jacket and as long as they don't mind, i don't mind. this weekend has been hot and humid and all i could do was sleep, so maybe my german cold bloodedness is already back in full swing.

of all the things, i noticed that i have become really unpunctual. remember in cape town i was the girl who couldn't be late even if i tried. here it has become easy. mind you, i am not proud of it, but i am not really bothered by it either. i have learned to relax which again is funny that stiff germany allows me to relax when south africa didn't.

so for the time being i'm relaxed. i write when i want to write. i work. i do what i came here to do: hang out with my friends, go for dinner with my brother, be ignored by my nephew when his friends are around, call my parents for free whenever, watch my godchild take her first steps, fish euros out of my washing machine, buy myself overpriced diptyque candles (i wish i could say with said euros, but the spoils have not been big enough yet...), book flights all over europe (again, not quite, but that's the goal, and yes, morocco has become part of europe for all intent and purpose).

okay, so i apologize for the silence but i am not making any promises right now. life needs to be lived and sometimes that is far away from a computer or a phone, because usually my hands are busy eating ice cream - have i mentioned that i not only live next to the red light district of hamburg, but also the best ice cream parlour in town?

once i put the ice cream down however my new iphone (hurrah) and i have been getting nicely acquainted via instagram so follow me here and as per usual read my thoughts about travel and the big wide world on travelettes.  

orange. friendship. silence.

i’m doing it again and sharing a very random picture with you. actually it is not so random as the travelettes are doing another instagram challenge and this time it is all about autumn. tricky one for me as we finally had the first visit of summer and getting cold and cosy is the last thing on my mind. but nevertheless i wanted to show that cape town can do fall colours as well, so here is my version of turning orange.

since last week i have come, again, to the conclusion that happiness and contentment really is something that doesn’t magically happen just because the sun is out. though it helps, it is an active process, something i knew before, but needed to remind myself of. so i am working on it and life is not as bad as my last post may have sounded. a lot of people seemed a bit worried about me. thanks for caring and the giraffe pictures!

however one comment on my last post really made me think. i mentioned how i felt i was losing a friend and how he hadn’t been in touch to resolve an issue i was having with him. a girl commented how she had also lost of a friend, not because of text massages, but because he died as she wrote. boom. that hit me in the stomach. it made me incredibly sad for her and it made me think. think about the whole situation from with my friend all angles again. i questioned myself if i had just written carelessly, giving the impression i didn’t speak to my friend because of some silly, unanswered text messages, or had i been carelessly with my friendship?

fortunately, i guess, i can say that no, i might be careless with my spelling at times, but i have not been careless with my friendship. in fact i don’t think i have ever been careless with a friendship. sometimes friendships have just come to an end without it being anyone’s fault and i have accepted that. and if there is an issue, i will say something. i will fight for my friend and if necessary i will fight with a friend to resolve things. i know that i am loyal and once something is resolved i don’t hold grudges. i am not someone to lose a friend over unanswered text massages, but i have also realized that eventually it all goes both ways and at some point a friend needs to call you back and acknowledge you and even argue with you.
i had previous relationship with boyfriends not talking, turning into an ice block of silence when there was an issue. i hated it and would do the opposite – yell and scream and cry. which admittedly wasn’t ideal either, but silence…ugh, silence drives me up the walls in any relationship when something needs to be sorted out and spoken about. why are we so afraid to argue with people that we love? surely silence will break any friendship, any relationship much faster than any honest words we could say to each other? to speak or not to speak should that really be a question?

Collection for a sad girl.

My friend is sad. There was a boy and then the boy was no more and we all know how these things sometimes go so I don’t really need to explain. Now she is sad and she doesn't want to speak about it, which is fine, we all know that feeling too. I hate the fact though that I cannot sit next to her on the couch, not speaking and just refill her tequila glass in regular intervals. Because I think that’s what friends are for… to not speak, to share silence and to make themselves useful as bartenders, who ask no questions.

This not an option right now thanks to 14787 kilometres between us according to Google Map as well as multiple tolls, some other countries and one ferry.

Some girls when sad might take comfort in puppy pictures and Paulo Coelho quotes and hey, I don’t judge. Frank Sinatra was my non-judgemental hero when he said: "Basically, I am for anything that gets you through the night - be it prayer, tranquillizers or a bottle of Jack Daniels." So if it is puppy pictures for you, it’s fine by me. I just don’t think this would work for my friend as we are more the slightly cynical type that agrees Mr Coelho has been a bit over-quoted of late and that giraffes make everything better, not puppies. So I put some other things together for her. I will call it a collection of things to make you feel better when some stupid boy made you sad and I cannot be there to sit next to you on the couch, not speaking and just refilling your tequila glass in regular intervals. Don’t even ask me how some of these things ended up in the collection, it might not all make perfect sense to the outsider. And yes, I am fully aware there are a good few inspirational quotes and baby animals. You can judge away if you must. I just saw them, thought of her and hope that they might just bring the tiniest smile to her in lieu of tequila...

Find the complete collection here.