Long time no hear.
Or in this case actually read.
Berlin is already a week over and away. We fell in love with this city. We saw not too many tourist attractions, though of course the Pergamon and the Altes Museum were on our list.
We enjoyed a boat trip on the Spree.
We loved Potsdam and celebrated my husband's birthday, our thenth dating anniversay and a simply beautiful day with Italian food and ice cream.
My husband discovered the taste of Greek gyros pita and real mokka and now has a hard time to adjust back to the local shoarma served here.
And just let's not mention the bread. I adore German bread.
But alas, all good times must end and we made our trip back home. Greeted by two furballs, who missed us and were equally missed by us.
Work took over again, as usual. Same old, same old.
The weather was interesting - last Monday night we experienced the worst thunderstorm I've ever been in, constant lightning, hardly any time for thunder, trees down, roofs peeled off, cars damaged, windows blown out. Seven centimeters of rain in just a couple of hours.
And now it's all sunny and warm again.
That on top of the week of sun we had in Berlin I gained my beloved freckles back.
I love my freckles. I only get them in summer and they are not very bright, but they are there and I love them:
And this time I got them despite factor 50 sun creme :-)
I am a redhead, just my genes think different. My skin surely doesn't.
I always have to think about this wonderful passage in GOOD OMENS by the wonderful Terry Pratchett (SIR Terry Pratchett, if you please) and the equally wonderful Neil Gaiman (not a SIR, but a knight with ink and paper):
"She herself had short red hair and a face which was not so much freckled as one big freckle with occasional areas of skin.
Pepper's given first names were Pippin Galadriel Moonchild. She had been given them in a naming ceremony in a muddy valley field that contained three sick sheep and a number of leaky polythene teepees. Her mother had chosen the Welsh valley of Pant y Gyrdl as the ideal site to Return to Nature. (Six months later, sick of the rain, the mosquitoes, the men, the tent trampling sheep who ate first the whole commune's marijuana crop and then its antique minibus, and by now beginning to glimpse why almost the entire drive of human history has been an attempt to get as far away from Nature as possible, Pepper's mother returned to Pepper's surprised grandparents in Tadfield, bought a bra, and enrolled in a sociology course with a deep sigh of relief.)
There are only two ways a child can go with a name like Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, and Pepper had chosen the other one: the three male Them had learned this on their first day of school, in the playground, at the age of four.
They had asked her her name, and, all innocent, she had told them.
Subsequently a bucket of water had been needed to separate Pippin Galadriel Moonchild's teeth from Adam's shoe. Wensleydale's first pair of spectacles had been broken, and Brian's sweater needed five stitches.
The Them were together from then on, and Pepper was Pepper forever, except to her mother, and (when they were feeling especially courageous, and the Them were almost out of earshot) Greasy Johnson and the Johnsonites, the village's only other gang."
