berlin walls are never boring!
Category: in germany
i’ve just realized i’ve been making these little one second videos for over a year now! hooray! :)
despite the bugs in the app and the last-minute-panics (“oh my god it’s almost midnight and we still haven’t filmed one second today!”), it’s been going well. i still miss around 1 or 2 seconds every month, and it still feels like most of them are really mundane… but i love the result and the thrill that watching these 1 second memories brings. they make everything so vivid!
plus, i’m always surprised at how many people seem to enjoy them as well! every now and then, friends, family or even people i’ve just met tell me they look forward to these little glimpses of our life every month. it’s funny, and it kind of makes me feel bad for being so lazy making them sometimes…
so anyway, i just wanted to say thanks for watching! here’s april for you all:
in april we ran, we roadtrip’d in bavaria (and ate an inordinate amount of sausages), saw the coolest museums, went to london for the second time, did a cooking course at leiths, met with lots of friends… it was ridiculously amazing! :D
ps – here is what the past year looked like:
2013: march, april, may, june, july, august, september, october, november, december.
2014: january, february, march.
Categories
the watershed
once, on a US mini-roadtrip, we passed by a sign on the highway saying “great continental divide”. i googled it and found out that there’s a sort of line, west of which the water flows to the pacific ocean, and east to the atlantic ocean. it was obvious, but somehow i had never thought of it, and it blew my mind! to think that 2 drops of water, hitting the ground a couple of meters apart could end up in two different sides of the country, thousands of miles apart? just… wow.
it’s no secret i love roadtrips, but i think what i like the most in them is actually this kind of random little things – the unexpected curiosities that you only notice because you’re in a new place and everything is foreign. so when we were researching for our bavaria roadtrip last april, i noticed by chance that we would drive across the european watershed drainage divide: the one separating the rhine from the danube… i knew I wanted to see that!
i knew more or less where it would be, but in the end we ended up noticing it by accident, while driving by. i made us turn around to get a proper photo:
and there it is, so unassuming, yet so significant! on one side of this line, water flows into the rhine drainage basin, ending up in the atlantic, off the coast of the netherlands. on the other, the water will eventually join the danube, crossing 10 countries until it finally arrives on the black sea.
so cool! :)
i’m a bit late on these posts, but i haven’t stopped making them! :) here’s march:
march had its ups and downs. the first half was great: we were in portugal, did a tedx presentation (more on that later), ran on the bridge, celebrated lots of birthdays… and then we came back home with a vicious stomach bug and ear-throat infection as souvenirs.
despite this, the boy still managed to run berlin’s half-marathon, and on march 27th we saw another of berlin’s foxes – so the month ended on a bright note! :)
the blog has been in a bit of a lull… april was a whirlwind of adventures and trips – i’ll try to catch up :)
first things first: earlier in april i’ve finished my first 10k race ever, without stopping nor fainting – a mighty accomplishment for my chubby self! :D
i even got a medal to prove it:
(that funny shape on the medal is the outline of the race track, part of which are the airport’s runways!)
running a 10k race had been on my latest 101 things in 1001 days list, but i never thought i’d do it so soon, since up until very recently the most i had ever run was around 5km. but the airport night run sprung up on us and i grabbed the opportunity of running on what will one day become berlin’s shiny new airport. i mean, how often do you get to run on a future airport’s landing strip? :)
well, we do have the privilege of living next to a former airport, so i had run on a runway before… but i’d kind of forgotten that the new ones are much longer, around 4km in total… it felt like it went on and on forever! i forgot to take my ipod with me, and so spent the whole time running a speech in my head in several languages, in order to keep busy. i seem to need a sort of distraction to run, and missed my beloved podcasts dearly.
but it was ok in the end – in fact, it was actually rather nice! the race started around twilight, and by the time we finished it was completely dark and all the airport lights were on, giving the track a bit of an otherworldly feeling. volunteers cheered us on enthusiastically in the dark, and gave people high-fives… it was magical! i just kept running and running and running until the finish line… it took me 1:10 to do the 10km, at a very relaxed 7:00/km.
so yay! it was good and i’m glad i did it… but now is time to finish this airport, ok berlin?