I will be out of touch until the 31st of December (sigh it's a hard life being forced to ski and eat lots with counts and countesses/dukes and duchesses!)
Love to you all at this special time xo
p.s -thanks Mark for the picture
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Christmas in Berlin
It has begun... the freezing temperatures, the falling over at whim due to the ice on the pavement, the no feeling to my fingers and toes...but also the glühwein, the Magenbrot, the amazing metre long bratwurst.. hmm sad that all the good things still are food :) I guess some things never change.
Christmas always brings back a lot of memories..the storms of Christmas in the tropics, making candles listening to the samichlaus parade through the old town of Fribourg, listening to Feliz Navidad over and over in California. I stare at the three Christmas tree branches that constitute my tree this year and think of the tree made of tinsel that accompanied all my childhood Christmases, the amazing trees of all the families I lived with and visited in Switzerland, my electric tree that doubled as a nightlight for the 6 months after Christmas in my last apartment in Berlin. Christmas this year seems to have come around too fast. I am not ready! I leave with the family for christmas on Sat. but will be back in Berlin on the 31st.
My parents arrived in Germany this morning after only one instance of my father taking the wrong passport with him to check into his first flight, missing the flight and having to take the next one almost 12 hours later! I am excited to see them in January
The longer I am here in Berlin, the more I am confronted by the impossibilities of living in a city like this surrounded by limitless possibilities but without the right colour passport, without the right box to tick for nationality. I am surrounded by people with degrees from Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford, who are working here as Chefs, kindergarten teachers, and secretaries in language schools because that was the best we could come up with in order to support ourselves, that was the one thing we managed to slip past the Ausländerbehörde and their predilection for stamps, official signatures and wanting to make all of us 'ausländer' disappear just with the threat of advertising our jobs for german citizens to take. We become the people we have been warned against in our own countries. We suddenly have this profound understanding for the people we never understood. but.. titles - illegal alien? even legal alien.... maybe no green antlers, no spaceships, but just as conspicuous, just as mistrusted. At the same time, I can imagine no other city to meld into. And my love affair with Berlin continues...
Christmas always brings back a lot of memories..the storms of Christmas in the tropics, making candles listening to the samichlaus parade through the old town of Fribourg, listening to Feliz Navidad over and over in California. I stare at the three Christmas tree branches that constitute my tree this year and think of the tree made of tinsel that accompanied all my childhood Christmases, the amazing trees of all the families I lived with and visited in Switzerland, my electric tree that doubled as a nightlight for the 6 months after Christmas in my last apartment in Berlin. Christmas this year seems to have come around too fast. I am not ready! I leave with the family for christmas on Sat. but will be back in Berlin on the 31st.
My parents arrived in Germany this morning after only one instance of my father taking the wrong passport with him to check into his first flight, missing the flight and having to take the next one almost 12 hours later! I am excited to see them in January
The longer I am here in Berlin, the more I am confronted by the impossibilities of living in a city like this surrounded by limitless possibilities but without the right colour passport, without the right box to tick for nationality. I am surrounded by people with degrees from Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford, who are working here as Chefs, kindergarten teachers, and secretaries in language schools because that was the best we could come up with in order to support ourselves, that was the one thing we managed to slip past the Ausländerbehörde and their predilection for stamps, official signatures and wanting to make all of us 'ausländer' disappear just with the threat of advertising our jobs for german citizens to take. We become the people we have been warned against in our own countries. We suddenly have this profound understanding for the people we never understood. but.. titles - illegal alien? even legal alien.... maybe no green antlers, no spaceships, but just as conspicuous, just as mistrusted. At the same time, I can imagine no other city to meld into. And my love affair with Berlin continues...
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