birthday present

thursday: birthday party for our Argentinean Barbecue Master. 30 sharp. so we started singing when wednesday turned to thursday. in the morning we showed a slideshow "of the best pictures from the last weeks" which then turned out to be mainly funny pictures of ABM. in the evening restaurant offered starters and champagne instead of dessert, and afterwards we had a party on the beach with delicious cake and (drinking) games. we also gave him a present, a tandem flight with a parasuit on the dune.

saturday: a day in bordeaux. nice city, and the small historic center was just enough for the 5 hours we had. i was there with a turkish girl, who took me to a turkish restaurant in the end. they had mainly kebap to offer, but after she chatted with the owner for a moment, a new guy from the shop nearby came and decided to bring products form the shop - baklava etc. nice. and it made me happy to see he talking in turkish, the wide smile on her face while talking her mother tongue. in the evening back "home" we had wine tasting. seven wines in an hour and a half, good cheese and some grapes. and after that a dinner. main course: a whole baby pork barbecued. very good, soft and juicy. although a couple of people became vegetarians for this meal (too-cute-to-eat-effect).

sunday: back to the dune to see ABM and turkish girl fly (who didn't get a present but wanted to try it anyway). I took a tandem bike with an israeli girl who never biked before (in 29 years, imagine!). but it worked well and was really amusing: 1) we were able to chat all the way, not too many problems with hearing one another 2) hill up was lighter since we were two to bike (she got the idea of biking pretty quickly) 3) hill down was really fast since together we were heavier than others. unfortunately there was not enough wind in the dune. so we waited. and waited. (i almost burned myself, forgot the suncream, stupid me. i think i'll survive with being red for a couple of days, hopefully no peeling.) after two hour, some rain, wind going up and settling down again we gave up and biked home. too bad. maybe there is time to do it this week (which is our last one here). because it is a perfect present. too bad i don't have extra hundred bugs.

on sunday evening the talk about the last week started. we are all very tired and somewhat homesick, but yet it'll be sad to leave all these amazing people behind. luckily i'll be probably meeting them in conferences and meetings for the next 30 to 40 years.

friendships

i've been thinking lots of friendships. i have a good friend N since my childhood. yet, some five years ago, as we had moved out from our home city to different cities, the close relationship started having problems. To make long problem short, i think our transition from childhood-friendship to a balanced (?) adulthood-friendship was pretty difficult. partly because of a imaginary world we had created in the last 15 years (think about the film heavenly creatures, although we didn't kill anyone) which needed to exist no more. and letting go is hard, whether people are imaginary or real. some (boy)friends started emerging, resulting in difficulties to share time and energy fairly. me coming out to her a year ago didn't really help. so we've been keeping in loose contact because 1) we're just unable to let go 2) both of us don't have too many that close friends. i don't know about her, but i needed to take distance and think about this friendship throughout. which of course i've been unable to do (at least objectively).

what brought her to my mind, was my sister calling and saying that she met N in the street shortly. since i'm meeting my sister in 3 weeks time while going back to finland for a week, she proposed that i could invite N also. i hadn't really thought about the option, since i'm taking a bunch of friends from berlin with me as well. but on the other hand, why not? i don't necessarily have to be the repellent one no more. as my sister says, why to make things difficult on purpose. my problem is mainly, that i've been so close of excluding N totally from my for several years now. i mean, is the friendship worth of saving (or in this case, do i get anything extra from the fact that i've known her well in my childhood, although i don't know too much about her life at the moment) instead of finding new (less complicated) friendships?

sure, building a new friendship takes usually years until it gets very close. yet, rebuilding this old friendship will also take years, definitely. so how much energy it's reasonable to invest if the relationship has failed working in the past? sounds much like problems in marriage. but every time i hear from N, i lay in my bed awake for hours thinking what went wrong and what could i do about it and shall i do something about it. so evidently i'm not ready to let her go from my life. i care about her and worry that she will kill herself working.

so there is no way i'm going to solve the problem today. i better stop. see you later alligator.

vineyard & cooking for 45 people

busy end of the week.. today is the first relaxing day in two weeks, i was cooking lunch from rest-overs and lying on the beach.

on friday i cooked for the first time in my life for over 12 people. and this was far more, as the title says, namely for 45. salmon, smashed potatoes and some beetroot-in-oven-dish. i was cooking with another finnish girl, and an argentinian guy barbequed the salmon. nobody stayd hungry, and there was not too much leftovers. and they liked it (me too :)

on saturday we had an excursion to a vineyard - it took couple of hours with the bus to get there, so luckily we could sleep on the way after fridays party. vineyard was nice, and the 30 euros wine was nice as well - no more and no less. the smell was better than the taste, or i just let it rest in my glass too shortly. anyway, it didn't encourage me to buy 30 e wines in the future. there was a really cute cat in the vineyard. she liked all of us until suddenly - no more, please. with claws.

more interesting than the wounds was my overreaction. i was namely sure, that because a cat doesn't like me, there can't be too many other creatures in the world which would like me. probably my need of a hug accumulating over two weeks had reached certain threshold. so i missed G more than ever. i would also have needed a day off the group which i've been in the last two weeks (longer than ever this intensively in any group), which wasn't possible at that moment. after a good sleep and an easy day it all seems fine again.

fireworks

yesterday the city celebrated 'la fete de la mere' - the festival of sea, which actually is organized at the day of the maria himmelsfahrt (what so ever that would be in english, the day to celebrate maria-the-mother-of-jesus, around august 15th). all the streets were packed with people and restaurants were full, so we didn't have our normal dinner in the restaurant, but a private dinner (much more delicious than the restaurant, but much more work for us..). at 10.30 pm there was a fire work over the sea organized by the city. the most amazing i've ever seen. a french guy who comes 'from the most professional fire work town' was a little disappointed, he had seen better ones, this was the basic one. or something. i was amazed already after the first sixth (yes, i can tell that, there were three parts, like in a symphony, and they were rhythmically different, with little pauses in between). and it just kept getting better until i thought it could no more. and there was still one part to go. the colors, the rhythmic, the sounds, it all fit together. the first part was quiet, so it was more like watching music in the sky. the third was so loud that well - we could hear the music while watching it. nice. you can forget about the fireworks in the opening of the new main railway station in berlin... afterwards the aforementioned musician came again to sing with us. this time he had even prepared some songs in english.

today i was just so tired. i've been sleeping eight hours a night, and still i need to take a one to two hour nap everyday. so after morning program i slept, went to the beach to read and to sleep some more and to swim, and left when it started raining. so not much happening today..

on the dune

we were on the dune (la dune du pyla) yesterday. wonderful. i'm lacking words. but here is a picture. yes. it is huge, biggest in europe. we rented bikes and it took only like half an hour until we were by the dune. some 40 minutes later we were on top of it - it's also over 100 meters to go upwards.



EDITED TO ADD: the small black dots in front are frieds. the smaller black dots on the right end are also people (if you don't see them click on the picture to zoom in). the dune is a couple of kilometers long. that's why they look small.

musician

yesterday evening we cooked our own food. that was really really nice after eating in a restaurant for a week. and the food in the restaurant isn't that good. we were something like 20 people and we had two kinds of pasta, spaghetti carbonara and another one with tomatoes and mozzarella. additionally we had bread, good salad and enough red wine. the mediterranean of us were cooking. yam. and not to forget the good company we had :)

afterwards we started singing with two guitars people had brought with them. suddenly, another man popped in with his guitar and started a show singing and entertaining us. someone told me that the man is a musician going through the restaurants and making his living out of it. he was just on his way back home when he heard us singing and just decided to come and see what's happening. i didn't know too many songs he was playing, but the spanish and italian speaking of us sang along the whole evening. after singing for an hour and drinking a couple of beers, he left. we continued singing. the mood was high and everyone was laughing. when all the wine was gone we still managed to find some more, and around three i finally went sleeping.

my hotel room is in the fourth floor, and there is a big balcony beside my room (yes, i have a balcony as well, but i didn't want to wake up my room mate). so, i was smoking the last cigarette of the package on the balcony, and i could still occasionally hear people laughing and singing, although the party took place a couple of streets towards the sea.

what a nice evening. more of these, please.

beautiful beach

the beach 200 m from hotel is at its most beutiful in the evening...

...but it's not bad during the day either

oyesters and exes

i ate my first oysters ever yesterday. they were pretty salty, and kind of weird, but if i didn't think about the slimy appearance (and that they were still alive as i swallowed them) they weren't that bad. definitely not my favorite dish, but i could eat them again. and lots of lemon juice helped. anyway, i'm constantly tired. working until 2 am doesn't really help. at least i didn't have to give up daily swimming yet. i'm getting pretty overloaded about all the new people, all new things i learned in the last four days. socializing with new people is the hardest part for me, although they are all nice, and some of them might become my friends for life, if i'm lucky.

an ex, let's call him Jorge, sent me a message yesterday. pretty surprising, we were out of contact for approximately four years, since he ditched be kind of rudely. yet, i got happy (at least happier i'd imagined). he's somewhere near munich, and asked, if i was around. well, bordeaux is almost as near munich as berlin. or something. it would be interesting to see him though, ask him whether he's still together with the girl he left me for and whether he graduated yet. and such stuff. small talk.

some people seem to stay friends with their ex. with all of them, at least the ones who are not real ass holes. or even if they were. i'm not one of those people. no matter whether i or the other one quitted the relationship, i don't have any contact with any of my exes anymore. all of them live now in a different city and/or country with me anyway, which makes meeting them occasionally in the street pretty unlikely. and once the contact gets lost, it seems kind of artificial to me to send a message to say something like 'hi ex! how are you? i just happened to think about you after all these years. no, i didn't just stop dating someone so i didn't want to ask whether you are available for sex. you know, we used to have fun, actually.' well, in the first christmas after breaking up Jorge and i sent x-mas cards back and forth. next year one of us might have done. you see the development.

on the other hand, i'm still interested in what happens to people i used to like so much at some point. so i google them occasionally. now that i think, this seems kind of distant. namely, i was lately with G in a wedding party of an ex of hers. my first gay wedding ever, and pretty sweet. the whole thing makes me think what happens if a not-keeping-in-touch-person and a keeping-in-touch-person break up. hmm. and being friends can also be defined in many ways..

war talk on beach

there are many israelis in my course here. but for the first three days, i didn't hear anybody talking about the war. finally, yesterday evening on the beach drinking wine we started asking one israeli why and what he thinks and so on. he wasn't too biased, but still i found myself on the lebanese side. no way on the hezbollah side, but what about all the civilians? after discussing several hours we concluded that maybe israelis should have taken their land from germany and not from arabs in palestine. we didn't make any (final) conclusions about the war. what a surprise.


now it's a beautiful morning, little chilly though. i'm sitting on the balcony of my tiny shared room, watching to the sea. i can just see the sea between all trees surrounding me. sipping my tea. they have water boilers in the rooms. clever. i'm doing all this because i'm waiting for G to call me. no, she's not with me and i'm missing her. i'd like to show her everything and everyone. (she just called. hurrah <3)

mistaken to a boy

we were eating the dinner in a restaurant near the hotel. the owners have a beautiful, really cute four year old daughter, who was testing our french knowledge while we were waiting for the food. my french knowledge is just the basics. the other ones next ot me new even less french. so i got a little confused, when she asked me whether i was a boy or a girl. 1) she had to repeat herself three times so that i understood her and 2) at first i was sure she meant the transgender gothic girl sitting next to me. but she said 'non, toi', and i explained very shortly, lacking most of the words, that i'm a girl, although i have a really short hair.

it was the first time i was asked that, even though every second hair dresser cutting my hair warns me: 'but, but - you're gonna look just like a man with such a short hair'. well, now i finally believe them, at least to some extent. not that i'm concerned about it. and yes, cutting my hair at home would be much less expensive even with berlin rates. i just lack a good machine at the time.

france: soft sand and footballers' wives

yesterday: traveling to bordeaux, france. i'm going to spend a whole month on the beach. not really :) however, in the plane to paris there were the footballers' wives. i wouldn't have believed that they really exist, until i saw them. experience didn't turn my world upside down, although they tried poisoning the air i breathed with luxurious perfumes while landing (i was sitting behind them. no, they were not sitting in the first class). i'm really not a big fan of perfumes, and even less when used extensively in a small space with no ways out. they were also continuously photographed, so you might end up seeing my elbow in a magazine in a few days.

update today: i take my word back. yes, i'm definitely going to swim everyday. but not lay on the beach. from the hotel it's some 200m to the beach. the sand is fine and soft, the sea is refreshing and not too cold, and half of the postcards here have a picture of a dolphin on them. so maybe i'll see one. or then i'm going to mistake it to a shark... i'd lose my nerve here in two days if i didn't have organized program everyday from 9.30 am to 8 pm. luckily there is a long pause for lunch everyday, which enables me swimming.

getting started

well I guess everybody has this problem.. what to say and what not to say. so. living in berlin. together with girllfriend G. not originally from here (meaning: not german). trying to get a grip of ME. this time by blogging. let's see what happens.