Spring has sprung! When I was living in Cape Town, colder weather always seemed to arrive at or after Easter (no matter whether Easter was in April or earlier in March) and now living in the northern hemisphere it seems that the change of seasons happens around Easter too. After coming back from our Easter trip to Azores, we found that the temperatures were higher and there were finally buds on the trees. This week those buds exploded into leaves and flowers. It’s amazing how fast the trees burst to life. Daffodils and crocuses are out, along with all the blossoms.

It’s even been warm enough some evenings to sit outside for dinner or to go without a jacket during the day. That’s a great enough pleasure, but here are some of the other weekly small pleaures since we returned from our trip.

Portuguese pastries and biscuits for breakfast. Of course we visited one of the many pastelarias in Lisbon before flying back to Berlin and stocked up on some sweet goodies for breakfast.

Pastel de nata (custard tart) with a coffee – best breakfast ever!

My uncle visited Berlin. It is always great to see family, and we went for a walk in Britzer garten to look at the spring flowers, followed by dinner in a German restaurant.

Visiting a good Asian fusion restaurant with a friend. What I liked about it was that you could order many small dishes rather than one large one, and so try a few different things. Their marinated beef salad was particularly delicious.

A trip to Halle and a visit to the oldest chocolate factory in Germany. Have you ever seen a whole room made of chocolate before? Neither had I!

A visit to Dong Xuan centre in Berlin, a Vietnamese shopping centre and eating area, where we browsed through all the goods for sale and ate a Pho Bo.

Have a great week!