What are the little pleasures during the week that keep you going? This is the question that Mani at a New Life Wandering asks in her weekly series, Weekly Small Pleasures. It can be as simple as a good cup of coffee or a chat with a friend. Here were mine for this week (Friday to Friday), and you can check out Mani’s here and Thistle and Kiwi’s here.

I’ll start with Friday, because it’s always a pleasure when Friday comes! I like my job but it’s very busy and it’s important to have a break in the weekend to recharge for the week ahead.

Friday night: We had a visitor to my work in Berlin so we went out for dinner with her and then treated ourselves to the excellent cocktails at Redwood. Since talking about our night out, a few people have recommended a couple of their favourite cocktail bars in Berlin. Maybe I should try them all and do a cocktail bars in Berlin post!

Saturday: Despite the late night on Friday, we were up early to go mushroom picking in Brandenburg. Normally we just find marrone (which are a bit slimy for my taste, but are apparently better once dried), but this time we even found a few Steinpilz (porcini mushrooms). My favourite part is actually just walking in the forest and looking at all the mushrooms, both edible and poisonous. The prettiest one of all, Amanita, is of course poisonous. We’ve seen animals a few times when in the forest – last year we saw a whole pack of wild boars, babies and all, and this time we came across some deer. They were too quick for my camera, unfortunately. We also had some friendly llamas come bounding over to us. Wait, llamas in Germany? you might ask. Well, you’d be surprised how many llamas there are around in Brandenburg. I think people keep them for llama wool. They are very cute, I’m adding pet llama to my wishlist along with pet donkey!

Sunday was a lazy day. We slept late and then met a friend for lunch at Poulette (a restaurant we hadn’t tried before – I liked the cute decor) followed by coffee and a slice of chocolate tart at one of our favourite coffee shops, Pakolat.

The rest of the week was pretty busy workwise. But everything is starting to turn golden as autumn sets in, to offset the grey hanging clouds and mists. I’m in autumn mode now and getting used to the cold. We have a new officemate, so there’s another person to go for coffee or lunch with, which is nice. Our regular work guest from the Netherlands brought me some ontbijtkoek (breakfast cake), so I enjoyed it for breakfast everyday (it’s finished now sadly, time to plan a trip to Holland!). We also got a little seahorse mascot along with our new machine, isn’t he cute?

Now that it’s cold, we are cooking a bit more. It’s pumpkin time of course, so we’ve had pumpkin soup a few times. J also made a good goulash one day.

We have also starting writing thank you letters for the wedding gifts. We want to send them with some wedding photographs, but unfortunately it’s taking a while for the photos to be processed. Hopefully they’ll be ready soon! i’m enjoying writing the letters because we bought some special paper from Siena when we were in Italy, and it even smells nice because it was in the same bag as the two Italian soap I bought: olive and cypress.

While in Italy I also bought a mug from the university of Bologna. It is the oldest university in Europe, founded in 1088. I really liked Bologna, and drinking a tea in my mug reminds me of our trip there.

So, Friday evening and time for another weekend!

Wishing everybody a lovely week.