North of Berlin, spanning the federal states of Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, is a watery land, with many lakes, waterways, canals and swamps, all surrounded by forests that are alive with the sound of birds and insects. Here you can find the Müritz National Park and the Rheinsberg Lake Region. Continue reading
Well, June disappeared quickly, didn’t it! I have missed quite a few weeks of Weekly Small Pleasures, as there have been quite a few meetings and a lot of work this month. So one of this week’s small pleasures is getting the opportunity to participate in this blog event again this week 🙂 Thanks to Mani for being so diligent and keeping this blog event running all this time!
Here were this week’s small pleasures:
1.Summer weather. In South Africa I took sun for granted most of the time, but living through Berlin winters has taught me to appreciate every sliver of it. We’re having a lot of good, sunny weather this year. Continue reading
May is almost over, so there’s only a short time left to gather together your photos of wild flowers for Jude’s Garden Challenge! I already put some photos up of the bear leek growing on the island of Rügen in north Germany; now I’d like to show some more photos of wild flowers I’ve spotted growing around Europe. I don’t know the names of most of them – I should really buy a book of European plants. If anyone can label any of them, I’d love to hear what they are called. Of course I do recognize poppies, and they are among my favourite flowers. They pop up on many roadsides at this time of year (often around railway tracks for some reason), but you can also see them grown commercially for the seeds (presumably they also grow them somewhere to make codeine and morphine). In Germany, poppyseeds are called Mohn, and they are used in lots of sweet cakes, pastries and dumplings. A piece of Mohnkuchen is delicious, with an almond-like flavour, and if you ever visit Germany i’d recommend popping into a bakery to try a piece.
It feels like it was a short week, as we just returned from our bike trip in the Alsace, France, on Tuesday morning and now we are off to Cambridge to visit a friend for the weekend. But here are this week’s small pleasures nonetheless. This week I tried to take note when little happenings (rather than things) made me happy, so they were not always things that could be photographed. Continue reading
The theme for Jude’s garden challenge this month is wild flowers.
“This month I want to see native wild flowers found in the hedgerows, woodlands, farmland, meadows, by the coast, up a mountain, on the heath and even in your own garden. Basically those plants that haven’t been planted, but occur naturally, although specifically planted wild flower meadows can be included. Wild flowers provide food for humans and wildlife and are usually hardy, resilient and well adapted to the climate and soils, and yes sadly often referred to as weeds.” Continue reading
Welcome to this week’s Weekly Small Pleasures, Mani’s blog event where you take note of the little things during the week that bring you happiness. After spending the whole week working inside a biosafety level 3 facility, the weekend was a good chance to get some sun and some time outdoors. We had great weather in Berlin this weekend, and spent Saturday walking around the city of Berlin and Sunday cycling in the surrounding countryside of Brandenburg.
Our first stop on Saturday morning was the Markthalle Neun in Kreuzberg, an indoor market where you can enjoy different foods such as English pies, Italian cheeses, German cakes, Spanish tapas as well as craft beers, coffee and ice-cream. a good coffee is always a pleasure. After that we took a long walk around Berlin. My favourite part was the pretty and charming area around the Nikolaiviertel. After a brief stop at home we headed off again to check out the blossoms at Bornholmer Strasse and continued walking by the railway tracks right up until Pankow.
On Sunday we went for a bike ride on the Panoramaweg, as it is Baumblütenfest time. We enjoyed cycling in the countryside through villages, orchards and countryside and trying the fruit wines along the way.
Other pleasures of the week were the fact that it’s getting light later now, the temperatures shot up, ending the cold spell of the week before, and we are having blue skies more regularly.
Check out A new life wandering blog to see what other people enjoyed this week.
Wishing everyone a good week ahead!
Here are some photos from our visit to the Berlin Botanical garden in early autumn. The great thing about gardens is that there is something different to see all year round. At this botanical garden they have handy seasonal guides to the highlights of the garden.
Actually, we weren’t supposed to go to Paris in the springtime. We were supposed to go in autumn, but exactly one week before our trip we were checking the news before going to sleep at night and read, to our shock, about the terror attacks that had occurred. In the wake of the sad events, it did not seem the appropriate time to visit the city. So, we postponed our trip to April. Then at the end of March, there were more terrorist attacks in Brussels. It was therefore with a slight feeling of unease that I set out for Paris, hoping we would have an uneventful trip. Well, luckily we did, and once you are in Paris you start to forget about what happened, because everyone is just going on about their daily lives, enjoying life. The city is huge and there must be only a handful of people who would go so far as to harm others. I did feel a bit uneasy traveling on the metro, but otherwise enjoyed walking around the city, eating in cafes and mingling with the locals.
Like this local
You will learn an important word if you visit the Azores islands of Portugal in the Atlantic, and that is miradouro. It means viewpoint, but my mind now translates it as “beautiful view”, because that is what we saw whenever we stopped at a miradouro, labelled with a binoculars sign. Doesn’t the word miradouro also sound a bit like admire? Continue reading
It’s been a while since I participated in Mani’s Weekly Small Pleasures blog event, I guess to be honest this year has been dominated by work so far and January/Feburary in Berlin are pretty grey and not so much goes on in Berlin. Not only that, but often it was hard to squeeze in time to blog, so when I had time I updated mostly on special trips I’d taken, for example to the Harz mountains for cross country skiing or to a meeting in Switzerland. Anyway, in the beginning of this year my small pleasures mostly included making it to the weekend, getting to catch up on an hour of sleep or so and having a nice meal at a restaurant now and then, as well as some visits to the farm in Czech where we catch up with the family and pets. Maybe I’ll do a Janurary/Feburary update some time, but for now here were this week’s small pleasures: Continue reading
