Bye, puppy

We had to say goodbye to our temporary dog back in August, but got to pet-sit him one more time on what was probably the last weekend of summer... I have a feeling that we won't be seeing much of him anymore. Maybe we'll have to visit a dog shelter and find someone to rescue there.

Annual Easter Sunday Brunch 2012

For our annual Easter Sunday Brunch the weather was chilly, but bright. At last year's brunch we were sunning on the balcony, admiring our sprouting sweet peas and courgette plants. This year the plants are all still safely indoors where it's warm. The other difference to last year was that somehow the amount of guests grew from fifteen to twenty-two. I invited a few people from work, A invited his band... I guess it's safe to say we are settled here if we can fill our whole flat with friends! But that meant that again this year I had to wreck my head trying to figure out how much food we need – and in my experience people will eat as much as you give them if they are also drinking alcohol. And we were: we went through 17 bottles of sparking wine and I don't know how much orange juice at our all-day-long mimosa drink station. We served: cole slaw, bulgur salad, jalapeno egg salad, watermelon and feta salad, breadsticks, soft cheese balls, roasted potato wedges, a roasted vegetables stuffed bread loaf and a savoury bread roll cake (courtesy of A). For dessert I only made St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake, because I trusted some of my kitchen wizard friends to bring a few treats, too – as they did, and they were better and prettier than what I made :) As usual, I hardly took any photos, but that can be taken as a sign of how much fun we had drinking mimosas and socialising with our friends!

March weather

 
This weekend the temperature reached +19°C on Saturday and we tried to enjoy the sun as much as we could, although we still didn't open up ice cream season... But we did go sit on a blanket in the park, we did go buy strawberry plants for the balcony and we did have Sunday brunch outside!

Next week will be though at work, so the vitamin D injection was well timed!

Spring!

Can I please, please, please declare spring now?

Yesterday we enjoyed the sun by taking a two hour walk along the river Spree in Rummelsburg, just east of Ostkreuz. It was lovely to be near the water and enjoy the warm sunshine. The dog absolutely loved it and we had a tough time keeping him from running too far ahead of us in all his excitement. We met many dogs, ducks and prams and we were all well exhausted when we got home again.

So, now I'll start talking about how it's getting close to summer now – I'm ever the optimist!

Newly weds

On Saturday we were invited to celebrate M and D getting married! The party at .HBC was an original and fun affair with Irish whiskey, cupcakes and vintage glamour.

Dog sitting - Åke in the house

This guy has been staying with us since last Sunday. It's a long story, but to sum it up: his owner is studying abroad, my friend who was dog sitting turned out to be allergic and we offered to help out for a few days. A few days is now six months instead. We're already completely in love with the little one, and it will break our hearts to give him back!

Baby, it's cold outside

Although it looked like we might escape it this year, winter arrived to Berlin on last Friday, a week ago, lightly dusting the city with snow. The sun has been shining and temperatures have dropped to -5 and -10°C. Icy,  Siberian winds have forced us to find flattering ways to wear six layers at a time.

Already before Christmas we realised that we had a lot of warm clothes that we could donate to the homeless for winter: A's old winter jacket, big cotton sweaters and countless mittens and woollen socks. Altogether it was two full, big, bags that we lugged to the Motz Kiez Café on Wühlischstraße, near Boxhagener Platz yesterday – finally.

"Das Leben ist Kein U-Bahnhof" is a campaign aimed at collecting winter jackets and donations for the homeless here in Berlin through the website onewarmwinter.org. I also recommend reading Exberliner magazine's article on what a scam the clothes collection bins are!

It's colder out there for some than for others.

The vote is cast

We had the privilege to vote in the Finnish Presidential election today. I had two excellent candidates to choose from, the Green party candidate and the Left party candidate. Hopefully one of them will make it to the second round! Then it's another trip to the Nordische Botschaften and another vote to cast in three weeks.

I've tried to make this week fun and sociable. On Monday I met with S at Kaufbar – or Weinbar, as I now like to call it – and we had a lovely chat about the holidays, about work and about them hopefully moving nearer to us, yay! On Tuesday I met the more and more pregnant S and hung-over C for breakfast before work: the best way to start any day is in good company with good coffee and a proper gossip at our favourite breakfast spot, Orange... On Wednesday I had a mozzarella baguette and a tandem meet with K, my colleague who's learning Finnish. We discussed her best friends' break-up, we read a Nora Roberts romance novel and I complained at length about how I'm dreading next week when we have to deal with a deadline simultaneously as a fashion fair. Finally, today, Friday the 13th, I picked up E from her shared office space for a little bite to eat, well deserved weinschorles and a good catching up session at Russian restaurant Datcha. Next week is going to be absolutely horrible. Now I'm prepared.

Balcony efforts

As a reward for our tenacious gardening we reaped 12 potatoes – a lunch together with a salad made with cherry tomatoes and chives, also from the balcony. All the sweet peas (all 20 of them) we ate in June, the courgettes refused to grow anything but pretty flowers and dusty leaves, and the chilies we are still waiting for. Let's hope that the sun is still kind on us this week!

A doctor's visit in Berlin

I've been coughing for over four weeks and have developed a pain somewhere in my ribs, so that EVERYTHING hurts, specially to cough. A week ago, on Monday, I waited for almost an hour at a practice on Rigaer Strasse to see a doctor who barely had time for me. After listening to my lungs he pretty much said it's all ok: I was in and out in three minutes. When my cough still hadn't gotten better after a week and the pain had gotten worse, I gave up and went to the doctor's office again. This time I wasn't confronted with an overcrowded room of sickly, elderly people: besides me there were only two pretty healthy looking women in the waiting room.

When you enter a doctor's office in Berlin, you enter the waiting room and you say a greet the people there with a nonchalant 'Hallo' or 'Tach'. You proceed to the receptionist's desk, where you greet her and present her with your health insurance card – there might be no one at the desk, only a little bowl or basket to put your card into. You might be expected to sit down while being processed and wait for being called up again to pay the administrative fee of €10 (mostly cash only, of course).

Yesterday, when the receptionist finally got around to processing my card, she called me up to her desk and told me very apologetically, that I was there at the wrong time. "Your doctor's hours don't start until after two o'clock, you could come back then?". "Can I not see the other doctor?" "No," she said confused "you have to wait for your own doctor." It was such an idiotic conversation that I decided to leave!

After desperately having trodden around the block, going into another doctor's office with only closed doors and cardiologists, I finally found a doctor in the old Stalinist building of Frankfurter Allee 27 who I was extremely happy with; an older man with not much hair, but a white rim around his head, glasses, kind eyes and a white lab coat. When I entered his office, he shook my hand. His German was pretty easy to understand, maybe he dumbed it down for the foreigner a bit. He put me on a nine day antibiotic regimen, wrote a prescription for painkillers and offered to give me a few days sick leave, which I declined, feeling too guilty about the workload for the coming seven days. But still, hopefully I'm on the mend now!

30

Before we went to Finland I turned 30. Not so note-worthy, I find, but did we celebrate with a lovely picnic in our living room. Most of the guests didn't know it was a birthday picnic - I don't like to make a fuss. So without stress (but a bad hangover from staying at Rosi's until 7am) we lounged in our living room with a few good friends, drank sparkling wine and ate bulgur salad, Portuguese cheeses, turkish pastes, bread, spiced cashews and pea soup, with a side of fresh cherries and strawberries. The people in the know gifted me with bottles of organic sparkling wine and to practice my German M&M had picked out the book Herr Lehmann by Sven Regener for me.

During our holidays at home both A's and my birthdays were of course celebrated repeatedly. A's mom gave me a gorgeous pair of silver earrings and my dad got A a vintage microphone that he was over the moon about. I got books and gift cards, and I started to believe that maybe turning 30 was a big deal.

Relocating to Berlin

It has been a very exciting week for me - one of my best friends moved to Berlin last Wednesday. E's staying with us until August, when she and A will get their own apartment. We won't live together the whole time, though: we'll be on holidays for two weeks and when we come back, E's going to Finland for two weeks, too. We have been getting along really well in close quarters, and I'm almost sad to leave for our holiday in Finland on Sunday. We've been taking it easy and have just been sitting in cafés, biergartens, parks or at home, chatting and catching up.

When escorting E to get registered at the Bürgeramt, to get a prepaid sim-card and to open a bank account I've realised just how easy it is for an EU-citizen to move around Europe. At work I hear the horror stories of Americans and Australians having to go plead their cases at the Ausländerbehörde. The only thing an EU-citizen HAS to do when moving to Berlin is to register their residency and address at the Bürgeramt. This took E about ten minutes: upon arrival to the Amt I realized that it was crowded and asked if we could make an appointment - a Termin - instead of just waiting for our number to come up. We got an appointment that was three minutes away. "Termin" seems to be the magic word around here! It can also be booked online.

Now I feel really guilty for leaving E alone in Berlin for two weeks... Luckily she's an independent girl and will go on a language course, bike shopping and on photo walks and will be just fine on her own. Plus some of our friends have offered to keep her company!

Happy at the office

"Ooooo, heeeeey, puppy-puppy-puppy! Oh, and good morning to the rest of you, too." Since last week, Luzie has been keeping us company – or we've been keeping her company – at the office and her little grunts and gruffs make my day so much better!

A new friend and a trip to Spreepark

Today was a really great Monday – not only because it was Pfingstmontag and we didn't have to go to work – but I did so many nice things that it felt like a day and a half.

First we had breakfast on the balcony, with some cherries as dessert. I rushed off to meet A, a friend of a friend from Dublin, who's moving to Berlin to do her PhD in autumn. She is very interesting and we had a lot of fun comparing notes on Ireland and the Irish while having coffees and Club Mates – first at Strudel Manufaktur, then Cassiopeia. A has studied architecture and so it was extra fun to walk her around Friedrichshain a little bit – she was very excited about Berlin.

In the afternoon we cycled to Plänterwald where the formerly abandoned amusement park had a "Pfingstfest". When we got there, our friends F and A had just joined the two-hour walking tour (€15, in German only, two tours daily: 1 and 4 pm), and the only other way for us to pass the time was to queue for the little train that takes you around the perimeters of the park in about 10 minutes (€2). A man in a yellow vest told us that the Spreepark will now be open every Saturday, Sunday and holiday, with tours twice a day, so it definitively isn't abandoned anymore. It also has lost it's magic: the area where you are allowed to walk around without paying is tiny, and it's taken over by a biergarten filled with plastic chairs, a children's hoppety-bouncy-gadget and a few amusement park toys dragged to the middle. The staff is bored and slightly annoyed by the guests. The two ways of exploring the grounds are to take the little train where you don't see much, or two pay €15 for a two hour guided walk with up to 50 other participants – nothing in between. Pay or go home.

 

 

 

 

 

We walked back to F'hain with F and A (who hadn't brought their bikes) and had a well deserved beer, dinner and an ice-cream. Now I go to bed, also well deserved. The next seven days will be really tough at work.

Crops

Even if this EHEC madness hasn't affected our eating habits – we've been eating at restaurants and making salads and everything – it's super exciting to eat something you've grown yourself. Two days ago we tasted our first balcony grown sweet peas and lettuce, and I suspect we'll be having new potatoes in a few weeks and courgettes (zucchinis) in maybe a month!

HBC party for rich people

You're Only Massive

On Friday we were invited to see our friends from Berlin band You're Only Massive perform as a warm-up for, and later on with, Hanin Elias for her record release party at .HBC on Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse. To my great surprise my rock'n'roll/metal/hard core brother was really excited to see Hanin – I think he had a little mini-crush on her. She was insanely charismatic on stage, so no surprise. The gigs were good, but the room got insanely warm and everyone was sweating and smelly. There was not much comfort in drink, because a small Pilsner Urquell cost €3, and to a Friedrichshainer that is just unforgivable. A vodka mix drink cost €7. We won't be going there for a drink any time soon!

After the gig we hung out with our friends for a few hours, using up their drink tickets. My party-fit brother and I agreed that we still wanted to go somewhere else for drinks, and arranged to meet up with a few guys in Friedrichshain; they'd go by taxi, we'd come by bike. This was at maybe 5 am. On the way M and K got really tired and I could see that they just wanted to go to sleep – but on Frankfurter Tor the two guys were waiting. We ended up in Paule's Metal Eck on Simon-Dach-Strasse and as the sun was coming up we forced ourselves to drink one more beer... We were home at about 7am.

Balcony battle

Today felt like a perfect summer day!

Without an alarm clock I got up at nine, which is a feat for me. The mission, after some shuffling around the apartment, amazed at how early it was, was to go shopping for plants. About a week ago I realized, that my dear forget-me-nots were infested with aphids. First I just thought it was disgusting. Then I realized they were harming the plant. Then I realized that they will probably spread to all of our balcony plants.

After trawling around the internet for advice, I decided on my first plan of aphid-attack: I combined 100ml vegetable oil and a teaspoon of dish washing liquid (organic) and added one teaspoon to every cup of water I filled my spray bottle with. When an aphid gets sprayed with this, he should be suffocated: the soap breaks up the oil, which then makes the water stick. This helped a little bit, when there were hoards of bugs and they were easy to see. Then I trimmed the forget-me-nots, in hopes of getting rid of the badly affected leaves. After a few days of hunting aphids with a spray bottle, I realized I was never going to get rid of them all like this. More googling suggested that there are herbs and flowers with scents that repel aphids: sage, spearmint, coriander, anise, chives, radishes, tagetes and petunias, for instance. I also found mentions of tomato plants repelling aphids, and then entries about aphid-infested tomatoes.

So today my mission was to go to the Boxhagener Platz farmer's market to shop for plants. I found mini-tomatoes for the balcony (€2 each) and I bought orange tagetes (€0,60/each) and something that looks like a nettle with white rimmed leaves, that the saleswoman said gets rid of aphids. After a gözleme at Boxi and a Milchkaffee at Intimes (Boxhagener Strasse 107) with A, I headed home to pot the plants and clean the balcony. I trimmed the forget-me-nots until they were practically bald. We also bought a bright yellow plastic cup at the Euro store, because aphids love yellow, and if I fill it with water there's apparently a chance they're stupid enough to just kill themselves.

I'm terribly excited to see if any of the tricks work. Finger's crossed the aphids don't eat all our sweet peas or kill our courgette plants by next week!

Easter Sunday brunch

Our first ever Easter Sunday brunch was yesterday, and we had such a great time. Today we keep having a great time by doing absolutely nothing, ignoring the sunshine and eating leftovers: rhubarb pie for breakfast, chocolate biscotti and mac'n'cheese for dinner :) What else can you do on a Monday, when everything is closed? Maybe plan next year's brunch! Or what we're going to do the next time it's sunny again, and we have nothing to do... Maybe go to Teufelsberg or Müggelsee... One day.

Easter sun waisted

It's been insanely sunny and warm in Berlin for the past week. Today was +22°C and full-on sun! I, on the other hand, was baking biscotti.

On our last Easter in Dublin we got invited to a traditional Polish Easter Sunday breakfast with our friends. Not knowing what to expect, we were so impressed by this tradition: a four course meal with mimosas, wine, beer and vodka in the morning! The sun was shining, there was plenty to eat, the company was good – we had a great time.  Ever since then I've wanted to have a similar Easter tradition, so we'll try to launch it this year by doing a super chilled Easter Sunday Brunch: mimosas, brunch, music - and sun on the balcony.

However chilled I always plan our parties to be, I can't help but stress a little. I want to make all these great dishes, have a lot of food, enough to drink, and a respectably tidy house – somehow this is not as easy as it sounds. But tomorrow should actually be under control, as long as we keep cooking tonight; egg salad with chili (!), tomato and asparagus quiche, mac'n'cheese, bulgur salad, lemon squares...

I'm looking forward to having those mimosas, for sure!

Chocolate pistachio biscotti (makes about 35)
500ml organic wheat flour
4 tbsp dark Fair Trade cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda + 1 teaspoon salt
OR 2 tsp baking powder (soda is hard to find in the shops here, or I'm looking in the wrong places...)
200g Fair Trade dark chocolate, chopped; half finely, half chunky
200-300ml peeled pistachios, chopped
4 eggs
350ml granulated sugar
+1 egg white

Preheat the oven to 175°C. Mix flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, pistachios and the finely chopped half of the chocolate together. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and sugar until they're light and fluffy: when ready, the whisk should leave a trail on the surface for a few seconds when lifted. Add the other ingredients, also the chunky chocolate, and beat until they're properly combined – try not to overwork the dough.

The original recipe suggests you turn out the dough on a lightly floured surface to divide it into three equally sized pieces and shape them into logs. I found that there was no way I could work the sticky, gooey dough into anything, so I spooned the dough to the shape of logs onto a baking tray lined with parchment paper. It really doesn't have to be that pretty – just not too flat, since the dough will melt in the oven. Brush the logs with egg white and sprinkle with sugar, if you like.

The Latin origin of the name 'biscotti' means "twice baked", so these biscuits literally are baked twice. First round for about 20 minutes, or until the logs are just firm to the touch. Take the logs out of the oven and let cool for another 20 minutes. When cooled off, cut the logs into 2 centimetre thick slices. Arrange the slices, laying down, on the a baking tray and bake them for another 10-12 minuter, until the biscotti are firm and dry, then let them cool off again.

Stored in an airtight container at room temperature, the biscotti will keep for about a week.

Obsession

I have developed a new obsession – I suspect it is to counter-balance all the excessive partying and beer-drinking I've been doing lately.

Last week we sowed the seeds of sweet peas, courgettes and garlic chives to grow on the balcony this summer. Now I'm obsessed. It's been a week and tiny little heads of green are beginning to sprout. When I get up in the morning it's the first thing on my mind, I have to go and look. I can sit and stare for minutes, sure of changes and growth.

I still want to buy a few strawberry plants and flowers, and was promised a few chili plants by friends who over planted. I am hoping to give them a few courgette plants in exchange.

I think this grandma hobby allows me to party and act like a teenager for a few more weeks, while the sun is shining and we're waiting for the crops...

April 13th – sowing.

Six days later things are finally happening!

Today, eight days later.