dinner

corn and red pepper quinoa, baked egg plant with feta, green salad, lemony salmon, blueberry lemon bars

i love to cook.

jumbled out of order, loves

my last visit to saint george's for books by irish authors (i like themed reading hah)
fanmeile with 300,000 German fans
Schlachtensee with Christiaan and Carlos

birfday tapas at tafelgold

görlitzerpark with susi, watching the sunset
olaf eliasson, martin gropius bau
sunlight and hope at the fanmeile: ending in disheartening loss. nevertheless, the best choice ever to be in germany during the world cup. football: you have stolen my heart
myself, temporary exhibit called "dream passage". hamburger bahnhof: museum für gegenwart

greece

and someday when i've finished my three papers and it's not the world cup and i'm not trying to eek out every last bit of happiness i can out of my berlin time, i'll write about it. though i'm sure the words will come very soon as it is sometimes necessary to procrastinate. for now, you can try to see it as i saw it.

DISCLAIMER: some pictures are stolen from hannah [just giving cred. where it's due]

(photo cred hannah)

(pchannah's cam by way of lily)

(pch)
(pch)
(pch's cam by way of me)

(heart)
(pch)
(photo cred hannah's cam. by way of me)
(pch)
(pch)

(pch)

out of order

brussels (day 3)
bruges (day 2)
bruges (day 2)
bruges (day 2)
antwerp (day 1)

last week, isabella and her roommate from paris visited me for a few days. we had great times, including a really fun dancing friday night out at rosi's, a very berlin, diy, grunge-esque friedrichshain club/bar. but the highlight was definitely our saturday visit to the tierpark, i.e. the former eastern-berlin zoo. we walked all over the gigantic park and visited with our favorite mammals and avian-variety creatures. definite favorite was the baby elephant, born only 2 months ago.

maybe four posts about one place is too much?

juices at la boqueria
palm trees!!
paellaaaaa
ice creams plus [already ripped] polka tights
la sagrada familia
la sagrada familia
aww
it's like 'where's waldo?', only this time it's 'where's hannah?' i am sooo original.
blurry hannah
yayyy, futbol

and, update again

i am terrible at this 'consistent blogging thing'. it's kind of like when i try to keep a diary: aka always a major fail. (i'll write a long, ten-page entry when i have a terrible day or something, vowing to write again 'tomorrow'-- and then nothing for two months until something else stupid happens.) i'm not sure why i thought blogging would be different? i actually kind of think i'm hesitant to write on this thing simply because i don't know exactly who is reading it. that's it: i'm writing on a blog instead of in it. obviously, i know that a blog is public, but it's hard to censor myself sometimes. i am not always very careful with my words--i write hurriedly, not carefully--i'm even too lazy to capitalize here which definitely says something about my time priorities. let's just say that there are a lot of things happening in my life that i could just never write about in a public setting like this.

i do sometimes self-centeredly wonder how many lurkers i have out there though. i guess i'll never know...

back to may 1:

the first of may is the worker's holiday. in berlin there are always a tonnn of protests on may 1. there's a traditional neo-nazi protest and then there's 'worker' protests in other areas of berlin. fun fact about germany: all protests must be registered with the police before they take place. yeah, you actually have to ask permission to protest. weird, right? the protests are pretty much always allowed, but the police can decide where and when you can protest. obviously, this has to do with the history of the country etc.

anyway, the protests in berlin on may first are pretty notorious for being violent. there are often riots and last year, about 300 policemen were injured (!). i went to an area of kreuzberg where the streets had been closed and where musical venues and food stands were set up. it had more of an open air festival feeling than of a protest, but there was definitely an undertone-feeling of violence--there were huge masses of people and a lot were drinking heavily. honestly, i kind of realized today that i'm kind of over the huge-mass-of-people outdoor festival thing. maybe 'over it' is not completely accurate, but at least, i feel like i've experienced enough of them to not feel this one to be particularly special or unique. i also wasn't super stoked on the fact that there was a definite undertone of anger, and i booked it out of there pretty quickly. i guess heavy drinking + angry men is not really my thing? i dunno...

tani and another friend from gv visited this week! we had a really nice time and it was so fun to have a little slice of home in berlin. hope this post was totally boring/weird. i'm in a rambling mood today i guess.

happy may first!