I am having a marvellous time.

This week I’m overwhelmed with visits by half a dozen lovely people primarily from Adelaide band Brillig. It’s an absolute pleasure to be showing the first arrivals, Matt and Elizabeth around my new city.

I’m almost shaking with excitement for Thursday when some of my most absolute favourite people in the entire world come to visit. I think I’ll need to visit some more fotoautomats so that I can record their visits too!

Altogether I’ve spent about 3 years in Europe since 2002, but I’ve never been in one place to watch the whole transition from deep winter to spring before.

It’s been a lovely couple of weeks here in Berlin. From the first day of April the sun started shining and people started smiling. Then the most amazing thing happened, the horse chestnut tree (Rosskastaniene) in the courtyard (hof) began to change from branches with buds to a tree with leaves. Sure, trees get leaves every spring, but from my regular typing place by the kitchen window I finally could pay attention to the process.

Let me tell you something fascinating, trees burst into leaf from the bottom up.  Over three days I could effectively see the sap flowing up the trunk and along the branches.  From hour to hour different leaves had opened and I kinda forgot to take photos of the process because I kept on saying to my flatmate “Can you see that? It’s like a switch has been turned on or something!”

It was pretty exciting.

Here’s a photo from today, two weeks after the leaves unfurled:

The season actually appeared to burst from tree branch, bulb, seed and sun. I guess that’s why it’s called spring?

I needed to live in Europe before I understood that in my part of Australia, the seasons of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter are Euro-centric ideas laid on top of a vastly different climate.  Even though it would make more sense to acknowledge traditional indigenous seasons, we persist in describing Australian weather with concepts that don’t adequately describe the actual seasonal patterns. I feel that one of the reasons discussions about climate change fail to influence people, is because a large part of the developed (and emitting) world’s population is semantically isolated from what is normal for their region.

Because of the ways in which language and culture are transmitted, the experience of being an Austrlian in Europe (and more specifically Britain) is that of normality: birds whistle familiar sounding melodies, trees are the shape of picture book trees and some houses are actually shaped like childrens’ generic house drawings. It may be ‘normal’ here, but however lovely Berlin in Spring may be, thinking about the contrasts makes me miss and desire the strange shapes, sounds and smells of South Australia, the experiences that I grew up in.

I think the black and white local magpies (Eltern) with their kleptomanic tendencies and dark blue flash of wing are quite beautiful, but there’s something about the sound of Australian magpies which makes up for their more violent tendency to swoop and attack while nesting [mp3].

by Dave – aka Emptybelly

The thing I most heartwrenchingly miss has always been the rainbow lorikeet, its swooping flash of colour as it flies through my favourite park and the chatter a flock of them make around dusk [the latter third of this mp3]. When I lived in Finland and made my garden wall, I painted a lorikeet to live in the plants.  If I could be reborn as an animal I’d be a lorikeet.

I had intended this to be more of a post about how marvellous the weather has been, rather than a meditation on climate, language, postcolonialism and the strange experience of being a European (Australian) “other” in Europe. Inevitably though, the feelings associated with new locations, travel and identity lead to a specific feeling of missing what is first known and familiar.

One of the reasons that I’ve become so interested in the process of friendship creation is that over the last 3 years I’ve been moving from place to place. I’ve stayed in Helsinki, Sheffield and Berlin for a minimum of three months each, which is long enough to develop a collection of acquaintances and friends in each city. As a result of actively trying to make new friends with each move, I’ve increasingly become aware of how my friendships begin.

I think that I’m most interested in the ‘betweenness’ of two people becoming friends and one of the topics I wish to explore is how a developing friendship is acknowledged: how do they negotiate and acknowledge that transition, what level of formality is assumed, are there cultural associations marking the transition of friendship?

To elaborate on this point, I’ll paraphrase my Quebecois flatmate:

How many of your Facebook friends do you kiss [on the cheek]?

I have close friends in all of the places I lived who I hug or kiss upon greeting, but from my perspective that is not part of my formal culture as it is for other, particularly French speaking people.

At a language level does the shift from the formal to informal pronoun (vous/ tu in French, Sie, du in German) happen before, at a similar time or after the cheek kissing? I have a feeling that traditionally, language shifts would have been a more important signifier of intimacy in Europe, but what about with languages such as Japanese of Korean?

I’m interested in exploring this cultural friendship marker further, at some point after first meeting, two people decide that they are now “kissing friends”. What type of developments and conversations happen to encourage that transition? At what level of intimacy and shared personal histories does this happen? Are most people unaware of this transition or do they make a conscious decision to move a friendship forward?

This article from the Psychology Today website that has really helped me focus some of my thoughts about the process of how we become friends. I’d particularly like to get hold of a book by Beverly Pehr called Friendship Processes which is mentioned in the article and unavailable in Berlin libraries.

If you’d like to support my DIYMasters you can make a donation, or you could buy Friendship Processes or another item from my Amazon wishlist.

Primarily it’s the fact that I’m pretty tired of cold, wet weather but my thoughts are turning to magic portals and instant travel back to Adelaide in the next couple of weeks. While I love Spring in Adelaide and would happily return for visits in October, future returns home will probably happen in February and March as that’s the time when Adelaide really comes alive!

Visitors to Adelaide during festival season (Adelaide Festival of Arts, Fringe Festival and Womadelaide) are given a strange impression of the town, there are people energised and out partying on the streets every night! There’s culture down every alley and even if you don’t like ‘culture’, there’s also a very loud car race which happens around the same time. The rest of the year, while it can be difficult to remember the party face the city puts on, it is still a lovely place that I miss.

Foolishly I’ve managed to miss out Adelaide Fringe and most frustratingly, Womadelaide for the last few years as I always seemed to book my flights back to Europe in winter just in time for slushy side walks and freezing winds.

If you’ve never experienced Womadelaide festival you really should. For three days the most beautiful park in Adelaide is full of world music, hippies and happy, relaxed, white-middle class families wearing ethnic clothing bought at the previous year’s festival. It is a time of picnics, temporary camps under amazing old trees, children wandering around and playing diablo, amazing art installations and all my favourite people.

This year I feel even more sad that I don’t get to be in Adelaide at this most wonderful of times as during Fringe there’ll also be the first Format Festival, run by some very dear friends of mine. Only last week did I realise that maybe I should have tried to organise a simultaneous Academy of DIY here in Berlin as part of my DIYMasters project. So while there won’t be a Berlin Academy of DIY this March, I’m hoping that in the next couple of months I’ll organise a similar event celebrating self-organised learning and informal teaching and community.

I won’t be around in Adelaide for the festivals this year, but if you’re in Australia make your way over to my home town and have fun on my behalf. During February / March 2010 though, is when I’m planning on making a short return to a festival filled Adelaide, my friends and family and the smells of dry earth and eucalyptus leaves. Until then, I’m looking forward to watching Berlin move from grey skies to blue and experiencing this city as it wakes from its winter hibernation.

I finally bought a package of jasmine tea today. Along with the recent purchase of a proper hairdryer, it’s a sign that I’m letting myself feel more comfortable in Berlin. It might not properly feel like home, but I’m beginning to feel normal and myself. It’s a little silly, but access to (jasmine) tea and dry hair are some of the things which make me feel more together.

Jasmine tea has always been important to me when living overseas. My odd penchant for cold and wet places means that I keep on missing out on important stuff like sun and flowers. One of the ways I’ve got over that is by drinking jasmine tea, closing my eyes and thinking about Adelaide.

I think that one of the reasons why I’ve begun to focus on friendship is that it actively draws my mind back to people I care about. I have a strong academic and creative interest in the theory of friendship which is very important in motivating me to explore the area. But there is also the payback of regularly acknowledging the presence of the people I know, whether they are my most intimate friends or people I used to serve beer to.

i love a town by Fighting Tiger.

Dear Adelaide,

as you might have guessed, I’m leaving you. Surely you’ve noticed the signs?

For the last couple of years, things just haven’t been amazing, not the way I want it to be in the long term. I mean, I really like you and all, but since that time I spent with Helsinki, well, you know it’s been a bit different. I realise I just couldn’t commit in the long term, not in the way you wanted at least, getting a full time job, a family and a mortgage.

I know, I know… When I came back to you after the Finland incident at the start of last year, everything seemed to be great – I had big plans for you and me in the future. You were going to be my Radelaide – and none of those little niggling things would get on my nerves. But I realise now, I was trying to change you singlehandedly, make you my dynamic dreamtown or something.

It was unrealistic of me. We both needed to be changing together. I needed to change my expectations and somehow without you knowing about it, you needed to become something different. Maybe I should have communicated my needs more, told you what I liked about you (your food, your people) and encouraged you to grow and change.

Don’t take this the wrong way, you really have tried hard, and sometimes the results are fantastic. There are times when you glow and shine, when every night’s a party and I feel more hopeful about the future. But I can’t spend my life waiting around for every March, just so I can see your Fringe and Womad happy face.

And then earlier this year that Europe thing came back into my life in a couple of ways. I didn’t realise how much I’d changed, how much I needed the challenges of that type of relationship, of establishing myself afresh.

I admit it, there’s somewhere else. It’s early days yet, and I don’t know what’s going to happen – but I know that I’d regret not taking this opportunity, I’d always think of what might have been.

I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you earlier, but you know, I just wasn’t sure of myself. Now I know what I want, and it doesn’t involve you.

Maybe there will be a future for us further down the line, you know, when I’m ready to settle down and raise some kids. We’ve all said it, you’re going to be a great place to raise a family with. I’m sure that someone will come along, someone you can grow alongside at your own pace.

Oh Adelaide, I do love you, but I just can’t see myself being happy in the long run. I will miss you.

I’d better go, my bags are packed and in the hallway…

Your friend,

Pippa

The last two months have been strange. Good though.

I arrived back in Finland one year to the day after leaving. And my plan at that point was to stay here for a month or so, to make some side trips to visit friends living elsewhere in Europe and then to go home. I had sworn to myself that I would not want to stay away from Adelaide for any longer than 3 months – to do so would be in contradiction to what I stand for. I had plans you see, plans to save my hometown single handedly and to make it an exciting and dynamic city that draws young people from the world around. I had to go back home and do that.

I still do have those plans, but somehow they’ve become terribly confused in the last few months. Friendships that I’d begun when I was first in Helsinki became even more strengthened. There were offers from my old boss to work at a new club he was going to open – only a week later I became adamant that I’d never work in a loud bar again. At the same time Toph (who I worked with at Ratbag) had moved to Helsinki too – I had yet another friend to hang out with in this town. Then, I started to think – if I don’t want to work in a nightclub, but still want to stay in Europe for the summer – what could I do instead?

I also made other new friends and went to Pixelache Festival which ultimately deserves an entire (very belated) entry of its own as it sent me on a 10 day bender on the internets as I read and linked and thought [almost] far too much.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with information about art, technology, collaboration, sustainable travel, ubiquitous computing and subcultures. I was reminded that my loves of gardening, urban design theory, architecture, craft, literature and culture actually can be combined with my technical background. Even though traditional games programming hadn’t been the ideal career for me, that didn’t mean that being a geek was a bad thing that needed to be completely written out of my life. Most importantly, I began to realise that there could actually be work that I would love to do if I combined my technical background with urban design. Most importantly this work could tie into the slowly gestating radelai.de concept: how can cities and towns best use communication technologies (web, mobiles, social networks) to become more vibrant and sustainable communities?

This of course is great. After a couple of years in the professional wilderness I have a path to follow. But after a bit of research into Urban Design degrees back in Adelaide I found out that I can’t actually start studying Masters until the beginning of 2009. Which has left me with 9 months to kill.

So I’ve been thinking once more about working somewhere in Europe for that time. It would give me a chance to live overseas again, I would be earning money – and there is so much more work related to my long term path in Europe. But I have two major problems: I left my house in the care of a housesitter with NOTHING packed up AND all the jobs that I’m seriously considering would be permanent positions. And before any of you suggest that I take up a job “permanently” and then quit 9 months later… Well, I’m pretty terrible at lying (even by omission) and that course of action would not really be in my best interests.

But then again, to not take the opportunities for doing this kind of work would also not be in my best interests – particularly when I could learn so much at any of the companies that I’ve been looking at. Would working towards this goal be better than formal study?

Ultimately I need to go back to Australia to organise my “stuff”, but after that, I’m not really sure what could happen.

I really am trying to summarise far too much in too few words – when ideally I should have been blogging about this all along, though my Twitter and Facebook updates have been fairly confusing reading for a lot of my friends!

Anyway, what I started out to say was that decisions about “home” and life are difficult, and even when you think you have plans, a path and a place to stay – your situations can change drastically.

Today, I went with Toph to the airport, just two months after he arrived in Helsinki to start a new stage of his career. A week ago, he found out that his mum was sick and understandably he chose to go back home to Australia for at least the next two months. I truly hope that everything goes well for Toph’s family, and I really am going to miss hanging out with him here in my other home, Helsinki.

On the windowsill of my room in Merihaka I have a temporary garden of lettuce, parsley and thyme in jars, mugs and reused plastic containers struggling to survive out of their traditional hydroponic environments.

At times I miss Adelaide horribly. I miss the way the park by my bus stop smells on a warm evening and the sounds the rainbow lorikeets make. I miss the Farmers and Central markets and the fact that I don’t need to buy airfreighted fruit and overpackaged food from a chain store. I miss my friends, Queen St and my old job, my bike and Womadelaide. I miss it but it all feels a bit unreal. I miss my garden and my ridiculously large house which is both a blessing and a burden.

But I’m back in Helsinki and that means that I’m surrounded by a tremendous amount of good stuff. I’m love that Ninnu and Sid are an hour away and that I have friends in Helsinki too. I love that there is snow even though it’s the warmest winter in a century. I love the drying cupboards in the kitchens and fact I can shower as long as I like and not have to carry the used water on to the garden. I love the smell a wood-fired sauna makes and that I don’t need to talk or think when the löyly hits my skin and my head. I love the amazing design surrounding me and the scale and density of the city and the public transport. I love the range of salmiaki in the pick and mix section of the video store and the rye bread. I love that even though I never studied the language I can actually understand some of what I read and hear.

I’m flattered that here I’m greeted like a minor celebrity by some old customers “Hei! You! Australian Girl!” and that my English is international enough to confuse some people into not knowing where I’m from at all.

For all the good stuff here I’m frustrated too. I’m kind of bored because I don’t have a job to fill up some of my days and let me meet new people. I regret not studying Finnish because I understand enough to know that it will be years before I was ever fluent in a language only 6 million people speak. I’m frustrated that I feel heartbound to Adelaide but intrigued by Finland and that so many people are leaving while I’m away (not that my presence would have kept them there).

Every couple of days it seems like I switch moods between “I shall stay here and work at the bar so I can stay for the summer…” to “I need to go home and make radelai.de happen right now!” and then to “Ooooh, maybe I should apply for a Masters program here… It’s free!”. I half make plans for a summer in Europe and for May in Australia.

I am confused by choices and I don’t want to give either one up just yet.

after almost a month of waiting and waiting and angry emails and cranky phonecalls…. the radelai.de domain is now actually working!

there’s nothing much up there yet – but soon there will be!

Since I’ve returned to Adelaide I’ve had opportunity to host a few guests as part of CouchSurfing, the program that introduced me to Sid, Ninnu, Ronja and a whole bunch of other lovely people. Regularly, conversation with my international visitors comes down to eating: favourite foods, traditional foods from their homelands and the difficulty of finding good bread while on the road. Just as it was when I was travelling overseas, I’m faced with the difficulty of defining what typical Australian food is.

There are the usual “Aussie Tucker” suspects of Vegemite, meat pies, pavlova, lamingtons, spag bog and Anzac biscuits. But in comparison to people who’ve come from most other countries (Canada and USA are probably the other exceptions) we can’t really identify distinct food cultures and rely instead on a few recipes and a salty, yeasty brand name. Our national identity is defined by events taking place during a little over two centuries of (primarily European) migration, and doesn’t really reflect a cohesive culture.

So I’ve thought and I’ve thought about this concept of food and national identity. Historically the French, the Italians, the Finns, the Spanish, the Germans, the Chinese, the Indians were not nations of people, they were many smaller regional and cultural groups who just happened to live within more recent borders. Migration, globalisation, the media, supermarkets, freezers and microwaves didn’t exist for thousands of years and so regional food cultures evolved out of eating seasonal, local foods.

Where people seem to have gone wrong in identifying Australian food culture is by looking for one food culture to rule them all rather than letting many smaller, localised food cultures emerge. Even the true food cultures of the Indigenous Australians seem to have been reduced down to a “bush tucker” of witchetty grubs and wattle seed, quandong, honey ants, lemon myrtle and kangaroo, ignoring the full spectrum of groups living on foods specific to the coast, rainforest, arid grasslands and bush.

Other people have probably come around to this idea before, but I’ve only just articulated this thought: As Australians we should be looking to our immediate bioregions as a way of identifying the seasonal foods which will then shape a plurality of culinary cultures. We should be taking pride in our local brands, environment and farmers, recognising the layers of food cultures, both indigenous and immigrated and working out what grows best where and when. Once we know what plants and animals are best suited to our local regions we can learn how to cook and eat the foods that make up our food culture.

Currently I can identify only one type of edible wild mushroom and teeny tiny native cherries, but part of my longer term garden plan is to plant a couple of areas with indigenous plants including those suitable for food. In the meantime I’ll be feeding my summer guests Vietnamese cold rolls with seasonal vegetables (some coming from my garden), suggesting they drink Coopers’ beers, Bickford cordials and local wines to be be followed by Haighs’ chocolates and local fruits.

Maybe in two hundred years my descendants will be able to say with more certainty what dishes make up the contemporary Tandanya bioregional food culture, but right now I’ll just have to play it by taste.