Oh, and did I mention that we’re renovating an actual proper boat of our own?

In late October last year Tim surprised me with a spontaneous early wedding present he’d found on Ebay.

We’ve been daydreaming about a small sailing boat that we could take for more extended trips than Tim’s old GRP (fibreglass) sailing dinghy Bumst (Shag in German).  Something low keel, trailerable and suitable for a gaff rig. Cheap enough for the budgets of two creative types and with just a little bit of work we could do to bring the boat to a useful state.

Or so we thought. The Lisa-Marie who will eventually be renamed the Runcible Spoon is in many ways perfect and was purchased for a song, or at least the price of her trailer.  A German trailer that needs to be tidied up for registration in Austria. A boat in need of a new cabin top, painting all over, pushpits (the metal bit at the front – think of the film Titanic), the installation of a mast Tim had built on a workshop the year earlier…

And we got started with patching and painting the hull, only to find bits of rotten wood where water had collected, and even worse, rotten bits of the deck…

Luckily the weather has now warmed up and we’ve been able to take her outside at Time’s Up where we have more space to work. Needless to say the boat is taking up a lot of free time and is very dirty work.

But otherwise… Things go on.

Bread and Fire

Yesterday was made memorable when I met two women from Antalya, Turkey who were making flatbreads over a coal fired oven in a tent by their family’s vegetable garden.  This garden is one of my favourite in Linz as it’s maintained in a liminal space on the grounds of a concrete silo. I ride past it regularly and love seeing the growth in spring and summer on what would otherwise be unused ground.

It was even better to meet this family using this space in ways more than just tilling the earth. The women I met weren’t happy to have their photo taken and my mobile’s battery ran out so I couldn’t even photograph their stove: a coal oven with a domed lid specific for making flat bread and a very long chimney. We spoke together in foreigners’ German and I left with a gift of Peyniri Borek (cheese wrapped up in the bread) to chew on as I walked my bike home.

Yeast and Ginger

I ended up throwing away the Kombucha experiment as after two weeks, despite smelling good, there were no Scoby life forms visible present. I’ll probably order a proper Kombucha starter in August after the wedding has taken place and I’ll have the attention to maintain the growth of the next Mrs Rochester.

The desire to home brew interesting drinks is still ongoing and this morning besides roasting peppers, I brewed a ginger syrup to which I added lemon juice, coriander seeds, some cloves and a juniper berry. Tim and I are both fans of rum and the ginger syrup will be used to make a ginger ale substitute for both virgin and alcoholic summer cocktails.

Delicious. Now to give it a label and to buy some rhubarb for syrup making before elderflower season hits.

Maybe its something to do with spring, but I can finally speak in German with strangers on the street. 2012-04-09 17.51.04 (Photo credit: Fighting Tiger)

Until I moved to a foreign country, I didn’t really have a clear understanding of even the most basic of challenges that migrants experience and the loneliness and sense of frustration that can bring. Whether student or refugee, traveller or economic migrant it can be incredibly isolating to not understand a language and to not know how to connect yourself to a new culture, how to make others around  acknowledge you as a human being.

For those of you who’ve not lived in a country other than that of your birth, think instead of similar challenges. Remember the trepidation of being the new kid at school, or the struggle to fit into a new workplace. Learning a language, whether it be dialect, work terminology or slang is a major step to becoming accepted. What happens when other challenges such as mental illness, self confidence, institutional access, poverty or cultural circumstances prevent you from learning a language? What happens when these situations increase the feeling of shame that making mistakes and drawing negative attention to yourself can bring?

…

When I first moved to Berlin I fairly regularly made my way to German class for about 3 months. I eventually met my old flatmate Glenn amongst other lovely people in class and learnt enough German to survive. I could go to the shops and  give appropriate amounts of money in exchange for goods. After several weeks I was able to very accurately describe to myself what I was doing in the present.

Ich esse. Ich schlafe. Ich sehe fern.
I eat. I sleep. I watch TV.

I began to discover the more challenging aspects of German, things like cases which confused gendered nouns even more. And I could think in the past tense!

Ich bin aufgestanden.  Ich habe mein Rad gefahren. Ich habe einen Kuchen gebacken.
I woke up. I rode my bike. I’ve baked a cake.

It was a cold winter in 2009/2010 and the darkness plus the challenge of moving to a new country meant that many mornings, my warm bed (a mattress on the floor of various sublet rooms) was very comfortable. Given the choice of freezing my way across Berlin or lying in bed feeling sorry for myself, I chose the warm option.

Then, surprise of all surprises I was lucky enough to begin a proper job in Berlin and met a lovely man in Austria. Life got busy enough that committing to 4 mornings a week of German class was difficult.

So, officially learning German was put on the back burner until the beginning of this year. Now, over the intervening 2 years my vocabulary, particularly my passive vocabulary has increased. I spent more time in Austria with Tim and eventually moved here, expanding my knowledge in order to accommodate both dialect and strange accents. I could talk a little bit more in German with friends and listen to many of their conversations with general understanding. I stockpiled German language kids books (for later) and started writing shopping lists in German. Ask me however, to write a short email or describe a situation in German and I’d have politely avoided the request.

Aufweidersehen! Gibst mir ein bisserl.
See you later! Give me a little.

But in the last months things have changed. I’ve been back in German class 4 mornings a week for the last 2 months, and have only missed one lesson. While I’m regularly late to class, I’m still clamouring to learn more sentence structures and to speak in the conditional and future tenses with more confidence.

Most important is that in the last week a major breakthrough has happened. I’ve been having longer conversations out of English, but it’s only now that I’ve started writing emails, only of a couple of lines, but all in German to both friends and relative strangers. And, maybe this has to do with the advent of spring, but I’m finally feeling confident enough to start up conversations with strangers on the street and in shops.

This change is significant and it’s affecting more than just my German skills. I’m learning to be less scared of making mistakes and failure.

Speaking to strangers and complimenting their umbrella or asking the name of their dog may seem like a small step, but it opens up so much more possibility and joy.  Of course, I could continue to write emails in English, or presume that
the young woman in a green jacket will understand what I’m saying. How
long would it be though before I could speak to my elderly neighbour, or learn that the fat chihuahua is just visiting with the lady who’s taking it for a walk?

When I’m in Australia and other English-speaking countries, and finally now, here in Austria, I am reminded of how much delight it brings me and hopefully other people, to connect with them and acknowledge their presence.  It is I believe, one of those actions that makes a place neighbourly and a community and which makes one feel more comfortable and at home.

My friend in Finland, Ninnu had a similar tin that she and her family keeps sugar cubes in. I’ve kept my eye out for something similar for the last couple of years and finally found one.

I got this in a haul of stuff from the Mauerpark flea market in Berlin and the tin still had tea in it.

(How weird am I for continuing to drink the tea? It seems to taste okay and I’ve not been poisoned yet.)

I really want a bunch of these, but have not seen them for sale in Linz. So I stole these from a park.

Watching poppies open slowly, forgetting about them and then realising they have bloomed is one of my favourite things.

photoboothoctober, originally uploaded by Fighting Tiger.

1. I forgot to take my annual birthday photo. Whoops. So 8 days later here’s an extra special pic for my 31st.

2. A friend told me this great joke which involves hand gestures. I’m not very good at telling jokes, but I want to get good at telling this joke. Request it next time you see me.

3. I got a great job and neglected to say more publicly ‘yay!’ about it. In case you didn’t know I’m now working with the Mozilla Foundation and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) coordinating the School of Webcraft. It’s an awesome project which lets people learn web development skills for free in a peer based environment.

You really should get involved. Offer to lead a course, or participate and learn web skills alongside other lovely people.

4. 2 months ago (today) I got engaged to the man previously known as The Contender or the Bearded Maths Captain. You could now call him The Intended, or TiBo.

The Romantic Story: We got engaged on a dike in the Netherlands after a week of sailing. TiBo said “What do you reckon we get married?” and gave me a ring made out of aluminium pipe and LEDs. I almost fell over with happiness.

If anyone tells you that being engaged doesn’t feel any different to normal life, they are possibly not doing it correctly. Being engaged to TiBo feels amazing and sparkly and even better than the way life was before. I’m so happy that I’m going to spend the rest of my life with him.

Cycling around Kreuzberg can be so distracting – often unwanted (and sometimes usable) objects are left by the side of the road.

I found this clock on the way to work this morning. The plastic’s kind of sticky – I imagine it was in someone’s kitchen – but the font is so cute! I think that with a new battery and a wipe down this is going to be as good as new.

And quite reasonable we are to complain too. After putting up with Berlin’s winter darkness we’ve been left with even more cool and gray weather.  I’d managed to slog my way through winter thinking – “oh, in Spring it will be sunny and warmer and…” only to finally get to Spring and have the skies feel dark and foreboding.

The cool weather has been affecting my water consumption, which in turn has been affecting my mood even more, so I’ve been looking for ways to encourage me to consume at least 1.5 litres a day and keep hydrated and happy. For some reason I was thinking “pink lemonade” and then I saw this post from Stephanie of 3191 Miles Apart. Well, it’s not exactly lemonade, but it was pink, pretty, drinkable and i had some rhubarb ready to be used in my kitchen – so I made rhubarb syrup.

I’ve been told that the weather is all the fault of Bjork and other Icelandic peoples and volcanoes, but I chose to not spread my blame to Múm, who despite being Icelandic popped up on my iPod with an aptly themed song “Rhuubarbidoo”. And it’s such things that make you forget that the sky is gray.

I think the syrup is very sweet and only lightly flavoured – as such it could have been modified to include some ginger, or some extra citrus flavour beside a little bit of lemon rind.  But oh! The bottled syrup turned out a lovely pink and beautiful like a jewel! So the bottle deserved a label.

rhubarb syrup label, originally uploaded by Fighting Tiger.

I’m not sure what cheered me up the most, drinking some more water, listening to lovely music, making the syrup or painting the label!

Tim gave me some beautiful woodworking tools for my Christmas present and I finally needed the hacksaw today, not for anything big, but just to cut some timber to make a window box support. I’m already getting really excited about the plants that will grow on my window sill, but I’m also pretty excited to be using the tools.

I’ve been tardy in documenting the little boat that Tim and I built over the beginning of this year. It was an act of love and learning and freezing to build a boat in the middle of an Austrian winter. One of the things that I learnt from the experience is that I love working with wood.

The boat that we built is an 8 foot punt and she’s mainly waterproofed building plywood and cheap spruce and pine framing timbers. But still, even a boat made out of wood reinforced plastic is officially a wooden boat and I learnt many things when I was building her: How to use a jigsaw, an industrial belt sander, how to use every clamping device in a work shop, how to loft boat designs from a tiny sketch onto full sized timbers and most importantly how not to panic when something goes wrong. I already knew how important tea drinking was, but I’m even more sold on tea as both a warming and meditative device to help you approach a difficult design challenge. It wasn’t until I was almost finished with the project that I realised I was most of the way to ticking item 23 off my list of 100 things to learn.

A couple of weeks ago Stubby visited Berlin and while we were out with his friend Lars I saw a dilapidated dining table on the street. There’s a lot of curbside furniture in Kreuzberg, but mostly it’s chipboard furniture that has seen better days. This table however, had also seen better days, but underneath the cracks and poorly applied paint, the sad old table was solid wood and a lovely shape.

As a result of working on the punt, I felt confident enough to assess the work involved in the repairing the table. There’s some glueing and screwing to be done and I have to repair the crack across the top of the table before it can bear the label of eating or work “surface”. And that’s before getting to the prettifying stage of sanding and sealing. Still, the table showed promise so I made Stubby and Lars help carry the table at least a couple of kilometres back to my flat.

I’ve got a lot of work to do on the table, but what I’ve done so far just reminded me of the Time’s Up workshop and boat building with Tim, of my Dad and the projects he’s worked on. Most of all it started me thinking about all the wooden projects I’ll work on in the future too. Tables, yurts, at least one more boat – really, it’s so exciting!

Buttermilch-Orange, originally uploaded by Fighting Tiger.

You know that feeling when you haven’t really done enough study and you’ve got assignments due, and then your mother and stepfather announce that they’re arriving in Berlin 3 weeks earlier than expected (yes, tonight!) and your flatmate hasn’t been around to help clean the flat and it’s May Day tomorrow so all the stores are closed and you woke up with a tight back and headache as a result of the anxiety and almost threw up from the pain?

Well, maybe you don’t know that exact feeling, but I’m going to place great faith in your ability to feel for me in this situation. So once I’d had returned to sleep away the headache, and then made a token cleaning of my flat it was time to head to the Turkish Market to buy ingredients for dinner tomorrow (quiche and salad).

So I bought food and fabric and wandered back via the Glogauer Str bridge area to look in a junk shop which is conveniently sited opposite my favourite icecream store.

Fraulein Frost have some really amazing icecream flavours – including a great Cucumber, Mint and Lemon ice (Gu-Zi-Mi) that is perfect for really hot days. It was pleasantly warm today, not hot and I’ve already had Gu-Zi-Mi on several visits – so I took the chance to try the Buttermilch-Orange eis.

I mentioned in my last icecream post about quark and ricotta based icecreams – the inclusion of non-traditional dairy usually changes the texture and adds a certain acidity to the mix. I like sweet things, but I prefer the tang or bite that comes with bittersweet chocolate, fruit-based cakes and tart apples.

So buttermilch-orange had to be tried. The orange flavour was restrained and very natural, the buttermilk gave a lovely tang and slightly changed the texture away from being creamy or crystallised, but was more smooth.

And luckily, the walk and the icecream have helped ease the crazy of the day. Thank goodness – now I’m more capable of making pastry and heading off to collect the parentals.

That means a return to amazing icecream, beautiful green budding on the trees, sunshine streaming into my bedroom every morning, early waking as a result of all that sunshine and a feeling of achievement from waking up early.

So feeling energetic and inspired this morning I made rhubarb cake, because spring also means rhubarb. It was an easy, Finnish-style rhubarb cake based on a recipe from Nami-nami. It’s good to note that the cake is egg free, not for any diet related reasons, but so often I feel like baking after the shops are closed and am foiled in my plans by a lack of eggs in the flat. So, as long as I have rhubarb, or some other juicy fruit (berries, pears, plums and peaches come to mind) I can imagine that my evening and Sunday baking urges are going to be fulfilled.

But it was so sunny and lovely and the proper first day of tshirt weather that just making a cake wasn’t enough fun. I had to get outside and so I met up with Sabrina of Food And Footage to get some healthy walking and talking done. Then as we walked past the Brazilian/French hairsalon/patisserie on Gorlitzer Str I mentioned that they’re rumoured to have the best pastries in the neighbourhood. And we walked past another cafe and another which we’d never seen before (cafes seem to sprout like spring crocus in Berlin) and eventually all this walking and talking past cafes got to me. We needed to eat ice cream, or else we’d eat cake.

I have a theory that as long as you walk to get icecream, and walk while you’re eating your waffle cone containing only one scoop of icecream, you’re mostly healthy. And considering that good icecream goes for about 90c a scoop in my Kiez (hood), compared to cake and coffee and sitting down, it’s by far the healthier and cheaper choice.

Oh and the choice of icecream! There are some really weird sounding icecream flavours out there, and usually they taste amazing. I’m betting that the cucumber and mint ice I had last summer is going to be hard to beat, and I once had some amazing mung bean icecream in China.

So anyway, we’re walking and we know that Gemelli is nearby. And we detour because by detouring to get icecream we are actually walking away from our intended path and therefore getting more exercise.

I’d eaten my first ice of the season while in Vienna from one of the eissalon on Schwedenplatz, and only the day before had eaten my first Berlin ice of 2010 from Isabel over by the Admiralstr Bridge (Sesame with honey and toffee krokante pieces). I probably could have missed out on more icecream, but Gemelli’s is one of my favourite icecream cafes in Berlin and they usually do some type of quark based icecream that I love. Instead they had a ricotta plum flavour that I willingly chose and Sabrina went for a rosepetal dairy free ice.

Delicious. The ricotta kept the icecream really creamy and the plum provided a tart taste with a backdrop of plum brandy. Sabrina’s rose petal was delicate and clear and is what I imagine fairies eating. So yes, early waking, sunshine, walking, friends, icecream and talking.

Thank goodness it’s Spring in Berlin.