jottkah

Lots of walks and a few bike rides. Seeing noone but the cats.

I am so behind on posting again, but finally here’s my VSCO Roundup from March. If I had posted this at the beginning of April, I probably would’ve written about what a strange month March was. And it sure was – but in retrospect it was just the beginning of the new normal. In the first days of March there was a Big Thief concert in Cologne and although Corona was already a thing and we thought it might not be the very best idea to attend the show, we still did and so did one thousand other people. Thinking about it now feels like it happened in a completely different time and world. I started working from home (which I still do) and taking walks during lunch break to see all those little masked ghosts who startet to appear on almost every wall in Dortmund.

There are hardly any photos from February. It’s always gray and dark and raining. Winter in Germany can be so annoying. So is the camera of my new phone. Actually it’s already a few months old, but I’m still angry at how bad the image quality is.

I didn’t do a single VSCO Roundup in 2019 (because I didn’t post anything on VSCO, either) and I was very unhappy with that. When I think about the past month it’s usually something like “There was work and … boring stuff … and riding delayed trains … and more work.” But when I look at the photos I am reminded that I did some really nice things, too. I really missed that the last year. So I want to get back to the routine of having a look at the good things. In January 2020 those were – among others – fluffy cats, long hikes and beautiful sunrises.

Edit: After I posted this I realised there were some more pictures from January … another hike and some gloomy shots in Dortmund.

In December there was a tiny little bit of snow for a few hours. I met a cat on the street and watched Fritzi watch out the window. We bought a Christmas tree (we did not cut it ourselves, though) and went to see an exhibition at NRW Forum in Düsseldorf: the elephant video is “Play Dead” by Douglas Gordon, the fantastic photo with legs and mirror is by someone else, whose name I’m unable to find out right now.

Not much going on in November.

And here’s the rest from October, which isn’t much. But at least there’s Nino, looking wise and mysterious.

Get ready for a huuuuuuge post! In October we spent a week on São Miguel, the biggest island of the Azores, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. We were hoping for a relaxed holiday: a little hiking, a little hanging around the pool. As it turned out, we couldn’t even use the pool once because it was raining and storming so heavily most of the time. Instead we hiked a lot and got wet a lot and were happy about our backpacks’ raincovers and fast drying functional clothes a lot.

I also took tons of photos with my “real” camera, but as usual, I haven’t even looked through them yet. So let’s start with the VSCO pictures from that trip.

Another great thing happened in September: we spent a weekend in Paris with friends. By train the trip only takes about an hour longer than to Berlin – I really don’t know why we haven’t gone there earlier. I had been in Paris once before, about 25 years ago. (I feel very old now.) At the time I had just learned a tiny bit of French and was able to say “Monsieur Cartier entre la salle de séjour.” Turns out, I can barely say any more than that today. All those years of French at school for nothing. Merde.

We strolled through Le Marais, drank beer, watched Julien Baker play a show, were happy about the rainbow crosswalk in the queer quarter, made photos with fingers atop the Louvre pyramid (which will never be published), held hands near the Seine, looked at the Eiffel tower, and wondered why Paris is called the city of love, when it should clearly be the city of piss smell.

January 2019 is almost over and I’m still stuck in September 2018. :-(

But it’s nice to look back especially to that month, because so many great things were going on. I even had to split the post since there are so many photos.

September started with a canoe trip on the river Niers. Next was an evening of “Kegeln”. It’s a bit like bowling, but not really. The most important things about Kegeln: it happens in the basement of shady pubs, everything is brown and straight from the 60s, you drink a lot, you have sore muscles the day after, and it’s a lot of fun. A weekend after that we did the Rapha Women’s 100. Women all over the world ride 100 kilometers on their bikes that day – and share the photos and experiences with the same hashtag. (Here’s our Instagram post including the route.) Then there was the Way Back When Festival (which was quite disappointing this year) and a workshop for mushroom picking (which was very nice despite not finding even one edible mushroom and both of us stepping into huge piles of dog shit).