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.
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.
On Sunday we went a bit closer to the Dutch border. The tour in the Diersfordter forest led through a moor and dunes and we even saw a wild boar – thankfully only from behind.
After weeks of gray and rainy winter weather, the forecast promised a beautiful weekend in January – with cold temperatures, clear sky and sunshine. So we decided to to check out two tours from Komoot’s “20 best hikes in the Ruhr Area” collection.
Prepared with long johns, a hip flask filled with grappa and the best handmade sandwiches we walked around some lakes and a stream near Bottrop called Rotbach. Here’s the route and here come the photos:
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).
A few weeks ago I opened a box in my bedroom that I hadn’t opened in quite a while. I found an old analog Olympus SLR camera. It was loaded with a Kodak T-MAX 400, only a few pictures were left. So I rewound the film and had it developed. Almost the whole roll is filled with photos from a bunch of flowers. But one showed a Swedish advertisement on the side of a building. By googling I found out that wall is/was in Malmö. I have no idea when I was in Malmö the last time – I guess it was around 2004/2005. So here are some very grainy, blurry, badly scanned, almost fifteen years old photos.
