Lots of great things happened in May, so there’s a ton of photos coming up. I made trips to Frankfurt and Berlin, I hiked and swam and biked a lot (for the first time in my life on the Tempelhofer Feld, which was really amazing. I want an abandoned airport in Dortmund, too!), I patted a donkey, I found lots of really strange window decorations, I drank beer in rooftop gardens, I spent early mornings at train stations and I saw some beautiful light (and shadow).
April went by pretty fast. The best thing about last month was a weekend at the beach in the Netherlands: wearing sunglasses, holding bare feet into the sea, flying a kite, walking through the storm (I still got sand in the pockets of my jacket), drinking beer, and eating frietjes, of course.
I hardly took any pictures in March because life happened, I guess. What I took pictures of: Munich airport, an illuminated grand piano at the Konzerthaus Dortmund, one of the chestnut trees growing on my balcony.
February was filled with lots of bad weather, a short trip to the Netherlands, a Tegan & Sara concert and an orange escalator.
Diana and I are doing this project called Samstag ist Badetag where we make stuff on Saturdays. This year we decided to challenge ourselves a little more and add a monthly task, which has to be presented as some kind of zine at the end of each month. The topic we had chosen for February was “Lokal”, which means “pub” as well as “local”. So I decided it would be cool to make it very local and just walk along the street I live in and take some photos. Maybe add some infographics (how long is the street, how many people are living there, how many piles of dog shit are there, …) and make a nice booklet out of it. So I went on a walk on a freezing morning, took lots of photos, got asked why I did that and whether I wanted to break in (yeah, even if – guess I wouldn’t have told you, nosy neighbor!), selected and edited photos all day long. When I wanted to start layouting the whole thing I checked again how many pages we had decided to do – and realized, that we had also decided to only use two colors, red and black. So my whole photo idea didn’t work anymore and that’s why I just post them here.
In January I spent a weekend in Bremen, took long walks in and around Dortmund, and saw some ducks sliding around on a frozen lake. Also I read lots of news. And worried. A lot.
Jokkmokk’s pretty small, there are less than 3,000 inhabitants. So strolling through the city is quite a short pleasure, but it is one nevertheless. The whole city is covered in snow, not even the sidewalks are cleared. The streets are wide and light and the buildings are painted in beautiful colors. There are huge candles everywhere and in front of shops they have iron baskets with a real fire inside. (Something that would be completely impossible in Germany).
I was quite surprised by the rainbow flag in the middle of town – wouldn’t have expected that in a really tiny town at the end of the world. But it’s good to see that there obviously is queer life around the arctic circle. (Well – or I’m getting it all wrong and someone just liked that rainbow sticker. ;-))
My favorite photo is the one where the yellow snow perfectly matches the color of the building.
Funny things happen when you go on a walk at -24 °C (-11 °F). At first your nose starts tickling because the hair inside freezes, then you get tiny ice clumps on your eyelashes and eyebrows. Hair that’s sticking out of your beanie freezes as well. You could probably break yourself a new haircut (hairbreak?).
That’s what I learned when I took a walk around Talvatis, a lake in Jokkmokk. I also learned that even though sunrise is at 10 and sunset at 1, it’s not as dark as one would think. (Okay, it’s probably worse on cloudy days …) It’s like dawn and dusk merging into another for hours and the light is incredible.
