An uneventful day, mostly spent in front of the computer. Only excitement: a workout at the gym in the evening.

Clothes swop treasures.

Had fries at the beach before watching Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Great evening with friends. Nick cooked an awesome meal, afterwards we had heaps of fun making balloon animals.

Also today: I’m very happy more friends joined the Foto Feb challenge (yay for having really cool friends!):

• Kai
• April
• Jennifer

A couple of weeks ago Kai managed to grab us some grab-a-seat tickets and I took a random day off today today to fly to Nelson. Unfortunately Kai had to go to Australia on short notice, but luckily Nick jumped in and made a fantastic stand-in husband. We did really awesome things:

• Beatlemania Exhibition at ART@203
• DIONOIA: A Diorama of Paranoia Exhibition at Suter Art Gallery
• Geocaching at Queens Gardens
• A visit to the ‘Centre of New Zealand‘ (see picture above)
• Lunch at Lambretta’s cafe (beware: awful website!)
• Ice cream at Penguino (awful website too!) – I tried their lavender honey gelato, which was really good
• Founders Heritage Park

Great day. Great company. Great escape from rainy & windy Wellington for a random mid-week day.

Just recently I convinced my friend Nick to do the exact same challenge, and it has been great fun reading his answers. Now that his 30 Days challenge has successfully been completed, we started wondering if we should come up with something else which would encourage us to blog every day. And while I would love to do the whole 30 Days of Me thing again to compare how I would answer the questions today – some things have changed, some topics I would write more about, I have more photos I could add to the posts, etc – but I really can’t commit to a full blown blog post every day. It’s summer after all, and I don’t spend much time at home in front of the computer these days.

This is how Foto Feb was born! During the whole month of February, Nick and I will post a photo of something that happened during the day every day on our blogs. There won’t be many words around it, just a sentence or two to give you some context. Some of it will be exciting such as summer parties, BBQs, beach days, pics of friends or food, animals, cute kids, lunch times in the sun, mini holidays, a wedding (!) and plenty of more awesomeness. But be prepared to also find boring work related images like business meetings, my desk at the office or walks in the rain.

I hope you’re looking forward to it. I certainly am!

Ich blogge gerne. Mir macht es Spaß unsere Erlebnisse online zu teilen und ich gehe auch gern zurück und lese alte Einträge – in gewisser Weise hat das Blog für mich auch eine Art Tagebuchfunktion. Trotzdem blogge ich nur selten, raffe mich nicht wirklich auf um mich hinzusetzen und etwas zu schreiben. Natürlich habe ich mich gefragt, warum das so ist. Einerseits sind ganz bestimmt Twitter und Facebook dafür verantwortlich. Was ich in 140 Zeichen in dem Moment in dem es passiert sagen kann, sage ich in 140 Zeichen in dem Moment in dem es passiert. Fotos, die ich mit Freunden teilen möchte, lade ich zu Facebook hoch, denn dort kann ich andere Personen in meinen Bildern taggen, und meine Freunde können jedes einzelne Bild oder Fotoalbum kommentieren oder ‘mögen’. Das gibt mir Feedback, das ist interaktiv, das macht Spass. Doch für längere Einträge im Tagebuchformat sind Twitter und Facebook ungeeignet.

Mit meinem letzten Eintrag, Happy happy happy, ist es mir dann klar geworden: mit ist das Übersetzen zu zeitaufwendig. In der Regel schreibe ich meine Einträge auf Englisch – das ist die Sprache in der ich lebe. Ich arbeite, spiele, lese, schreibe, denke überwiegend auf Englisch, und es fällt mir manchmal echt schwer, die passenden deutschen Worte zu finden. Sobald der Eintrag fertig ist, mache ich mich ans Übersetzen. Beim letzten mal jedoch war ich zu müde. Ich wollte es nachholen. Ich wollte mich später noch einmal hinsetzen, und die Übersetzung nachliefern. Das ist jetzt sechs Wochen her. Ich habe es nicht gemacht. Und? Es hat niemanden gestört. Niemand hat mir Emails geschrieben und sich beschwert. Niemand hat einen Kommentar hinterlassen, um zu fragen wo der deutsche Eintrag bleibt. Es stört also niemanden, wenn ich nur auf Englisch schreibe.

Ich denken einfach mal, dass heutzutage die meisten meiner Leser eh über gute Englischkenntnisse verfügen, um zumindest den Kern eines jeden Eintrags zu erfassen. Zusätzlich (und für diejenigen die kein Englisch verstehen) gibt es Google Translate, eine Online Übersetzungsmaschine, mit deren Hilfe sich alle Einträge einfach übersetzen lassen. Die Übersetzungen sind in der Regel relativ gut, und da ich den meisten Einträgen auch Fotos hinzufüge, sollten eigentlich alle Texte zumindest grob zu verstehen sein.

Ich werde also mal das Experiment wagen – von nun an gibt es Blogposts ausschließlich auf Englisch. Oder findet Ihr das zu radikal?

Trotz allem wünschen Kai und ich Euch ein tolles Jahr 2012! Bleibt gesund, seid nett zu einander und passt auf Euch auf! Happy New Year!

Those who have been reading our blog for a while now have seen it going through a couple of changes already. It started as extension of our wedding blog at www.dianeundkai.de when we moved to New Zealand in 2005 – many short updates (sometimes even written by Kai), always in German and usually quite regularly. When more and more of our English speaking friends started reading, I started writing all posts in both German and English. Later we moved the blog to the current URL and the time between posts got longer and longer.

I love blogging. I like sharing our adventures online and I love going back to older posts – in a certain way the blog has developed into some kind of diary for me. Still, I rarely blog, I don’t really sit down to write new posts, although a lot of things happen which would be worth sharing. I started wondering why that was. Sure, Twitter and Facebook play a huge role in my blogging apathy. If there’s something I can tell the world in 140 characters when it actually happens, I will tell the world in 140 characters what is actually happening. If I want to share photos with friends, I upload them to Facebook, where I can tag people who are in the same picture with me, and where friends can easily comment on photos and ‘like’ them. I’ll get timely feedback, it’s interactive and it’s fun. But for longer posts in diary format both Twitter and Facebook are not suitable.

With my previous post, Happy happy happy, realisation finally kicked in: the translations are too time consuming. Usually I write my posts in English – that’s the language in which I live.  I work, play, read, write, think mostly in Englisch, sometimes I find it quite hard to find the right German words. I often have to look up certain expressions I use in English, but can’t remember the equivalent in German. Usually I start translating as soon as I finish a post, before I even publish the post. But last time I was too tired. I wanted to do it later. I wanted to sit down again and deliver a translation. It’s been six week since I published that post. The translation never happened. So? No one was upset. No one sent me an email to complain. No one left a comment, wondering when the translation would finally be available. No one cares if I write in two languages or just one.

I think the main reason is that most people nowadays have enough English skills to understand at least the core message in each post. Additionally (and especially for those who have never had any exposure to the English language at all) there is Google Translate, a free translation service which usually delivers reasonably good results. I guess especially with the fotos I usually add to each post, this should be sufficient to understand what we’re up to.

So, here’s an experiment – from now on I’ll only blog in English. Or do you think that’s too radical?

Anyway, Kai and I wish you an awesome year 2012! Stay healthy, be nice to yourself and to others & take care! Happy New Year!

Happy happy happy

Last Friday I turned 37. There’s nothing special about turning 37. It’s not a big exciting ‘zero’-birthday, and it’s certainly not an age that allows me to legally do something I couldn’t do before. But still it was one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had. Here’s why:

When Kai had to plan his last couple of trips to work onsite with his client in Southport/Australia before the end of the year, it was an easy decision to let him be away over my birthday and to go over for the weekend to celebrate in the sun instead. So for the first time in 19 years I didn’t get cake & candles, presents and a song at midnight. I wasn’t even awake at midnight. I went to bed early the night before my birthday, so I could wake up early and be a happy, non-sleep deprived person in the morning.

My flight to Brisbane didn’t leave before lunch time, so I decided to start the day with a breakfast with friends in town. I met Cathy, Helen, Teresa and Nick at Finc – which made it an absolutely perfect start into the day –  and when everybody went to work, I drove back home, grabbed my luggage and made my way to the airport. A couple of hours later Kai picked me up at the train station in Nerang, and my short but sweet holiday began.

We did all sorts of relaxing things while we were at the Gold Coast: walks along the beach in daylight, walks along the beach at night, shopping in Robina, coffee in Coolangatta, a trip to Aldi and we also rented a plane to fly up and down the coast. The time difference between Queensland and New Zealand is three hours. I didn’t want to get too used to the new time zone, and because it gets dark quite early in the evening over there, it was easy for me to go to sleep at 9 pm and get up again at 5 am. In case you didn’t know: 5 am is an awesome time to go for a walk in the park. The Nerang River was very close to our apartment, so I went out for a morning walk and to spend some time on the playground before most people even got out of bed.

‘Wait, playground?’ you might ask now. Yes, playground. There’s hardly anything in the world that I love more than being on the swings on a playground. I used to have a set of swings in our garden when I was a kid, and I still went out swinging everyday when I turned into a teenager. I could do that for hours and hours while listening to music and thinking about just anything I needed to think about. Sunshine, rain, snow. My swings were important, they gave me space to clear my head, to solve problems, to rehearse conversations I was planning to have with friends, or fights I was about to have with my parents. They made me happy. Then, one day, they were gone. My parents had decided that I was getting too old for swings and my dad had just disassembled them, they no longer existed. Anyway, I’m getting side tracked, sorry…

While I was swinging on the playground in Southport, with lorikeets flying over my head, I did what most people do on their birthday: I thought about my last year. I had a pretty good year, I must say. My 2010 birthday was the first day I was allowed to leave the house after my back surgery. And although I had to go through endless hours of rehab afterwards (and am still working on getting stronger), I have been pain free ever since. Well, apart from two or three little setbacks, but that’s a minor nuisance, and last time it happened was doing a weird sideways twist reaching for luggage on a holiday trip. I’m happy to ignore that one and pronounce myself healthy.

While swinging on the playground in Southport in the sun (yeah, it’s pretty sick that the sun is out at 5.30 am over there!) I was happy. Just happy. Warm, cosy, comfortably happy. I’ve been very happy for quite a while now, the longest period of uninterrupted happiness I can actively remember. I closed my eyes, took deep breaths, swung backwards and forwards, sang along with my favourite songs and every time I opened my eyes I saw people walking by, looking at me with big smiles on their faces. Who knew that seeing a chubby 37 year old randomly swinging on a playground could make people smile? Not even in an evil ‘look at this crazy bitch’ kind of way, but in a ‘how nice to see a happy person’ kind of way. Magical.

While swinging on the playground in Southport, with random people smiling at me, I once again realised how lucky I am. I live a great life, with the best husband in the world. I have the best friends ever (both in NZ and the ones I still have in Germany), I love my job, and I’m healthy again. Wellington is a great place to be, and if one day we don’t like it anymore, we’re free to go wherever else we want to.

While swinging on the playground in Southport, filled with happiness, I also realised that not everyone in the world has reasons to be happy. I wish they had.

On the way back to the apartment I came across a big sun and the wording ‘have a happy day’ on the footpath. I knew I would have a happy day. Many happy days. And I had to think of a toddler I know, who deeply impressed me when I saw him on a day he was extremely happy, just a few weeks ago. He threw his little arms up in the air, started running (not caring that his wobbly legs might let him down any second) and just shouted ‘Happyhappyhappy’. Sometimes I feel like I should do that too. It seems to be a very appropriate way to express happiness. I hope you’re happy too.

Das klingt alles viel stressiger als es in Wirklichkeit war. Wir haben wirklich jede einzelne Minute in Deutschland genossen, waren aber auch froh, als wir uns auf dem Heimweg wieder in die Sessel im Flieger sinken lassen konnten.

Germany

Four days in Germany. On our arrival day we went to see Kai’s parents before heading towards Essen, where we met my lovely sister Gabi and my nephew Stefan. The next day my dad got married and from one minute to the other I gained new siblings, an aunt, another grandma plus heaps of other new extended whanau members. The following day we visited my dad and his new wife at their place, before we moved on to a Hey-we’re-her-meet-us-at-Starbacks event, organised through Facebook. Sooooo many of my favourite friends came to see us, wow! The same night we went shopping (think about the largest mall you can imagine and add opening hours until midnight!) and were totally exhausted when we finally fell into our beds. The next morning we went back to Kai’s parents (including a quick visit from Corinna and her ‘fresh’ new baby daughter – awwww) and before we could even start to think about it, we were already on our way back to Singapore. At some stage in between we drove by the Essener Verrichtungsboxen (beware the wonky translation through Google translate) – a concept that still fascinates me.

This sounds way more stressful than it actually was. We’ve enjoyed every single minute in Germany, but we were also quite glad when we could sit down in the plane for the journey back home.

Na, dann will ich mal loslegen: der Urlaub in Singapur war super. Sommerwetter, freundliche Menschen, Urlaubsstimmung – mehr kann man sich kaum wünschen. Wir haben es uns in den drei Tagen auf dem Weg nach Deutschland und in den zwei Tagen auf dem Rückweg richtig gut gehen lassen. Wir waren shoppen, im Zoo, im Skypark auf dem Dach des Marina Bay Sands Hotels und haben die kleine Flucht aus dem Winter richtig genossen. Singapur ist definitiv auf der Liste der Orte, an denen man ruhig mal ein wenig mehr Zeit verbringen kann.

Singapore

Has it really been four months since my last blog post? And already six weeks since we’ve returned from our trip to Singapore and Germany? Oooups,

Well, here’s a quick summary of our time in Singapore then: summer weather, friendly people, holiday mood – you can’t ask for a more awesome holiday. We really enjoyed the three days we’ve spent over there on the way to Germany and the two days on the way back home to New Zealand. We went shopping and to the zoo, and we’ve spent some time at the Skypark on the roof of the Marina Bay Sands hotel. Singapore definitely made it onto our list of places where to spend more time in the future.