things i love about berlin: part 1

red bicycles - white vespa

white vespa - take 2
ok, it may not be a vespa, but it's a cool retro scooter in any case.
and i want one.

the lamps

pretty street signs 

big hamburger street

more to come. but suffice it to say, i. am. in. love. with. berlin. it's like the apple or the nikon of cities. i really don't know why anyone lives anywhere else.

crocheting and blog camp and gratuitous yarn porn

learning to crochet granny squares

elizabeth and her family came to visit today and thankfully, they brought the sunshine with them. it actually hasn't rained here at our house since they were here. and that's a good thing. i'm really, really tired of this rainy, cold summer and could definitely use some consistent sunshine. especially as tomorrow is the solstice  and i would like to be able to see the sun in all its glory. so let's hope it holds!

beautiful crocheted basket liner by elizabeth + pears in the evening light of our terrace.

elizabeth is able to crochet anything she likes without the use of a pattern or most of the sight in her right eye. thanks to her expert tutelage, i am now crocheting granny squares with that yarn stash of which i have been so proud (see below). i hope to achieve elizabeth's facility with crochet one day, but at the moment, i'm having a few challenges figuring out exactly when it is you change colors (please tell me this is normal and if it's not, please keep the sniggering to a minimum) on the granny square, so i'm thinking they'd look quite nice all in one color. and do they really have to be exactly square?

yummy yarn stash

elizabeth brought a wonderful gift that's meant for the next blog camp, which is fitting, since it was one year ago today that we were enjoying the first blog camp! and the sun shined the whole time! so the danish summer is capable of being a good one. and i was supposed to have learned to crochet already back then.

back row: polly (who isn't polly) and marie (who isn't blogging anymore)
front row: b, me, sabin and extranjera

thinking of all of the good and creative people and things the blogosphere has brought to my life and feeling pretty grateful.  i think it's going to be a very good week.

* * *

oh, and since it's father's day, i wrote a little something to my dad over here.

digesting

i'm uncharacteristically silent. still savoring and digesting blog camp 3.0. the last of the blog campers departed this morning. it feels quiet and a bit lonely around here now. the energy level has settled down to a dull roar again, from the extreme heights it achieved on saturday evening.  i have a million thoughts and feelings about it all, but i'm definitely still mulling them over.

why is it that our words about the way in which we think our thoughts are food-related? savoring, digesting, mulling, chewing...as if thoughts are ingested and turned into nourishment for our souls.

my soul definitely feels nourished by blog camp 3.0. more about how when i'm done digesting it all....

blogging blog camp 2.0 - take 1

blog camp lived a little more up to its name this time around. at least the blogging part of it. because we (and by we, i mean spud) actually blogged at blog camp (tho' there was still no camping). it might have been the rain, which kept us indoors on saturday. it might have been that this time, i planned it that way - that we would have a relaxed day, where we could just hang out together and talk. we also actually did a little craft project, which was one of the original ideas behind blog camp - remember when we talked about everyone having a talent that they would share? that somehow got dropped along the way, but sabin remembered it and she insisted that we all make some small clay figures.

there's a great picture of the end result over on the blog camp blog. i somehow took an insufficient number of photos around the house on saturday, i was too busy flitting around, running to the grocery store, jumping on my bike to run to the station to meet kristina, trying to prevent husband from buying a chainsaw, making dinner, keeping the blog camp blend diffusing, burning up the biscuits, filling wine glasses (you get the picture). but i think somehow when it's your house, you just don't think about photographing stuff in the same way. because you're used to all of it. i'm really looking forward to seeing what pictures the others got and seeing my own surroundings anew. jelica and spud have already posted a few pictures that made me smile.

aside from sneaking out between showers to go to lunch at café le zinc, my favorite local cafe, we did spend most of saturday hanging out in the blue room (not to be confused with a bar in a little town in the upper midwest).  jelica's husband, ruslan, was a bit suspicious of us spending so much time in the blue room and suggested that we might be indulging in some odin cult ritual, but i actually suspect that he kinda wished he was here, sipping wine and discussing roland barthes as well. :-)

on sunday, as you can see above, we walked around copenhagen, snapping photos at every opportunity, eating a sausage from a sausage stand, drinking a coffee (what a surprise that was! not.) and perhaps even indulging in a beer at nyhavn (not a sailor in sight, unlike last time). spud had to depart first and we choked back our tears and let her go home to her megaboys, followed by anne a few hours later. jelica didn't leave until today (which was according to the original blog camp plan) and now she's on her way home as well, so i'm here in the quiet house, feeling a bit lonely and bereft and thinking about it all. because it's not easy to take it all in.

blog camp is really hard to explain and it really is true in some ways that you "had to be there." i exchanged some emails about that with an open heart this morning. she had gone to blog camp - reno and was finding it difficult to express how great her experience was. because sometimes words don't really express it. and that's a strange feeling for us bloggers, so stand by for more as the week progresses...

still basking in the sparkle of british blog camp

bee called it that fizzy feeling and spudballoo wrote about it too, but i think for me, it's more of a sparkly feeling that i feel when i think about blog camp. so the sunlight dancing on the oslo fjord when i took a little walk this evening after work seemed to embody the happiness i was feeling as i reflected on the weekend.

BBC was different than the first blog camp back in june. which isn't really that surprising, of course you can't duplicate your experience and you only ever have one first time. it was different for the obvious reason that it wasn't at my house, so i didn't have all of the worries about levels of tidiness and preparedness that i had the first time around. it was quite delightful to just get on a plane and be picked up at the airport and proceed to enjoy myself. and although i had butterflies as i came out to a waiting bee, it was just for a second and then it passed.

i guess i was just really much, much more relaxed. it helped that i knew B and polly and kristina already and that we just picked up where we left off the last time. it also helped that i got there a day ahead of the others and bonded with bee. the impatience of waiting for spudballoo made us quite antsy for the last half an hour or so, me constantly glancing over polly's shoulder and her jumping up to look out the window whenever bee's husband's game shook the house a bit from above (he's got some good speakers on his computer in his lair). but at last we saw this sight...

not a great picture, i realize, but i didn't take time to change to motion settings and just dashed out to capture the moment.

once spud arrived, it felt like things could really begin. bee had stretched out her lunch preparations (she is a brilliant cook and makes a really mean salad) and the timing was perfect. there was a big rush of words over lunch, as we all felt the intensity of being together and wanting to tell everything and ask everything immediately. looking back, i'm not sure any of us ever really properly took a breath, we were in such a rush to talk to one another.

maybe it's something the blogosphere does to us. we sit in our little lairs wherever they may be (mine's currently in a boring hotel room in oslo), tapping out our words and thoughts in isolation, but actually being quite social people. as bee put it, we're sociable loners, so although we are quite happy with our own company (as long as we've got a macbook and wireless (or maybe that's just me)), once we get together, we feel desperate to catch up on the social side of things. so out tumble the words in a huge flood.

this blog camp, as many of you - desperate for updates - noticed, didn't involve much blogging (or camping for that matter, not that we've ever meant camp in that sense). we tweeted some (those of us with iPhones - which was four out of six), but we didn't blog. and we had the password to the wireless and everything, but we were simply too busy talking. and talking. and talking some more. maybe it was also because we had one less day together than at the first blog camp and so we didn't want to "waste" any of our precious time together staring at our screens.

another of the joys of blog camp is, i have to admit, the prezzies. since i was sick the week before, i didn't get to make a present for everyone this time, but i did bring along some goodies - really special chocolate that i bought at the chocolate research facility (yup, that's the name of a posh chocolate shop) in singapore. the packaging was so beautiful (that's what's in the background of the picture in this post) i didn't need to wrap them, so i tied a little wooden viking ship that i acquired at the viking market the previous weekend around them and gave everyone one of the little scrabble tile necklaces that sabin went into overdrive producing a few weeks ago. i happened to have some little tags that said charming, intelligent, adventurous, humorous and inspiring on them and i stamped the name of the person who best suited those words on the back of each one. can you guess who got which one?

overall, with the second blog camp, i feel an evolution of the concept happening and i'm fascinated to see where it's headed. the first time, there was an element of performance to it and that was totally absent this time. we were all just being. enjoying being together. although we ate great food, drank awesome coffees and had glasses of lovely red wine, all of that was secondary to our just being together. really, truly present in the moments we had. sparkling. illuminated.

please do use the links above and go read what everyone else is saying about their experience. i'm sure that together we are capturing some of the sparkle and fizz that was.

that's a lotta palaver

i have spent my entire day getting to oslo. you'd think that would be quite difficult, in light of it being under an hour's flight away. sadly, it wasn't. everything that could go wrong did. metro issues, rebooking of original flight due to missing first one (see aforementioned metro issues), my bag (containing absolutely everything, since i didn't feel like carrying anything but my purse) took the flight after mine and i had to wait for it at the airport (during which time i almost collapsed from lack of food and latte), delays due to tracks under repair near the station i was going to once i got to norway....i could go on, but it's still too depressing and there's no sense all of us being depressed. at least it gave me plenty of time to do lots of processing (aka scribbling of thoughts in my little notebook) of the wonderful blog camp weekend. so i hereby totally change the subject to that.

on twitter, TFM dubbed BC 1.5 British Blog Camp or BBC, and we loved it, so it will hereafter be referred to as BBC, at least by me.  i was reading gail collins' column in the IHT this morning and she said something that resonated with me as i bask in the afterglow of BBC, "whenever anybody asks you to do something off the wall, you should try to do it - unless it involves being unethical or a two-plane connection." from all that i learned at BBC, i would have to wholeheartedly endorse this as a kind of general life philosophy (especially the two-plane connection part).

because if you think about it, going to a stranger's house in another country for the weekend is a bit off the wall. although we don't feel like strangers here in the blogosphere thanks to the very personal nature of blogs, there is still  chance that someone might present themselves as other than they are. however, i felt certain that i knew bee and that we had a lot in common and that she would be as i thought she was. and indeed it was true, only of course, even better.

from the moment i arrived and we greeted one another like old friends with a big hug, we didn't stop talking. i told her that the only thing on my agenda was to spend a bit of time in a bookstore. so we did that, after we had a lovely lunch and a long walk along the river in a town not far from her house. the whole time, we talked and talked. we told our stories. it was a bit like opening a floodgate for both of us. the words tumbled out. we hardly paid attention to our food, which was excellent or even our coffee, which was lovely.

when i think about it now, it was quite astonishing how much we both had to say. and how urgently we seemed to need to tell one another our stories. in person. i'm not sure why it was. in one sense, it was like a rush to catch up. even in the bookstore, i hardly wandered around, we spent a bit of time by the cookbooks (oops, bought four), but even then, we didn't stop talking and laughing and talking some more. it was quite extraordinary. a real palaver.

we'd had a late lunch and when we got back to bee's beautiful home, i settled my things into the cheerful orange room (which oddly enough, i failed to photograph, tho' that's for the best since it belongs to her very private daughter, tho' i will say it had a gorgeous orla keily duvet cover that practically leapt into my suitcase) and we had a cup of tea. as we chatted away about being mothers, the mysterious behavior of teenagers, the delightful behavior of tweens, schools, books, laura ingalls wilder, cookbooks (i bow to bee's collection, she beats mine by a long shot, tho' those four i bought helped a little bit). of course, we also talked about blogs and the ones which inspire us. funnily, enough, the blogs the two of us tend to read don't overlap that much, so i can tell you, i have a whole new list of wonderful places to discover.

while we chatted, in the back of my mind, i was thinking about the ways in which bee had both retained a lot of her americanness and also had absorbed a lot of englishness--the tea, the public (which are private) school talk, the driving on the "wrong" side, vocabulary. i found myself wondering in the back of my mind how much americanness i retain (i suspect it probably came out a bit in bee's presence) and how scandinavian i have become. because i think it's hard to tell about ourselves. we're so inside of ourselves, aren't we? how do we know? i was a little disturbed by the thought of exactly how far i now am from americanness (and how far i feel inside of me from danishness), because it leaves me with that strong, melancholic sense of what i always call that mid-atlantic feeling - adrift in the middle of the atlantic, not belonging (by choice) either place.

but that makes it sound like BBC made me sad, which is far from the truth. being together in person with these amazing women gave me so much energy (that was lucky in light of today) and so much inspiration and much to write about in the coming days. so stay tuned for more.

when we create things and release them into the world

it was not even two months ago that the idea of blog camp was born. and already, we've held the first one, planned the second and organized an emergency we-simply-must-get-together-again blog camp 1.5 in the UK in between the first two and we have 50 followers (!!) on the blog camp blog. on top of it, sara is planning a spin-off blog camp (note: this link is just to sara's blog, not a specific post on blog camp 2.1) in the US, to be held over labor day weekend, at the same time as blog camp 2.0 in denmark. there really is a snowball effect happening.

i think it's pretty amazing to see these small bits and pieces of the thoughts and ideas which we throw out into the blogosphere being caught and made into beautiful things all around us. and the fact that there are real people behind it all, making things happen, makes me realize that we are quite far from husband's theory that the internet will take on a life of its own (he's still waiting for the internet to do that first post on his blog).

and what's interesting to me is how organic it is (hmm, maybe this proves that husband is right)...with things growing and changing in a dynamic process all the time. i had an idea about how blog camp 1.0 would be and while it was, in some ways, how i imagined it, it was also very different. because you have to factor in the people involved. and now, we're having blog camp 1.5 with five of the same people from BC1.0 plus two more and i'm really excited to see how that changes the dynamic and perhaps even the concept. because it's difficult to predict anything when there are people involved. i'm certain only that it will be fantastic, but i can't foresee in what ways.

i saw a list yesterday of potential things to do at BC 2.1 (as we've dubbed it) in reno. and it struck me that a list of activities--none of which involved pajamas or blogging--was a new incarnation of the concept. although we did see the mermaid, for those of us at BC 1.0, it was really about meeting the people behind the blogs and doing some of the things--e.g. taking pictures and drinking lots of coffee and wine--that we love to do in the blogosphere together in person.

and after my initial confusion and a bit of wondering whether i hadn't been clear on the concept (i reread and i, in fact, had been pretty clear), i took a deep breath and realized that it was all ok. because we can't really know what will happen with the things we create and we have to be prepared to release them and let them become whatever they become to others who embrace those ideas. and i realized that was actually a pretty powerful thing.

and speaking of blog camp 2.0 - there are still a couple of spots, so please do let me know if you'd like to come! it'll be a blast and well worth the trip, i promise.

blog camp: different yet the same

there were a couple of moments at the beginning of blog camp, when we were wandering around copenhagen and i felt a little bit like this place was far too small. and that's because twice we ran into someone i knew. first, at the airport, we almost missed B and polly because i was talking to an old friend i ran into. then, at nyhavn, those crazy guys who had been working for some hours on their buzz before the ACDC concert (they actually remembered running into us, because the one i knew left a message on my wall on facebook that indicates he remembered!)

just to clarify these guys for all of you who were deeply confused by our strange posts during blog camp...guy on the left, friend of guy on the right (who i knew and used to work with). both were very drunk at 6 p.m. since they'd had quite a few beers and possibly some nasty licorice vodka during the four-hour train ride to copenhagen. they were going to attend an ACDC concert later that evening. guy on the left really wanted to play with my camera, but i wouldn't let him--he's also the one we pretended was seaside girl. at one stage, he took a little nap in his chair (next to polly), then suddenly woke up and burst into "singin' in the rain" (it was raining at that point), which seemed a little at odds with the whole ACDC concert thing.

* * *

the rain cleared and upon slipping free of the drunks gentlemen sailors above, we made our way on the train to my house. i was fine until we were two houses up the street from our house and then suddenly i had a major case of butterflies. the more i think about blog camp and how i felt leading up to it, our house was my biggest worry--whether they would like it. i'm not sure why that is, except that i feel it so strongly reflects who we are that i was worried that if they didn't like it, then they wouldn't like me.

when we arrived, husband had placed this stump and all of the axes in the household out front, which was great, because it broke the tension i felt.

he and sabin had also locked the doors and put up signs saying the house closed at 7 p.m. (it was by then 8:45 or so). they had left a little tray of sandwiches outside the back door, but apparently the cat had eaten them as only some tomatoes were left. somehow, i didn't manage to take pictures of those signs (i'm sure others did and hope they will post them), but they were quite hilarious. finally, they did let us in and we opened some wine and set about the business of picking places to sleep (we drew names out of a cup) and then ate a simple dinner of cheese and sausage and homemade bread and hummus. 

it was chilly from all the rain and husband had started a fire for us in the wood-burning stove in the blue room, so we moved out there for more wine and strawberries and cream and lots of laughter. we diffused some of the wonderful gingery-lemony "blog camp blend" of essential oils that the fragrant muse had been kind enough to send to us (among other things) as a special treat (more about that later today on the blog camp blog). and we laughed and talked about blogs and blogging and whether we were like our blogs 'til the wee hours. 

B has perhaps said it best on her blog as to whether we are like our blogging voices. and i feel largely that we were. the biggest surprise for me was polly, who is quite serious on her blog but is very funny and a bit more wacky in person. kristina didn't join us for the evening, having parted with us in copenhagen to go home to sweden, but we realized that although she blogs largely through images, those had given us a good idea of her voice--pictures really are worth a thousand words. seaside girl, who we had gotten to know better from her blog in the month or so leading up to blog camp, was very like her blog self, as am i (we know i don't hide that much of who i am here). i would say that extranjera was actually nicer than i expected her to be...by which i mean less sarcastic and cynical that she seems (for humorous effect, which we totally get) on her blog. as she said herself, "i'm really quite pleasant." and she is.

best of all, tho' was the way there was no one dominant person and no underdog. no one person was ever the single object of ridicule--it shifted nicely (me and the stains on my shirt, polly's posing, seaside girl's open mouth in all pictures, extranjera's crouching, b's closed eyes, kristina's butcher knife in the head). no one was albanienated at any time. and i didn't have to be mother hen and protect anyone from being left out/bullied. in other words, we were all totally cool, capable adults who rocked blog camp. yay for us! and frankly, i didn't really expect it to be any other way, tho' you do worry anytime you gather a group of women. i think five (sometimes six) was an excellent number--three is no good, then it's always two against one, but with five, there's always someone on your side (see evidence in the comments of this post).

in all, blog camp was a resounding success and i'd do it again in a minute. like in august in the UK, at bee's house (she apparently has a very cool and understanding husband as well). and then, of course, there's blog camp 2.0, right here at blog camp ground control in denmark. two of the four spots are spoken for, so check those ticket prices today! you don't wanna miss out on scenes like this:

blog camp: reflections on the beginning

when you plan for something big, you have all of this anxious build-up to it...both literally and in your mind. you imagine what it will be like and you plan for what it will be like. with blog camp, it was the same. only it was difficult to really imagine what it would be like. it was a little strange to think of meeting five people who i'd never met in real life, but felt like i knew through their blogs--what would they be like for real? what kind of chemistry would be there between the group? or, even worse, might there not be chemistry between the group members? yikes. so many thoughts.

with all of the personalities and talk of tiaras, would anyone be a prima donna? would we all be? would it make it insufferable? or would there be one nice person who got crushed under the force of stronger personalities? or would one person dominate totally? would the weekend go quickly or drag on endlessly? so many questions.

so, in the end, all i could really do to mentally prepare was get ready in the physical sense...house cleaned and tidied, beds ready for people to sleep in, food and drink supplies laid in. if the house was ready i would be ready.

and largely, i would say that i never second-guessed the decision to invite five strangers to come hang out at my house for a weekend. it was done a bit on a whim and quite possibly began as a joke on husband's part (he should know better by now), but i never regretted it, even if i couldn't really imagine what it would be like.

i headed for the airport on friday with good butterflies. i had a sense of trying to consciously preserve the "first time-ness" of the experience--because you only have one first time experience of anything. and it's not that often that you know you're going to experience something for the first time--most of the time, things just happen and they end up being the first time. this was a unique opportunity. i knew i was going to meet my blog camp friends for the first time. and that felt somehow special.

my only doubts as i headed there were, "oh dear, will i recognize everyone?" i thought i'd know extranjera and B and polly, but i'd never seen seaside girl or kristina, so i wasn't sure. we'd made a plan that i'd buy a little flag from each country and be standing there waving those and they would thereby find me. however, i got to the airport and realized i didn't know for sure what the flags of poland and spain looked like and the shop was out of all of the others! yikes! so, i'd have to hope they recognized me.

i saw kristina first, she was leaning against a big pillar near starbucks, where we had agreed to meet. although she didn't look as i expected, i knew it was her right away from the way she looked at me like she recognized me. she had spotted extranjera, sitting in the starbucks and we went over to greet her. we knew it was her from the murakami she was reading. (oops, still owe a discussion on that one on the hermit book club blog).

i'd had word from polly and B that their flight was delayed, but we knew that seaside girl would arrive soon from gatwick, so we went over to wait. we giggled quite a lot about how we would recognize her since none of us had much of an idea how she would look...we couldn't even really agree on what she'd said about her recent haircut. thankfully, she recognized us and came right up to us. we all immediately started laughing and headed back over to starbucks to wait for B & polly's flight to come in.

we chatted away, only having a couple of minutes here and there of wondering what to say next. but it helped that we felt we knew one another from our blogs. then, it was time for B & polly's flight. while we were waiting, we tried to catch a photo of a weird nu skin cult leader girl for molly's sake, but kept missing the opportunity (ok, it was me who was too slow to get out the damn iPhone at the right time). at last, just when their flight had disappeared entirely from the sign and we were beginning to wonder if they had had to report a lost bag, they came out. and we were off towards the train to the center of copenhagen.

i entered my usual chaos mode and it took extranjera and i quite a bit of discussion to determine how many tickets to buy and which color of clip card was best, but soon, we were on a train and stowing their bags at the central station in copenhagen so we could be free to walk around.

it was so much fun walking around the city, cameras constantly at the ready, seeing copenhagen anew through their eyes. and it was quite amazing how quickly any nervousness and awkwardness melted very quickly away. i suppose because we did, in many ways, know one another quite well through our blogs and everyone proved to be very like their bloggy self.

more later from the first evening...

in the aura of blog camp 1.0

i'm still basking in the afterglow of blog camp 1.0. it was a success beyond my wildest expectations (and my expectations were quite wild). i'm still processing all of the many thoughts and feelings that are tumbling through my brain but after two action-packed days, two very late nights and relatively early mornings in a row (and some lovely patron tequila), i am rather exhausted, so those will have to wait before tumbling out onto the page.

i came home from the airport just in time to grill sausages and halloumi and marshmallows with my family and then i retired to the upper garden with mma ramotswe (i've got the new one) and a glass of wine (yup, i could still drink wine). husband came up and sat with me for awhile, but soon, i was snoozing away. and my snooze turned into a two hour nap in the late-afternoon sunshine, lulled to sleep by the songs of the birds overhead. blog camp was pretty tiring. :-)

i'll be sharing some of the pictures/highlights/impressions/reflections all week, both here and on the blog camp blog.

but for now, thank you girls (and they were all girls, despite our little jokes trying to convince otherwise), for a beautiful weekend! be sure to visit B and extranjera and kristina and polly and seaside girl to see their impressions this week as well. and don't forget to check in on the blog camp blog, because we've got some post-blog camp 1.0 fun planned there. and if you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please ask them over there, so all can answer!