The little things in Berlin

Weather - has been AWFUL! It's rained for the last two weeks... pretty much non stop. This annoys me because I can't ride my bike... and of course after a while it starts getting to me and making me feel down. On the upside the outside of our windows get a regular wash.



- due to the weather I have taken our only good umbrella to work. This is the result... Let's play "what's wrong with this picture?" game :)

- as mentioned before I actually started work last week. I now work 4 days a week (mon-fri) at the same place Aperto. And I have an 'unbefristet Vertrag', basically a contract without an end date. Pay is not great but as Lena says "it's better than a kick in the teeth".

- this is a cup that they have next to the water dispenser in the Australian Embassy. Now just try to imagine how would one go taking one out from the bottom of the stack. It's not like it's very user-friendly by design. On top of being unable to get a drink I also managed to slice off part of a big toe on my right foot while I was re-parking my bike (after a serious looking security guard came out and said that one is now allowed to park a push bike outside the Aussie Embassy... I was very tempted to say that it wasn't an explosive type of bike, but held my mouth shut). Thus after hobbling through the scanner and bleeding all over their floor I said the following to the reception lady "Hi, I'm here to get a new PR Visa for my husband, and by the way, do you have a first aid kit?"... she was amused but passed a couple of bandaids and antiseptic to me through a tray thingie (prison style) in her door. Only afterwards did I realise that the Australian Government probably took my bloody tissues out of the trash and kept them for DNA purposes. Conspiracies!

- Jack has been spoiling me with flowers and right now we have at least five vases with at least six different types of flowers. *big grin*

- I've signed up to another german course at the Goethe Institut and taking the next level of German three nights a week. So far it's been great - the teacher is pretty good and we have an interesting spread of students... Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Ukraine, US, Spain, Iran, Australia/Russia, Lebanon... Viva Deutsch!