Jingle Bells, Batman Smells...

So it's Christmas spirit all around. Berlin is officially a Christmas-crazy town. We are pretty much surrounded by Christmas Markets and light-covered-trees. There's all sorts of chocolaty, marzipany goodies in the shops and people walking around wearing Santa hats. In the flats accross from us I think there are at least 50% of windows that have electricity-wasteful-horribly-blinking lights. But on the upside there are shops which are open on Sundays in December - that's amazing in this country!

Due to our slightly new-flat-everything-gone-silly lifestyle in the last couple of weeks, we haven't kind of actually seen each other. Yeah I know - we live in the same flat, catch the same train (but at different times of the day), and even poo in the same loo. BUT pretty much 101% of our conversations revolve around washing machines, colours of tiles, types of floors, our annoying mobile phone provider, colour of the new kitchen, colours of light switches (did you know they also come in gold, and some can be made of porcelain??????), our annoying electricity provider, etc. etc. etc. You get the picture.

This Thursday we decided to sneak out of this drastic cycle and went out on the town. We had dinner in a "totally a Denis type of place" Bulgarian restaurant which is tucked away on one of the corners of our big street accross from the Bulgarian Embassy. We were the first (and some of the only) customers, but that didn't matter. The food was great - yummy hearty soups, a cheese plate, a salad and a bottle of wine filled us up for taking a stroll afterwards. We walked to Brandenburger Tor and followed Unter den Linden towards Babelplatz and ended up at one of the Christmas markets next to the Opera. We got a Schokoball (it's this chocolate with pastry thing rolled into a ball the size of your two fists)... we had these at Rothenburg ob der Tauber back in 2004 and let me tell you - THEY ARE GOOD!!! And then seeing as the temperature dropped to something around 0, we had to have Glühwein mmmmmmmmm. Here are some pics from the evening...





Oh, and in case you didn't know, and I didn't either 'till about 5 mins ago, there's actually...

AUSTRALIAN JINGLE BELLS

cho: Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way,
Christmas in Australia on a scorching summer's day, Oh,
Jingle bells, jingle bells, Christmas time is beaut.
Oh what fun it is to ride in a rusty Holden ute.

Dashing through the bush in a rusty Holden ute.
Kicking up the dust, esky in the boot.
Kelpie by my side, singing Christmas songs,
It's summer time and I am in my singlet, shorts and thongs. Oh.

Engine's getting hot, we dodge the kangaroo,
Swaggie climbs aboard, he is welcome too.
All the family's here, sitting by the pool,
Christmas day the Aussie way, by the barbecue. Oh..

Come the afternoon, Grandpa has a doze,
The kids and Uncle Bruce are swimming in their clothes.
Time has come to go, we take a family snap,
And pack the car and all shoot through before the washing up. Oh..

Three Years?!!?!?!?!?!

just read this article on The Age, and it's fairly freaky if it's true...

"It has been revealed that the average female spends three years getting ready to leave the house. That's three years during their whole lifetimes, not just for one dinner party ...

Research found that the average woman took one hour and 12 minutes to prepare herself for a big night out. That's 22 minutes showering and removing unwanted hair, seven minutes applying moisturiser and fake tan, 23 minutes doing her hair, 14 minutes applying make-up, and six minutes putting her clothes on.

On top of that, the typical woman spends another 40 minutes a day getting ready for work and three months of her life choosing handbags and the ideal pair of shoes to wear."

Perhaps I should wear less make-up and spend more time doing something else... but what?! :)

Polina has gone into a poster frensy!!!

that's one good thing of being back at uni... and it's not 8am lectures... it's the poster sales. Man - I missed those. I remember buying my first Jim Morisson poster... ahhh... those were the days. I might've been under 20 back then... :)

well today I went crazy and bought four posters. I don't even know that we'll have enough wall real estate to hang them all up on... plus they need to be laminated.

hmm... the older guy who's also doing a bachelor is silling on the row in front of me (I'm waiting for a stats tutorial to start) and is burping... REALLY REALLY loudly... yuk!!!

Anyway... back to the posters... here are the smaller versions of the ones I got :)



PS: I got inspired by the second one there... it's huge... I think it's like 2 meters by 1,5 meters, or whatever the standard sized for posters are... oh yeah - they go by paper size.. so I think it's A1... 'Eating above Manhattan' is also A1 and the other two are A2.... mmmm posters

PPS: be sure to open the Mind Warp one... it's too freaky

Demolitian Man (the walls and himself)

So Saturday rolled around and we figured it would to be good to let out some built up tension from the week gone by, especially after Polina's good experience on Friday...

So the hammer, me and me wife beater got together and had a bit of a party, unfortunately the walls were built in different thicknesses, hence at one point the hammer went through easily. This is not really a problem, except that the bit where my hand impacted the wall, followed by the hammer handle not to mention a touch of momentum, was in turn much thicker. This combination basically caused my right index finger's bone to burst like a ripe tomato. This in turn caused an outburst of cursing and a trip to the doctor downstairs, seeing as he did such a good job on Polina the day before...

After we got back from the doctors I did a bit more hammer swinging, albeit left handed which is not really so much fun, but we wanted to get stuff done...

Then we cleaned up a bit, got the place stylish for our guest and had a bit of a building site shindig, was darn good to put a nice cold beer on that finger...

Seeing as the whole place is basically a ruin we bought some paints and let people get creative on the walls...

So that's life in the home renovation game two days, two wardrobes, four walls, two broken fingers and a case of beer...