Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Frühjahrsmüdigkeit

In the vein of being incredibly late on things, or at least of catching up on things I meant to write about back when they were actually relevant...

I want to at least mention "Frühjahrsmüdigkeit."

(Picture: Springtime outside the planetarium in Berlin)


What, you ask, and quite rightly so, is "Frühjahrsmüdigkeit"? Literally, this translates as "spring fatigue" and all I can say is...it's a syndrome Germans think they get in early spring.

The idea is that, contrary to what you'd think (it's spring! new energy!), the transition from winter to spring is actually tough on the body, and leaves us feeling tired and drained of energy for a while, until we adjust to the strange new seasonal conditions of warmth and longer sunlight.

Zeit magazine suggests this is a real phenomenon (article in German). Germans will certainly insist it exists, and that it's the reason they're tired/having trouble concentrating/whatever else in the early spring. (One American acquaintance of mine jokingly excused himself for being particularly scatterbrained this spring with the words, "I have Frühjahrsmüdigkeit...whatever that is.")

So why do no other cultures seem to have this problem?

Germans will probably counter that, well, they live further north, and thus have more extreme shifts in length of daylight to contend with...yet I don't think I've ever heard Canadians or Scandinavians complain. Americans certainly pooh-pooh the idea – and I have to say, my part of the US may not be as far north as Germany, but we experience the four seasons far more intensely than anything Berlin ever gets.

Any thoughts? I really am intrigued: Is this a case of Germans being more in tune with their natural environment (often true) or a case of Germans maintaining weird superstitions long after you'd think an industrialized society would have discarded them (also true)?

I'll give the last word here to one poster on the language forums at the dict.leo.org dictionary (where there was, unsurprisingly, some disagreement on how to translate "Frühjahrsmüdigkeit") who suggested – with a wink and a nod toward the clichés of the German angst-ridden mentality [and I'm translating here] – "So, in other words, in Germany, autumn depression is followed by spring fatigue, interrupted only by a terrible winter – that's normal, isn't it?"

Sunday, May 27, 2012

England: Quite Nice

England: quite nice. England's Lake District: even better. Hiking in the Lake District: best of all!


Here's a very small sampler, with more to come (eventually).
 

Valley where we spent the night in a former shepherd's cottage, now Black Sail hostel:

 Setting out to climb another mountain:

View down to Buttermere (I think) after climbing Loft Beck:

Sunset from Black Sail:

Friday, May 11, 2012

Apologies Forward and Back

Dear readers, if in fact any of you are still loyally hanging on out there...

I'm sorry! I know I've fallen off the face of the blogosphere. In fact, I've been falling behind on pretty much everything lately.

It's not for lack of material...! I have a whole list of Berlin anecdotes I've meant to share with you. And I haven't even mentioned that I was in Spain for a week (Madrid and Andalusia) and in western Germany for a long weekend, to see some old friends.

Come to that, I still haven't even put my Senegal pictures in any sort of order – and that was January!

None of this will be happening just yet, though, because in about 10 minutes I walk out the door for my next trip:

England! Land of crumpets and rain and hiking through the Lake District, here I come.

After that, though, I really will be staying put in Berlin for a while, and then I promise to tell you some stories.