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?"

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:

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.

More Aprilwetter

Now it's actual-snowing! April in Berlin is my new favorite weird thing!

Aprilwetter

As I write this, outside my window in Berlin it's both blindingly sunny – and hailing. Last week, we had a day where it rained, sort of slushy-snow-rained and then also hailed, but all interspersed with periods of bright sunlight.

In German, fittingly enough, they call this "Aprilwetter" – April weather. When my students try to use the phrase in English, I tell them we don't exactly use that phrase, but might just call it typical spring weather.

Anyone care to weigh in on whether I'm correct? This is the kind of thing where, the longer I live away from the U.S., the less I can claim to be 100% sure about what we "actually" say.

(Or, in Ohio for example, we just called it typical Ohio weather! I'm sure in England, Scotland, etc. they say the same but, you know, for England or Scotland or etc.)

Lisbon Layover

Well, it's still going to be a while before I get all my Senegal pictures together, but it the meantime allow me to present: the Lisbon Layover!

On my friend Kap's advice, we flew Air TAP to Senegal, through Portugal. This was supposedly cheaper than anything we could have got from Berlin, though once you factor in the trains to and from Hamburg (the city we flew out of) and the time spent in Lisbon on our layovers, I'm not sure if it's strictly true.

But it doesn't matter, because between the length of the layovers (about 6 hours when we first flew through together, and a full 12 hours when I flew back in on my own after Senegal) and the fantastic, fast bus link into the city from the airport, this meant – I actually got to see some of Portugal! A place I'd never been before.

On our first layover, we took the airport bus into the city and wandered up to the Alfama (Lisbon's old town, and conveniently the only thing I even knew about Lisbon beforehand), poked around, then had dinner and the obligatory famous pastry, the pastel de nata, before heading back to the airport for our late evening flight to Dakar.

On the way back, I had even more time, a full day, so I took the bus into Lisbon but then continued on straight out of town by train. Kap had recommended the town of Sintra, which is apparently a top day trip destination out of Lisbon.

And with good reason, because Sintra is home to the coolest castle I've ever seen. And remember, I'm not even particularly a castle person. (Except in Scotland.) This place – the Moorish Castle – was just fantastic. Like an enormous stone playground (please don't consider me historically insensitive when I say that...) but better, way better. Words don't do it justice and pictures probably don't either, but here are a few:

Click on the image to go to the album!

Lisbon Layover

Moderate Climate and Unsophisticated Cuisine

Aw... The "International Placement Services" at Germany's Federal Employment Agency try to entice skilled workers to Germany with a description that begins thus:

"Moderate climate, a regionally diverse cuisine (though not exactly renowned for its sophistication), a varied landscape with coasts and mountains, any number of famous historic and natural monuments..."

Just makes you want to up and move here, doesn't it??


(The translation crossing my desk today is about skilled workers from countries-in-economic-crisis like Portugal finding jobs in Germany, and the relevant background research led me to this.)

Duct Tape, or Failing at the Small Things

This is the reality of living your life in another language, no matter how fluent you become:

At some point, you find yourself standing in a hardware store and realizing that, while you can successfully communicate the concept "I need to fix my floorboards down more firmly because they squeak when walked on, but the nails that hold them in place are already so deeply sunk into the wood that a hammer can't reach them, so I need some kind of small, thin metal piece I can put on top of a nail to then hammer on that instead of on the nail directly" and yet at the same time you don't know the word for "duct tape."

And you stand there and ask yourself, Do I really want to submit myself to the humiliation of playing the describing-and-guessing game for something as basic as duct tape? Or am I going to slink out of here, consult a dictionary, and come back another day?


(To be fair, part of the reason I don't know the word for duct tape is that Germans never seem to USE duct tape. And for those desperate to know how the story ends: I did a second, more thorough pass through the store and eventually found the heavy duty tape on a shelf near the back, thus saving myself both the humiliation of asking and the extra trip to the store!)

Map Nerd Discovers Map Nerd

This could be dangerous...to my own amount of time spent reading things online, I mean.

I've recently discovered the "Borderlines" blog on the New York Times website, where author Frank Jacobs – as his byline says – "writes about cartography, but only the interesting bits."

As a Europe-dwelling person who likes countries and maps, I particularly enjoyed this installment: "Where Is Europe?" As in, where are the borders of the European continent, and how do we decide?

The careless way people use "Europe" as synonymous with the European Union has always bothered me (So Ukraine or Croatia don't even count as Europe now? It's bad enough that map makers often don't even include all of Eastern Europe on European maps...) but this article puts that in the larger context of what has been considered "Europe" over time – from the name's original usage for a small bit of land near the Dardanelles, to the political connotations of "Europe" being wherever the Ottoman Empire ended, through various attempts at establishing some sort of logic to where, geographically, Europe ought to end and Asia begin...and back to the politic aspect, with the E.U.

Except he explains it all much more interestingly than I managed in that summary!

Drowning in Bubble Tea, the Addendum

Just so you can see I wasn't kidding...

This is a random and utterly non-exhaustive sampling of pictures taken on a single evening's walk home through Prenzlauer Berg. As far as I can tell, none of these places existed a month ago, or if they did, they were other types of cafés, with no mention of bubble tea in sight.

What's going on, Berlin??


Gleimstraße:


Prenzlauer Allee:


Schönhauser Allee:


Hufelandstraße:


Pasteurstraße:



Not to mention the parents-and-children oriented café a block from my apartment, which is called Café Ballon ("Balloon Café") and is appropriately filled with balloons, a children's ball pit... and bubble tea.