Sorgers in Berlin: A Midlife Adventure

A fond farewell

I packed my first suitcase today. We are coming home! As our year in Berlin is draws to a close, we are all feeling a wide mix of emotions as we bid farewell to our new friends, favorite spots and cozy yellow house in the woods. I’m so happy that Forest has a new home…
One last hurrah

With roughly two weeks left of our transformative year abroad, we have just returned from our final escapade before shifting our focus to winding down our year, packing up our suitcases and saying our farewells to dear new friends. This last trip of our year was made possible by the combination of two fortuitous circumstances:…
Full Circle

Today, I am happily settling into the a lovely feminine sanctuary of an AirBnB that I rented in Amsterdam West, away from the crowds in a modest residential area with a wonderfully multi-cultural local population– which is all the more noticeable having been living in über white Kleinmachnow! I popped around the corner this morning…
So Posh!

Ah, Berlin– some days you feel like home, and other days, we’re back to square one. Whether fishing around in my bag for one of the no value coins to borrow a shopping cart at the grocery store, or reconciling the fact that food shopping will invariably result in several items on my list being…
Shades of green

On my bike ride through the woods yesterday, I was struck by the change in tone of the moss on the trees that has morphed from a lovely celadon to a bold Irish leprechaun tone. It then occurred to me that green has been the primary hue of our past several weeks. Of course the…
A turning point

Now that we have crossed the threshold of the halfway point in our year abroad, we’ve had a notable shift in our mindsets, outlook and overall sense of ease here. The daylight hours are no longer so oddly short, the sense of permadusk has receded, the sun peeks out more often, and what had been…
On visitors, laughter and wintery daze

In this new year, we savored every last moment of being in CA with our family and friends before hopping back on the long journey back here to Berlin. Lucky for us, we brought back a visitor! My sweet mother-in-law flew back to Berlin with us for a jam-packed 10-day visit in which we explored…
Finding my people, places and spaces

As wintertime has settled upon us in northern Germany, the sun now begins to set around 2:45pm, and it’s pretty dark by 3:30pm. That plus the regularly misty days even when there is no rain in the forecast has meant adjusting our routines to avoid biking through the woods. Forest and I got completely lost…
Squash blossoms, ancient wonders and meringues in the sky

“Roam if you want to… roam around the world…” 🎸🎤 (courtesy of the B52’s) was my internal soundtrack last week as I joined Jonathan at a conference… in Rome! It was so fun to be free birds, with Julian off at a soccer tournament chaperoned by his coaches. We ate scrumptious food (with beautiful squash…
On second passports and Parisian cafés

Still in the throes of post-election despair? So are we. We are trying our best to distract ourselves here in-between reading news updates on the crumbling of American democracy. But wasn’t this the reason we got our German passports to begin with? The whole process was triggered by the results of the 2016 election and…

Sorgers in Berlin

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