382

German easters are slightly different than the Dutch ones. Everyone seems to have left town for familyweekends with big meals and presents and I dont know what. Meanwhile, Hamburg is busy covering herself with a blanket of snow.
So my weekend will be spent inside with a lot of coffee, fellow lonely souls, tulpen aus Amsterdam, pancakes and some good books. Maybe not very German, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Frohe Ostern!

381

I wish that I could write about how it was for me,
when I grew up among the mountains, wolves and redwood trees,
but I was never there, were you ever there?

I don't know why this feeling keeps on coming back to me
That I need to go into a place where I can see that things can be small,
even the trees, and the cars, and the roads and the houses and the other mountaintops
And the only thing that is big is the sky. 

(To All My Friends)

I actually dont like the mountains that much. Too high, too static, too dangerous in an uncomforting way. But I do love cities that feel like mountain landscapes: with towering buildings to make you feel small and with windows that look down on rooftops to make you feel like the queen of the world. With millions of paths and corners to discover and get lost in. And somewhere in between all of this enormousness, hidden away from everything and everyone else - a small, secret cave of warmth and comfort; surrounded by it all and yet completely isolated and on its own.

380

I have been living like a little nomadic girl for the past two weeks. Traveling all over the Netherlands and a trip to English countryside. I enjoy seeing all these wonderful people and places, but now I'm as tired as can be and am also very much looking forward to sleep in my own bed again and have quietness around me. One can only travel for so long. Like people with travelsickness need a stable point to focus on in order not to get sick, I need a stableness to go back to every now and then in order not to get nervous and itchy.

Ungeduld von Goethe

Immer wieder in die Weite,
über Länder an das Meer,
Phantasien, in der Breite
schwebt am Ufer hin und her!

Neu ist immer die Erfahrung:
Immer ist dem Herzen bang,
Schmerzen sind der Jugend Nahrung,
Tränen seliger Lobgesang.

379

Oh the grey of this city is too much to bear
but I feared it even more when I saw it didn't last

Someone once told me he thought Hamburg was one of the greyest cities in the world. And maybe this year it was even greyer than usual. In 2012, Hamburg received the least sunhours in Germany and it is said that this has been the greyest winter in at least 60 years. Usually a German winter can enjoy about 150 sunhours, but this winter we had to do with a little more than 80 hours of sun.

When bad things happen to a family, people always say it will either tear them all apart, or make their bonds even stronger.
When winter falls over Eindhoven, I feel as if the arms that hold us together, start to shake and shiver and lets us all fall in pieces to the cold ground, but those same arms in Hamburg seem to just hug even tighter and tighter.
I don't want to leave Hamburg behind just when the summer is going to start, and I am not sure if I want to go through such a grey winter again next year, but I think being hugged by strong arms, even if they are the greyest arms in the world, is always better than slightly less grey arms who just let you fall.

I am seeing good friends in Eindhoven today, but I am hiding inside for a little longer, because the streets there are covered in snow. I hope spring will come and say hi to me again when I say my (temporary) final goodbyes in Hamburg in two weeks.

(the lyrics from Laura Marling, slightly changed to not get confusion of me putting thoughts in the head of the lovely boy on the second-last picture. And he is the one who gets credits for the final photo.)

378

"You don't strike me as a person who still believes in romance, living in a fantasy bubble of pink air."

Winter makes me more cynical and rational, but these past days the sun has been shining over this grey city and has settled in my heart and body again. My stomach flutters and my mind drifts. I dress myself in clothes with colours of candy.

Picnics in parks, bicyclerides in streets full of castles, cold pancakes coated with stolen sugar, dancing and cleaning in a sunsoaked room with the windows wide open, a new friend, pretending to be somebody else and blending in with the tourists of the city, watching out over the harbour, thinking of flying and sailing.

"This is the last imbiss before new york".

A white handkerchief, kissing a sailor goodbye, dreams of waiting in your underwear for clothes to be clean. Longing for summer to come through even more, feeling the wind on your bare legs, blowing up your dress.

"It's fine, I'm wearing my pretty underwear anyway."

This strange state of mind as you have just woken up, but are still half asleep. Inbetween dreams and reality.
This is how I feel these days in Hamburg.

"You remember the old Roadrunner cartoons where the coyote would ran off a cliff and keep going untill he looked down and happened to notice that he was running on nothing more than air?"

"Yeah."

"Well," he says, "I always used to wonder what would have happened if he'd never looked down. Would the air have stayed solid under his feet until he reached the other side? I think it would have, and I think we're all like that. We start heading out across this canyon, looking straight ahead at the thing that matters, but something, some fear, or security, makes us look down. And we see we're walking on air and we panic, and turn around and scramble like hell to go back to solid ground. And if we just wouldn't look down, we could make it to the other side. The place where things matter." 
(page 146 from The book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper.)

A book I read in a the first month here in Hamburg in a cafe where I could crawl in a big chair with a coffee and wait for the dark to come so I could go home again.

Trying not to think; trying very hard not to look down, but keep running and keep looking forward. I keep running running. Looking down. Falling. Climbing up again and running running. Looking down. Falling. Climbing up again. etc etc etc. It's natural.

Sometimes I just wish I could just run for a bit more than three weeks and fall a bit less high.

I guess part of growing up is learning how to run without looking down all the time. But maybe also knowing how to grab hold of the sides of the rock as you are falling down, so you dont hit the ground completely.

"Does it bounce?"

Yesterday we saw a movie. There was a building burning down and people jumped out of windows, one by one you saw them crashing into the ground. They dont bounce.

I dont want to end this on a sad note. This morning my downstairs dönershop-friend nicknamed me "the sweet neighbour."

"A Club Mate for the sweet neighbour!"

A big smile.

These are all merely observations. I am unsure if I should post them. But when you are reading this, I obviously did post it. There is a lot of thinking these days and it helps to write things down and put them out. Distance yourself from it. so you can look at it again at another time and see things in a new light maybe.