Into The Spring

It has been an interesting time of late with many different things happening. We have seen a very mild Winter and the last couple of weeks have given us a truly wonderful taste of an early Spring. Temperatures have risen to 19 deg C and even today the sun ws so warm at my office that it begged a little lunch time snooze on the outdoor bench, eyes closed and dreaming of Queensland days. I have met quite a few new people in recent weeks through my local English Club in Darmstadt. Several of them are very interesting with one working for Lufthansa Catering Division and another being a wine maker from Oppenheim.

My friend Laura who has sat beside me for the last 2 years at work has just finished competing in the German version of Popstar. She managed to reach the Top 10. Totally awesome!

She did very well indeed given that the starting field was almost 30,000 competitors. Unfortunately the chief moderator for the show was not on her side even though the rest of the judging panel gave her very good reviews. There is no cure for biased judges. Truly a shame as she deserved a far better rap than the one Dieter Bohlen gave her. Hopefully the television exposure will give her the boost she needs to find a career somewhere in the music industry. Her rise through the various competition stages resulted in, amongst other things, in me venturing out to a variety of local hotels around Darmstadt to watch her on Saturday nights as she did her thing in Cologne.

It seems to be the year for visitors from Australia. I am expecting 3 in the next 6 weeks and 2 later in the year around September. Fantastic as I have only had 2 lots of visitors from Down Under in the last 6 years. I guess my wine cellar will take a bit of a pounding but this is only to be expected. I had always thought I would see many more visitors living here but the cost of the flights from Australia is truly prohibitive for most people.

I have been very busy getting my pictures from Greece and Barcelona digitised and loaded onto Flickr for friends to see. It has taken many weeks to get it all there but I have the bulk of them up now. Here are some samples.

Trips this year should include another run to Berlin and hopefully a return to Prague and possibly onward to Budapest and back through Vienna. A good opportunity exists to head to Italy to stay with a friend but that needs more planning at this point. I have recently won a couple of night in Hotel Du Palais ,Biaritz which was originally Napoleon’s Summer home. That should be really interesting providing the ceilings are higher than 5 feet. Napoleon never liked any thing to be a great deal larger than himself.

So here comes the Summer weather, the bar-b-ques and more of those wonderful German white wines. Hooray!