Hi all. Happy Easter from Germany. I hope the first term”s teaching went well and the new crop of students are all delightful.

I had a lovely couple of months in Berlin, eating a lot of cake,  learning a little German and also managing to fit a few operas in.

Jocelyn arrived last week so we revisited a few cafes from our trip to Berlin in 2014 plus my new favourite café, saw an excellent Hundertwasser exhibition and walked in a couple of palace gardens.

We’ve just spent a wonderful couple of days in Leipzig. The most interesting thing was an exhibition on Mendelssohn, Bach and the Third Reich, not things that I previously knew of any connections between.  We’re definitely experiencing Spring weather at the moment 21C on Monday but only 10C yesterday. My personal thermostat has obviously reset itself to NZ conditions because I found 10C to be flipping freezing whereas in Berlin anything in double figures felt pretty warm. I bought merino socks with part of the Kathmandu voucher and they have been a lifesaver. Now we’re on the road I’m also using the waterproof bags I bought with the same voucher and have confirmed my theory that you can never have too many little waterproof bags to put your bits and bobs in.

You can have too much gear overall and lugging bikes on and off trains is beginning to suggest that we do. I think this will be confirmed once we actually start riding our bikes rather than trains on Saturday. I’m not prepared to give up any warm clothes to lighten the load though, I’ll just look resentfully at the tent and hope we have great fun camping when the weather warms up (though we’ll be in Britain for most of summer so that may not happen).

Today were are travelling from Leipzig to Freiburg, a trip requiring four changes. We’ve managed our first one and are currently headed for Nürnberg. From the views outside the window I’d guess we’ve recently  crossed from the old east to the west- no more towns with large, deserted industrial buildings.

A belated but very appreciative thank you to those who came to my farewell and/or contributed to to my gift. And to all for being great colleagues! See you in 2018

All the best

Caroline