Another Count-Down…….

My head full of memories, words creeping up from the bottom of my heart to the top of my tongue – but still I am unable to let them out in an appropriate way .

So, as I can’t produce sentences, let me just drop some word-pebbles:

São Paulo, for me, meant:

*feeling the warmth of friendship and the heat of the sun

*hearing the wonderfully relaxing sound of “flip-flop-flip-flop-flip-flops” all over

*eating  my favourite kinds of fruit fresh from the trees

*enjoying beer for the first time in my life

*drinking the world-best cappucino ever

*experiencing “big city life” – accompanied and  protected by Sampas best tourist-guide

*wearing NO wristwatch – and not missing it

*being disconnected from my European mobile-phone without regret

*getting to know what “saudade” can mean…..

*starting another count-down…

365

…

Bee will bee back!

14

Fourteen days…

Dear Uncle Government,

thank you very much for the valuable information you gave me on your homepage about all the risks I am running by travelling to Brazil:

 “Auswärtiges Amt”!!! 

So, during my stay in São Paulo, I will do everything you advised me:

* I won’t drink water from taps, even at the hotel, but take a case of 12 bottles of mineral water into my baggage, maybe even some bottles of German beer.

*  I won’t drink any of the freshly pressed fruit juices offered on the beach or in the streets, but take some bottles of Badischer Apfelsaft in my handbag

* I won’t eat any fresh fruit sold on street markets, but take a dozen of tin cans of pineapples, mangos, papayas in light sirup

* I won’t eat any salads, raw vegetables, shrimps, sushis or beefsteaks à la française, but bring my home-made lunch package including some loafs of healthy, biologically produced German Pumpernickel

* I will leave all my short-sleeved T-shirts at home and put thickfat woolen pullovers instead to avoid beeing stung by mosquitos

* I will wear gloves before touching anything or anyone to avoid the risk of getting infected in any way

* I will carry my camera in a torn old Aldi-plastic-bag so that future thiefs will get the impression that I have got no camera at all

* I will use none of the public means of transport like buses, metros and so on and call private taxis if I want to go somewhere….

But, my dear Uncle, there is one thing I did not understand: you tell me that even those private taxis can get robbed and that therefore I should be extremely careful.

So I ask you: wouldn’t it be better just to stay at Guarulhos International Airport all the time so that really nothing  can happen to me????

If you could answer my question before I get on the plane, I would be even more thankful to you.

Yours faithfully

Bee

P.S.

Will I become seriously infected if I hug my Brazilian friend Celso???

18

18 days to Brazil

but today, another event will be taking all my time and thoughts: my parents are celebrating their “Golden Wedding” anniversary!

So, the whole family will be here and Bee will meet all her kids, brothers, sisters….Great!

Last night before going to sleep, I asked myself what kind of feeling this anniversary produces in me. Here are some of them:

* pride

(hey, they had to get married because of me, so in some way, I am the reason for all the celebrating today)

* envy

(after two divorces I sometimes ask myself what went wrong, if I am really as unsteady, unbearable and horrible as that…)

* pain

(the marriage of my parents had not always been the most happy one…especially since my father retired, there is almost constant “war and peace” so that I wonder if it is really ok to envy them)

* care

(organizing the celebration was hard work for my parents -even if we children helped wherever we could-  they were all excited, stressed… sometimes I feared that one of them might get a heart attack or be hit by a stroke with all this stress)

And now: get me my shower and hairdo….I have to leave, help them to handle the many guests that will come round…..

Brzlmmmmmmm…..gone

GoodBee-heee

P.S.

I will do some bigbig gluckgluckglucks with some excellent Badischer Spätburgunder Rotwein and take some bigbigbig gluckgluckglucks for my favourite queijo!!!

PROST!!!

19

Blind dates 

According to the Wikipedia definition (English version), I will really have a blind date  very soon: I will meet someone whom I never saw “in person” before and we will try to know each other better…

The German version is a lot longer, going into details and above all: German Wikipedia authors automatically connect blind dates with sex.

So, in English I can call my favourite friend Celso from São Paulo my blind date.

But I won’t do this in German for several reasons

In his personal count-down, he tried to find an answer to his FAQ:  “why Germany???”

Let me find an answer to my FAQ: “why him???”

According to the German way of understanding relationships, we don’t make a good match!

* we have got a time-lag of 3-5 hours

* we have got a geography-lag of 12 000 kms

* we have got an age-lag of 20 years

How have we been able to keep our very special relationship alive for more than one year now?

Maybe because we are both a little crazy and don’t fit into the usual patterns of our countries?

Maybe because we both  stayed children in some way?

I think the main reason is because we both are able to communicate – by words, pictures, music, thoughts ….. multimedia-communication 

I’m very curious to know how our eye-to-eye communication will look like!!!

Now, go and get me my dictionary!!!

Gooosh, only 19 days left and I haven’t even learned half of the words I’d like to know!!!

Brrzzzzlmmmm

20

Twenty days left for leaving

My Brazilian friend Celso is absolutely right: we are really different!

In Germany, if you tell people that you are going to spend New Year’s Eve in Brazil, nobody will ask you: “Why Brazil???”

Why???

Germany in November/December means: darkness, cold, rain.

Every now and then, some sunrays dare twinkle down from behind the clouds, but not enough to cheer you up when you’re down in some depression. In addition, German weather is nothing to rely on.

End of October/beginning of November my hometown Lahr celebrated the 10th anniversary of their beautiful flower-show Chrysanthema.

We had all:  heavy rains with temperatures far below cosiness but also 20°C to sit down and have a cappucino outside in one of the street-cafés.

Afterwards, we had to get those enormous coats, scarves, gloves and fur-boots out of the wardrobes: winter said a little ”Hello!”

At the moment, temperatures allow T-shirts again – but we are not in the mood for them ‘cos a nasty wind is blowing all day and if you look out of the window: hum, nothing to make you want to go for a walk.

So why should anyone here ask you why you want to fly away and enjoy some sunny days over in Brazil?

The thing is: Most Germans only want to know the “sunny side” of Brazil ( o lado A…!).

Rio de Janeiro, the famous beaches of the Copabacana….

So they rather ask me: what? you don’t go to Rio? what do you want to do in São Paulo?  See the industries and syscrapers???

My answer is clear: I want to see MY FRIENDS!!!

See them and get to know some of the places they use to go to, know some of the bars, restaurants, museums they go to, see where and how they live, which kind of people live around them, work with them…

That’s why I am getting more and more excited the closer I get to my take-off-day: I will finally meet the most amazing ”blind-date” I ever had up to now….

More about tomorrow!

Brzzzzzlllmmmmm

BrazilBee

Bee-hee!

- – -

Bee-hee!!

? ? ?

Beeee-heeee!!!

(Bee, stopping her snoring,  slowly opening her left eye, looking at the calender next to her computer, suddenly jumping up like Mr. Beeean after he realized that he had got an appointment with the dentist and crying out loudly)

Goooosh!

I almost forgot it!!

Thank God I hired the best travel-planner I could find over there in São Paulo, Sir Celso Bessa from SPGTI (São Paulo Guia Turistico Internaçional)

And now: Quick!

… get me some of those anti-Alzheimer-pills which I have forgotten to take for weeks now…..

So, tomorrow, I will remember EVERYTHING I wanted to tell you about my travel, about how I feel, about what I am doing to prepare my journey and the one of my favourite queijo ….

Brzzzzzzzzzlllmmmmmm

See ya

GeograBee – Meeting Burundi and emotionally developed countries

When I was a child, I always heard people say: “Not for school, but for life we are learning“.

Now that I walked quite a few miles in life, I find it amazing to discover that indeed, school was just a kind of “kindergarten” – and life itself is the important school we are attending…

I got a new job, my fifth free-lance job, to help me earn my cappucinos. Like my other jobs, teaching, this one is very interesting and gets me in touch with lots of unusual people: I’m a reporter for a local newspaper and every week around Thursday, I get my “missions”.

The first one was to write about an assembly of a carnival-club. Meeee, Beee, who basically hates carnival!

The second one was last Friday. I had to attend a show at a church-hall: school children performing together with a group of drum-dancers from Burundi.

Never had I heard of this little country before, but now I know: Burundi is indeed one of the smallest countries of Africa, the people there call it “heart of Africa” and if you take a closer look at the map you can see that it really is shaped like a heart.

The facts I learned were these:

• Burundi is even smaller than the German “Bundesland” in which I live: Baden-Württemberg;
• After having been a kingdom, it first turned into a German colony in the beginning of the 20th century, then became a Belgian colony and in 1962, they got their independence – followed by years of civil wars;
• In Burundi you can find the second deepest lake of the world, “Lake Tanganyika”, with an impressioning depth of 1400 metres;
• Even though situated in Africa, the climate is very balanced there, no mortal heat, just about 26°/28°C on average and geographically it looks a little like the Black Forest;

Those were the main facts I got to know. But what impressed me a lot more than the facts was the project that was presented: Schulprojekt Mahoro, a project that aims at building schools for children and adults in Burundi. And what I liked most was the person who presented it, Abbé Alphonse Ndabiseruye.

He is a wonderful person and a fantastic priest!

See, for long years, I was part of the system in our church to be able to tell you that here, in Germany, a normal religious service looks a lot like a funeral: the priest is all dressed in black, puts a solemn expression on his face, in the room, there is a deep deep silence and if you should dare cough or talk with your neighbour some heads will turn towards you and make you understand that you’d better shut up. Singing, praying, getting up or sitting down follows a strict order, there is no room for spontaneous emotions. Thats why I quit.

What Abbé Alphonse transmitted was pure life! He danced and drummed and laughed, didn’t care about if people might think he was a little crazy, took people in his arms and gave them a lot of warmth in that cold November night.

At school, little Bee learned that we had to help people in Africa, help them develop – but today, I am sure that we, emotionally poor Europeans, can learn a lot from Africans or people in other so-called developping-countries!

Keep developping.

Bzzzzzzzzzmmmmmmmm

Dream on… (what would Adolf Hitler dreamed of)

In my German language classes, I sometimes ask my students to answer “stupid little questions” which I am collecting on file cards.

This is a good way to start a conversation, to make people speak.

One of these questions recently was: “What was your last thought before falling asleep last night?”

Since I had been discussing about those last few moments spent in the “here and now” just before you float away to your personal land of the dreams, I am more aware of them.

So, let me tell you, which had been my very personal “last thoughts” last night.

To help you find your way through the strange labyrinth of my ideas, I should tell you what had happened during daytime:

In class, we had been talking about recent German history, especially about the years between 1933 and 1945 , because I had to prepare my students for the test they had to pass about German society and history.

Sure, we had to talk about our most famous historical personality of those years, about his ideas of the ideal Aryan and we laughed quite a lot when I asked my students, to describe the physical appearance of Adolf Hitler – which was everything but Aryan!

At night, lying in my bed and trying to fall asleep, my thoughts began to float back to the times when I had worked for a psychanalist. Vaguely remembering what Freud had said about psychological projections: that we tend to fight in others what we hate most in ourselves.

Suddenly my brain gave birth to some stupid little questions and laid them right beside me onto my pillow:

• What if, at that time, men already had joined the fashion of dyeing their hair? Would little Adolf have been a blondy then?
• And hey, what about blue eyes? Today, he would have no problems getting a pair of bright blue eyes, just buying coloured lenses and that’s it!

Damn! Couldn’t they have invented this stuff some decades earlier? Maybe this would have saved millions of lives and helped us Germans write history books we could be proud of…

Amazing, those “inbetween two states of beeing” thoughts, aren’t they?

Let’s go on dreaming… Bzzzzzzzzzmmmmmmm

Say: “cheeese!”

It happened at the cheese-counter of my favourite shopping center.

I was just ordering a piece of “Roquefort”, when she came towards me, latest-fashion-sunglasses on top of her hair, expensive make-up perfectly hiding her crowsfeet, glittering D&G belt underlining her “vogue-brand-jeans”, silk T-shirt showing soft suntanned skin – decently evaporating just the right quantity of   ”Chanel N°5″…

Chapeau!

Even if she does not belong to the category of “my best friends” – she’s really someone you could envy for what she has (her own business including secretary and cleaning lady,  a brand new Renault-Megane-cabriolet, a semi-detached house on a river…)  as well as for what she is (beautiful, rich, independant, almost retired…)

Especially on a hot day like this, when you are standing at the cheese counter, champagne-bottle-bottom-glasses in front of your eyes, red-faced, sweaty and stinking like the French “Munster” behind the glass counter…because you had decided to walk the 10 kms to the shopping center…because your car was being checked at the garage and you had been too tight-fisted to take a rental car…

I’m sure you can imagine how I felt when she asked me the question she HAD TO  ask on her way to the fish-counter (where she was going to buy some lobster):

* “Hey, still here??? You told me you were on vacation???”

-”Well, errr….”

Meanwhile, two of my three weeks of vacation are over and I can say that I definitely AM HAPPY about how I spent them and that I DO FEEL SUPER-GOOD at the moment!!!

See:

I don’t know how you normally define “successful vacation”.

But for me it is this: Doing all the things which you can’t do when you are working.

So my holiday-report can only be absolutely positive:

* Work-Bee spends a lot of time on four wheels, in a non-airconditioned minicar on overcrowded highways

*Holiday-Bee uses her own wings and legs to move, sitting in a quiet corner somewhere in the shade, sipping drinks and cocktails and eating ice-creams

*Work-Bee teaches, talks a lot and listens to other people’s problems, struggling to give them a helping hand

*Holiday-Bee learns new portuguese vocabulary,  listens to her favourite music, reads just for fun and listens to the voice inside of her

*Work-Bee, having to sit or stand in front of other people, always checks her menu: “uuups! none of that sausage please – garlic!!!” “aargh! beans! – no, please, I don’t want to sound like a trumpet-orchestra!!!”

*Holiday-Bee joyfully smacking her lips with all the tomato-garlic-and Kraut-salads she can eat now, happily smelling bad for hours

*Work-Bee often comes home late, having only little time to share with friends – the ones that live close to or very far from her

*Holiday-Bee has loads of time for friends and family and -last, but not least:

Holiday-Bee finally in honeymood again!!!

Keep enjoying whatever you do!

Bee

Bee’s holiday-job

Yeees!

Even bees do holiday-jobs.

Quietly.

At home.

Filing papers.

But I have got very precious helpers:

Homage to

Louis Leitz, inventor of the famous “Leitz-lever-arch-files”!

The best thing about them, invented in 1911, after several years of development and improvement of the original “Leitz-Ordner”: the hole in the back!!!

*No matter where your file may be, up in the highest heights of a shelf or deep down in the most inaccessible depths of a bookcase …

*No matter if the file weighs 10 kg or just 200 g…

*No matter if you are completely fit or if a lumbago makes you walk round like “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”…

You simply stick your finger into the hole …and here you are with your file, ready for work.

Isn’t that great?!

So, let me say : “Thank you, Louis!!!

Keep filing!

Bee