Welcome, gazillions of readers, to what may well be my last blog post this year! First off, this Sunday marks the 3rd Advent sunday - I'm not sure if the Advent, or time leading up to Christmas, is celebrated in other countries as it is here. The 4 sundays leading up to Christmas are the 4 Advent sundays, and many people have wreaths with 4 candles, with a new candle lit every sunday until all 4 are burning. So, today we started on the 3rd candle.
Last night, I finally managed to summon the spirit of Christmas that I hadn't felt before, when we went to a charity concert produced by students at Berlin's Academy of the Arts... they performed many bits of classical music, which were beautiful, but the high point was a medley (sung in Korean) of songs like my favorite Silver Bells, Jungle Bells, and Santa Claus is Coming to Town. It was truly multicultural - the Korean singer was accompanied by a Japanese pianist, a Polish flutist and an Iranian guitar player. Of course, they also did a Gangnam-style dance :-) Here's a pic from their practice session:
By the light of those three advent candles, I wrote a few old-fashioned paper Christmas cards...on the principle that people today are happier to get one of those than get an e-card...
We had a good friend visit us and cooked an all-new recipe, a leek-salmon quiche that looked like this..
and tasted great. So, we're at least well fed for the one more week of work ahead. Unhappily, work sucks at the moment...I've been notified that I'll be back to only 20 hours/week from January, even though there's a ton of work to be done. And I don't know if I went a little overboard in protesting this. Also, on Tuesday we'll be "informed" of our new organization structure, and I'm really curious what I'll end up doing. All in all, this was a pretty subpar year and I just hope the early indicators are not representative of what 2014 will be like.
Here's wishing all my SG friends and followers, as well as random readers a very happy holiday season, and a good start into what I hope will be a wonderful New Year for all of us! And now excuse me please, there's a piece of quiche calling out to me...
