Happy Thanksgiving!

Today is Thanksgiving. I am going to steal my friend's idea and celebrate good things of today and the whole month.

Celebrating today:
- a lighted christmas tree in the entrance of the office building.
- the sun first breaking through the cold and then giving us a beautiful sunset.
- a fun office colleague who makes me laugh even in times like these.
- a seat on the tram
- nice emails from American friends who are thinking of me today
- a phone call from a friend in Eichstaett
- a song played specially for me
- good music on my iPod
- the sudden appearance of christmas lights and trees all over Basel
- that my room neighbor finally managed to turn off his alarm clock who kept nonstop for 2 nights now.
- Getting a lot of work done
- watching a fun show online

Celebrating this month:
- the start of the skiing season
- my sister's birthday with a surprise b'day party and her happy face
- seeing my family
- making my Dad happy by taking him skiing
- meeting some nice old colleagues while helping out in my old project
- sun almost every day
- and many more things...

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!

Guardian Angels exist - And everyone should be an organ donor!

Sometimes fate plays us hard and keeps us on a rollercoaster of emotions...
Against all odds my sister's friend got the 1 in 10 Million chance to be gifted the chance for a third life.

There must be someone out there watching over him, someone with immense powers!
Now all he has to do is fight for this third life. He will make it, I am sure!


Please, please, please, everyone: Become an organ donor! It saves lives and is there a better gift to give?

Info in Germany: http://www.bzga.de/themenschwerpunkte/organ-gewebespende/
Info in the US: http://www.organdonor.gov/Default.asp

About missing some essentials

If you had asked me a couple of weeks ago whether I can live without a cellphone for a week, I would have promptly answered YES. Now I can honeslty say, I might be able to live without a cellphone but not without a smartphone. My beloved iPhone got stolen and I had to “work” with my private phone for a week. That is a phone in the sense our parents use it. To call – and it can write text messages – but anything else goes beyond its capabilities. Coming back home from Barcelona without a phone was the first of many challenges until I had internet again. Without my phone I have no calendar which means I have no idea what time my flights are or what reservation number I have to use for check-in. How did we do that before smartphones? The following week until I got the new iPhone was horrible. I felt disconnected from the world, cut off. 7 long days before I was back on What’s App… Wow!!! I wasn't aware I used it that often and therefore could miss a piece of electronics that much! Besides my phone, which I am never letting out of sight anymore now, I lost something else last week. My voice! Not having stayed in bed for a major cold a couple of weeks ago struck me down last week in the sense of me completely losing my voice and not being able to say a word anymore. The whisper that came out of my mouth if I said something took a great deal of effort from my side and also pain in my throat. The doctor had an easy job here: Don’t speak for three days, drink plenty of fluids and for heaven’s sake, rest! He forbid me to talk for three days and ordered me to stay at home and read the book I always wanted to read. Now here I was again, in the silent world… But although I was in my Basel apartment all alone and not speaking, singing, humming or anything else I didn’t feel isolated. I had my iPhone and many really nice messages, chats,…. from friends all over who wished me well and told me to get better very soon. So now that I have both back again I have to admit, if I had to choose what to give up again for a week, I think it would be an easy decision for me: The iVoice. :)

Seeing a new city with different eyes.

I recently moved to Basel due to a work project. So at least from Monday to Friday I call this multinational city in the country triangle of Switzerland, France and Germany my temporary home. And I still remember the first week I sepnt here. It was the beginning of July, hot and humid and every night when I found a different new route to my project apartment, I wanted to go out and explore the city, drink it all in, the bridges, the Rhine, the little shops, the old buildings, the beautiful marketplace, the people that literally come from all over the world. So I downloaded 1h walking tours I could easily do after work, looked at the map and googled for nice restaurants to spend the warm summer evenings at after having floated down the Rhine. Floating is THE summer acticity for everyone here. Stores sell sealable orange bags to put your clothes and wallet in. Then you go to a certain spot, put your belongings in the bag and float to the area where all the steps are, you get out, buy yourself a beer on one of the stands and sit on the steps in the sun to dry off. Great idea! There were even lots of nights when I could have done it, but for the lack of the sealable bag, the company and several other made-up reasons I haven't managed more than a late-night almost skinny-dip with some colleagues a few weeks back. On one route to work I kept seeing those amazing architectural buildings near the Novartis campus and I made a mental note to get off the tram there one day to look at them. But every night my shoes were already pinching me, I had no camera with me and I was too hungry to stop and take a look. So one week after the other passed, I had a lot of 4 day-weeks and then I went on vacation. Since I am I feel a little more home here, I moved apartments and now have a really nice one with 2 Ginkgo trees outside my window overlooking a nice little square. I know my way around the city a little better, and guess what happened? The urge to explore has vanished. The camera is in my purse all the time now, but I never seem to need it, although there are so many things to see, so many interestings scenes to watch and everytime I walk around, I am thinking, I can pay attention to the details another time. After all I will be here for another 9 months at least. So there is no hurry. The same thing happened to me already in New Haven, CT where I lived in 1999 and in Munich, where I moved in 2008. Until today, I have not seen most of the sights, know less than most visitors to my current "hometown" and don't know my way around as soon as there is no subway map involved. Isn't that sad? We are being placed into new surroundings, are all eager to explore, travel half around the world on a regular basis to experience something new, but we don't seem to bother about what we have right in front of us. So here is to Basel and my plan to make an effort and explore the city before the days get shorter and I only see everything in the dark on my way to and from work. I will start exploring... next week, I promise :)

An evening with Byron Katie

New Design

It's spring, the weather in Munich is beautiful and I think it is time to loose the gray and go colorful!

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Happy with what you got?

One of my friends - an actual one - posted the following on Facebook a couple of weeks ago:
Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are. -- Malcolm Forbes

It got me to thinking why it is that most people don't value what they are or what they have achieved and always think about everything they don't have.
People want winter and when they get it, they want sun and warm weather. People who are in a relationship envy the ones that are not for the freedom those have and the ones that are single want to have the comfort and love of a relationship.
Do we have too many choices?
We have a saying in Germany: The healthy person has many wishes, the sick person only one.
So it is the perspective with which we are looking at things.
But is it only that? Are the things we wish to have or achieve the ones we really want or are there also some that we think we want because our family, friends, society and therefore "everyone" expects them from us?
How do we differentiate between the expectations and the true objectives we have for ourselves?
Of course parents only want the best for their children. But what is the best for them? Is it the same way of life they are leading or could it also be something different? What do the neighbors, the bigger family say to a child that is doing things another way? The child that doesn't get married at 25, builds the house, starts working on the grandchildren?
Should we even care what the neighbors think about our life choices?

Before doing things you don't really want yourself, it is very important to listen deep inside yourself and check out if any major decision is really what you want or whether there were influences that make you think you want something but you really don't.
I think there is no worse feeling than realizing one day that you have only done certain things and live a particular life now because you think it is expected of you. Marrying the guy, building the house, having the babies. Is this really what everyone wants nowadays with all those options?
There are many, many out there who want exactly that, I am sure. Once they've achieved all this they are happy and you can see it in their eyes.
But I also believe that there are so many out there, who only thought this is what they want because "everyone" else does it and it's expected of them. They do the same things, get married, build the nice house, have the children. And then they wait for the satisfaction and the happiness to arrive, but it doesn't. It puts them into a really awkward and unfortunate position. Now they have what they thought they wanted, but they are still looking for more, for something else.
They realize that this is not what they wanted. They were chasing a dream - the dream of someone else.

The art of repression or the fight against the inspiration

Here I am, totally inspired to write something and finally get back to blogging. What inspired me? Mainly 2 blogs I am following of two really great artists. Yes, artists. Kelle (http://www.kellehampton.com) and Daina (http://daina-newyorkstateofmind.blogspot.com/) not only have a great writing style, they also take amazing pictures.

Anyway, I want to be as consistent as they are and keep blogging here, maybe even start a collection of best of pictures.

So sitting in Starbucks - a very inspiring place for me - I am wondering why it takes me so long to finally sit down and get things started? Not only with writing, pretty much with anything that doesn't have a timeline. I was going to clean up my bedroom and sort through my clothes for weeks now, I have the time, the weather is not the best and yet, I manage to find tons of other things to do so I can avoid what I want to do and - now that I did it, I know - that feels so great when it is finished and off your to do list.

Since I am home a lot at the moment, sitting on my window working, I got a chance to observe the life in the backyard of the house I am living in since more than two years. I was never home during the day before and I am very surprised that there is a lot of action in this little courtyard that no one without a key can even get to.
The girls from the advertising agency are constantly coming back to the trash cans to secretly smoke, my neighbor from upstairs seems to be on vacation since she keeps coming downstairs and shortly after going back up with her (girl?)friend, the mailman comes with a bunch of paper, kids ring our bells to get to the mailboxes and dump huge amounts of advertisements, the mother from the front house lets her kids play in front of my windows - but for no longer than 10 min before she yells at them, my new student neighbors seem to always leave and come back together - I wonder if they study the same.
If I am home on the weekends - of course that rarely happens - there is not much going on in front of my window. So that is kind of funny to see and notice what is happening here all day.
I still hope that I won't have to watch this a lot longer... I am much better around people. :)