The last of Deutschland and the first shots from Turkey

Pictures of working at Weingut Becker (French-German border) for the last month and then a few shots from our weekend trip to Freiburg

moving on from the EU...

Just a few more days before we say 'Tschus' to the damp, fall, German weather and start to head back towards the heat of the tropics! We just finished up our month of work at the winery and are heading to Heidelberg by way of Stuttgart for a bit of R&R before flying from Frankfurt to Istanbul on Sunday. We are looking forward to catching up on the blog, etc before we are back at work on the next harvest in Turkey (olives). Check out what will be our next digs here:

http://dedetepe.org/?lang=en

We will only be in Turkey for 10 days and then we head to Uganda to stay with our friends Paul & Sonya through mid-December. Here is an overview of the good work they are doing:

www.afripads.com

While in Uganda, we plan on a going on safari and doing a little exploration of Tanzania and Kenya. In addition we are hoping to find volunteer work. Sounds like we've got a good lead to help out with rural renewable energy through:

www.sccportal.org/Vi-Agroforestry-Programme.aspx

And then on December 10th we head out to Thailand!

Weingut Becker

Here is the website for the winery we have been working at for the last few weeks during the harvest:

http://www.friedrichbecker.de

We will be here for another couple of weeks, working in the cellar before heading out to Istanbul on the 23rd. More blogging coming soon. 

Italy - Agroturismo in Tuscany and Slow Food Cheese Fest in Bra/Torino

Trip Overview

For anyone that might be interested, here’s an overview of our trip so far:

Middle – End of May:
o Wrap up at work
o Complete Wilderness First Responder certification course
o Pack/sell/give away our belongings/say “hasta luego” to our Colorado family

June:
o U-Haul belongings to Linda’s family’s summer house in Garezers (Latvian summer camp) in Three Rivers, MI
          Work on projects around the summer house
          Enjoy some summertime in Michigan with family and friends
o Head east, stopping in Sandusky, OH for a sailing lesson from Eriks’ aunt Ina

July:
o Continue east to the Moore family cabin in Salisbury, CT for a week of relaxation, wild blueberry picking, enjoying the pristine waters of Mt. Riga.
o Pit stop in Rhinebeck, NY to visit Devin at Omega Holistic Healing Retreat Center
o Arrive at Eriks’ family’s home in DC
        Family fun, catching up with friends, meeting new additions (Ms. Vivian Porter-Koontz)
        A flurry of last minute details/packing for our adventure
o LEAVE THE COUNTRY!
        Fly to Latvia via Reikyavik and Helsinki

August
o Visit family and friends in Riga and Valmiera, Latvia (see blog post below)
o Recoup from Latvian adventure in Copenhagen, Denmark at Eriks’ cousin Karolla’s (see blog post below)

September
o Travel by train into Germany, visiting Stuttgart and Berlin (see blog post below)
o Travel by car from Stuttgart, Germany to Tuscany via Austria (see pictures above)
o Relax and overindulge in everything Italian at an Agro-Tourism villa near Chiusdino, Italy
o Drive through Genoa to Torino for the Slow Food Cheese Festival (see pictures above)
o Arrive ready to work off Italian overindulgence at Weingut Becker in Schweigen, Germany

"Poor But Sexy"

“Poor but Sexy” is Berlin’s gay mayor’s unofficial slogan for the city. After last month’s visit to this progressive, kooky and gritty city, the slogan (on top of the existence of an openly gay mayor) seems appropriate. When I first visited Berlin in 2006, I somehow managed to completely miss seeing anything of note and didn’t actually enjoy myself at all. This time around, however, the interesting blend of East and West that we found resonated with me in a strangely stabilizing way. The few days we spent here helped me to close a little tighter the very palpable gap that seems to still exist between Eastern Europe (Latvia) and Western Europe (Denmark, Germany).

A few of Linda’s most notable experiences in Berlin:

• Getting intellectual with our hosts and their spunky, local friends

• Sampling plentiful and very affordable Sudanese/Vietnamese/Thai/Turkish/Lebanese/German/you-name-it food available at every corner

• Exploring the wealth of street art and creative architecture that cover the urban landscape

• East Side Gallery: Interestingly, the Berlin Wall, once a barrier representing segregation and control, now seems to serve as a cultural and temporal bridge. The parts of it that remain act simultaneously as monuments dedicated to remembering the unimaginable and as canvasses for artists, which are therapeutically swathed in the colors and shapes of humanity’s emotional gamut. Check out our pictures (below) to experience some of the art of the East Side Gallery.

• Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport: Expanded by the Nazis to become “the mother of all airports” and used throughout the Cold War by the US military presence, it has found a new life as a well loved and well used public park, community garden and open-air living room. Spending a sunny Sunday afternoon here, we were surrounded with people of all ages from countless different cultural backgrounds all barbequing, playing and relaxing next to one another. Unfortunately, we got “locked out” of our hosts' apartment and weren’t able to grab our camera before heading to Templehof, but here’s a pretty good picture from the web: http://mullenkerri.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/090510-tempelhof-park.jpg . Who knew airplane runways made such great rollerblade tracks?

• Getting “locked out”: Each new location we find a temporary home in there’s a new kitchen with its own arrangement, new toilets with buttons in different (sometimes unexpected) places, new showers with different methods for flood avoidance, washing machines in a new language, a new front door and lock with a unique set of special pushes, pulls and number of clicks. Let’s just say we were “locked out”.