I once was a writer...

I hate marketing. I hate it. I hate it -- because it works. You see, I'm getting married in seven months (yay me! Check out our wedding website ), and I need to do all the planning here in Germany for a wedding taking place in the Caribbean coast of Colombia. It does seem like a challenge, but I am an amazing planner and I can do it. Also, my mom and sister/Maid of Honor have it all under control. But, as I said, since I'm in Germany, there are many things I need to do online. So I have to rely on websites to kinda figure out what I want. Before I went online, I took advice from my good friend Hope (who also recently married) and closed my eyes and imagined my perfect wedding. This is what my perfect wedding looks like: At the beach, hopefully getting our feet wet while saying "I do", at sunset, with only our closest family and friends (so, no more than 20 people), drinking piña coladas and eating fish and coconut rice, listening to soothing background music a...

I've been a little unfair to Germany and the Germans lately, and for that I publicly apologise. I tend to write only when I am trapped at home due to the inclement weather (well, ok, as Cata said , Wahrnehmung  is important, and gray, foggy and under 0°C is inclement to little Caribbean me). I tend to write only during these days and of course I tend to write with the mood that this type of days gets me into (OMG, please don't have Canuck read this post and accuse me forever of being the only English major in the world who finishes a sentence with a prepostion... which I technically didn't do because the sentence ends now, without a preposition). (Although, ending a sentence with "preposition" is just as bad as ending a sentence with a preposition, right?) The sun does shine--once in a while. And when it does, I go out. I make excuses to go walking, or shopping (without Honey's knowledge or consent, because we're supposed to be saving for my birthday......

It's been 6 months here. Six months of winter. That's all the Germans have--winter. Don't let them fool you: they will speak of myths and legends, fairy tales if you ask me, of some weird thing called spring , and then comes the completely unfathomable tall-tale of summer , which makes unicorns seem like normal, everyday boring stuff. But there are other things they Germans say. Things so cute, or so weird, or so plain interesting, that make me pleased to have enjoyed their winter, with sunrise at 9 a.m. and sunset at 4 p.m., and during this "daylight" time, no sun. How can you have a sun rise when no sun rises? Anyway. That is totally not the point. Not today. Not now. When I met with my German friends, Isa and Chrissy, in Barranquilla in May of last year, I think what they were most surprised with was our waking-up attitude. I used to sing them the song my mom used to sing to me (we sing it to each other every once in a while, still), which loosely translat...