Meeting the Mailman

I’m happy to report that Berlin has started getting little bits of sunshine this month.  March has snatched the spot for #1 month of the year in my book so far.  Here’s our favorite sugar dish posing outside for all of you.  He’s the only one with eyes wide open these days.  Everyone else in Berlin is squinting in the bright light.  It’s like we’ve emerged from a cave.  Cave Winter.

The spits of snow are starting to turn into splashes of rain in the sky.

Then the mailman thought I was stealing someone’s mail when I walked up to the mailboxes after school and picked up an Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association magazine.  AOPA is an organization for pilots of small aircraft (like us!) in the United States.  It was abandoned on the radiator by itself.  Let me just say that you’ve never seen a mailman look at you like he’s going to rip you to shreds like I saw today.  I tried to explain to the mailman that the magazine was my husband’s.  I wasn’t committing a federal crime (assuming it’s illegal to open someone else’s mail here).  Before I finished explaining, he cut me off and let me go on up the stairs.  I’m pretty sure it was my American accent and poor German grammar that gave it away:

The woman taking the American magazine is an American.

The good news is that I think he’ll remember me from now on, and I kind of miss having mailmen who hand my mail right to me and say, “Hello” like I grew accustomed to in the small communities and Denver suburbs were we’ve lived in the US.  Or in the very least, I hope we can be on good terms.  I’d hate to be on the mailman’s bad side.  That’s worse than finding out half of your strawberries from the market are moldy the next morning.  And the next morning.

All this is to say I’m thinking of sun.  I’m thinking of airplanes.

I’m thinking I would love to know where you would go if you had one (sunny!) weekend in Europe.  You could go anywhere.  (For my European readers, feel free to take this imaginary weekend retreat outside of Europe!)  Where would it be?  Would you be lingering on the steps of the Louvre?  Inhaling the tulips in Holland?  Watching the bulls in Spain?  Sitting on the beaches of Italy or Greece?