While once in a while it occurs that a storm tears down a couple of trees and that it snows quite heavily, Germany has never had to fear tornados. Yesterday, however, my area was labelled with a warning for the first time. Almost to my disappointment, it didn’t happen – but the sky still turned into a very frightening shade of black and the clouds hung so low in the sky that it felt like I could touch them from our balcony.

]]> http://livelifedeeply.net/2010/07/15/force-of-nature/feed/ 0 http://livelifedeeply.net/2010/07/13/everyone-soon-or-late-comes-round-by-rome/ http://livelifedeeply.net/2010/07/13/everyone-soon-or-late-comes-round-by-rome/#comments Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:51:42 +0000 Anisha http://livelifedeeply.net/?p=47 I will be honest with you and let you know that reading about everyone else being off on holidays so soon made me a tiny bit jealous. Up until recently, I had no definite plans to go anywhere, except for maybe Berlin and London (though later is more like home – nonetheless, I always get very much excited about it!).

My best friend looked into travel arrangements and found that going to Rome this summer and particularly in August, when Italy is boiling, isn’t much more expensive than going to Berlin and spending our time there. And since we’re both fans of Italy, we were sold. Today, we booked out trip and I’m very happy to announce that in about a month, I’m on my way to the Eternal City.

I’ll be honest with you and say that I never expected to go there any time soon, so I’m unprepared! Rome seems to be a whole lot more confusing that London for example – at least there, I could always telll where I was when I knew in which direction from the River I was walking… Italy with its small sidestreets seems a bit scary!

Also, I’m at a complete loss as to what is worth looking at and what not – some sights are plain and simple a given (we’re, for example, locted closely to the Vatican) but apart from that, how are we supposed to fill our five days? Where do we get the best food and where can we possibly do a bit of shopping (hey, we’re girls!)? How do we get to and from places by bus and the metro?

Have any of you fellow bloggers ever been to Rome? Do you have helpful links you could point me to? Anything is appreciated!

And where do you plan to spend time this summer?

(The very awesome picture is from CarSpotter)

it has been a whole long while since I’ve really been into blogging and promises of a giveaway for the blogs first birthday were made but unfortunately broken as well.

Sometimes, life just gets too busy and while blogging and social networking is a rather huge part of my life, it had to take a minor spot on my list of priorities. As I said, both my parents have been to the hospital. It was nothing serious in the sense that it was life-threatening (my dad’s suffering from, well, it’s really hard to tell. His skin is really messed up and on most days, his hands and feet are covered in open wounds. And my mother has gone through with her final operation after her breast cancer treatment.); they’re both on sick leave and at home now.

Course work needed to be done as well in the form of a presentation on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And right now, I’m thinking hard about a topic for a term paper on ‘Truth and Religion’.

Work is an ever-present factor that’s putting a little stress in my life as well. With the World Cup going on, we’ve been super-busy. And now that the weather is just so much better, working in 37°C is torture.

Life hasn’t been all work and play though. June 18th until 20th saw five co-workers and I spend the weekend at the Hurricane festival, watching bands such as Billy Talent, We Are Scientists and Vampire Weekend take the stage. As I took a disposable camera with me, I have almost no visual evidence of the weekend apart from the view pictures I took with my mobile phone. Picture from the disposable thing we’re supposed to be put on a CD when I had them developed at the lab but somehow, that didn’t happen and I couldn’t be bothered to scan any of them yet.

It was an amazing weekend that ended on this tone:

A pair of very muddy wellies after the rain came down for ‘Vampire Weekend’.

Lovely, right? I was shivering the entire 6 hours until we jumped into the car and made the very tiring journey home on which I must have left my voice at the gas station that we stopped at.

Another thing that has been stealing my time for the past four weeks has been the World Cup. You see, I don’t care about football that is played in the national leagues. But when it comes to an international tournament, I love watching. For Germany, it was a great tournament and we had just as much fun watching the games over here as people must have had in South Africa (really, it’s already been four years since we hosted the thing?). Sadly, Germany lost to Spain last Wednesday, making it possible for Spain to win the trophy last night. At least we lost to the new World Champion, right?

A note on the game last night: Was that horrible or what? When it wasn’t boring, it was downright vicious and violent and as much as I was for the Netherlands taking the cup home, De Jong fouling Xabi Alonso in the way he did should have been punished with a red card.

Well, what have all you lovely people all over the world been up to? Have you been watching the World Cup as well? Have you recently be on any music-related outings? Tell me!

from weheartit

“Writing, or already even thinking, about ,defining moments‘ is a complex task and it is hard to put into words what leads one to say that there was that one moment that made them change their pursuit of life and not the other.

Defining moments, when they occur, pass us in disguise and we are only able to identify them as such later. Sometimes, it takes a few hours for us to realise but more often a lot time will have gone by before we figure it out and can pinpoint the very seconds our lives made a sharp turn.

Often, these moments go lost in the bigger picture of a happening because they seem trivial, sometimes odd and so ordinary.“

I wrote this a fairly long while ago. I still believe firmly in this. My whole life is based upon defining moments.

while I live in a fairly tiny town somewhere in Western Germany and said town doesn’t offer a lot in terms of sights, there are still other places that can be easily reached by train and car and offer some beautiful sights to go.

One of those very nice and historic places is Münster, about 70 kilometers up north from where I live (and funnily the city I almost moved and went to university when I left high school five years ago). Münster is seriously the bicycle capital of good, old Germany (Wikipedia is not lying about that!) and a few years back was voted to be the most attractive, livable city in Germany. It is a city full of students riding around their bikes and full of beautiful, ancient buildings.

St Paul’s Cathedral is one of those buildings.

And why do I tell you all of this?

Well, not too long ago, my family and I took a trip to Münster to do some shopping and have a lovely day away from home. Towards the end of our little excursion, I managed to drag everyone into the cathedral as they’d never actually been! I have been before, on several occasions: with school, with friends on my own.

I’m in love with churches. Does that sound ridiculous? I’m just so stunned by the constructions, the size, the effort put into building those large, beautiful buildings. I also really like the atmosphere inside: Don’t you know the feeling of walking into a church and feeling at easy and so utterly calm? I only ever get that in All Hallows in London but every time I walk into a church here, I am reminded of the feeling just a little bit.

In 1225, the current church was built and was only severely damaged in the times of the Second World War (and then fixed in the years leading into the 1950s). Inside are many tiny chapels that are all dedicated to different saints, and the Cross above the altar dates back to the 13th century. The organ is apparently a rather new one, but a little further down the aisle you find the very old astronomical clock.

The orginial clock from 1408 sadly fell prey to the iconoclasm during the Anabaptist Rebellion in 1534, but a couple of years later a new one was built and installed and has been in the exact same place ever since. And it is actually still working. The Perpetual Calendar that goes along with it runs until 2071 – isn’t that amazing?

In any case – here are a couple of pictures from inside that I took. I completely forgot to take some of the exterior – the beautiful Paradise Gate and the two towers!

I guess what with my obsession for churches, it is a great thing I’m going to work as a member of clergy at one point in my life, right?