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Christmas is coming! Day 1

Yesterday, I bought Little an advent calendar.

Well, it is actually an Advent Book, with a Christmas activity for each day. The activities are pretty diverse: learn a Christmas Carol – here are the words; bake some biscuits – here is a recipe; make this decoration – here are the instructions; read this cute story.

This is great!

…. expletive….

Its Sunday…. I really, really hope that the first activity does not involve baking, because there is no butter in the fridge, and I am not sure about the egg and sugar situation either… And the shops are not open on Sunday.

Berlin Fact #1: Don’t count on being able to buy milk on a Sunday; almost all shops are closed. Some cafes are open, so you can get as much tea and coffee as you want, as long as you are happy to pay for it.

Sigh of relief. I have some respite; the first activity that needs materials we don’t have is on Day 3. The activities for the first two days are:

1. Write a letter to Santa.
2. Sing “Deck the Halls”. I assume that we should also start decking the halls. Or hall singular.

My own grand plan for the Advent Period was to write a blog post Every Day. I have been rather lazy about starting to write, and am hoping that making it a “little project” will help to “break the ice” as it were. So – here is Post 1.

I am going to tell you EVERYTHING that happened yesterday.

Little and I wanted to do Christmas shopping, and it was a lovely clear, freezy day – perfect. We started by going by bus to BuroClip. This shop is close to her school and sells the most marvellous stationery items and rucksacks. All three Dekkers have rucksacks from BuroClip!

We then took a series of S-bahn and U-bahn trains to the Tierpark. Berlin has two zoos: one in the west and one in the east. Our favourite is the “east one”, because it feels more like a beautiful park that just happens to have animals in it. It really deserves its own blog post! But I do want to mention that at the moment it is all rigged up for Christmas lights in the evening, so yesterday I took more photographs of “sculpture things that will light up later” than of animals. After lunch at the Kakadu cafe, and a brisk walk around the park, we went to the Zoo-Shop: the intended Christmas-shopping destination!

From the zoo, we went to Dussman – an amazing bookshop on Friedrichstrasse that also deserves a more lengthy description and definitely an excursion when you come to visit. We bought a lot of books, and other stuffs.

Confession #1: When I go Christmas shopping, I always allow myself to buy something “just for me”. There are so many lovely things! And I wants one too!

After all this shopping, we were both rather weary so went home – rather an inefficient route as it turns out, because:

1. Both our phones had run out of charge.
2. I had lost my capacity to do anything creative, so we had to restrict ourselves to steps that did not involve looking for bus stops.

We quickly nipped into Edeka – our little local supermarket – to get milk-for-Sunday; and another shop to buy wrapping paper. On the walk home, an advert for a Chamber Music concert caught my eye:

Piano Trios!! At 8 pm!!

So instead of viola practice, or piano practice, or anything else I might have planned for the evening, I went to a concert at Auenkirche.

Musical knowledge #1: We might be forgiven for thinking that the default meaning of piano trio is a trio of three pianists – either on three pianos or huddled together on one. But actually this is wrong. Sadly.

Unless otherwise specified, the default meaning for “piano trio” is, in fact, a piece of music for piano, violin and cello.

• Piano quartet = piano, violin, viola and cello.
• Piano quintet = piano + string quartet
• Flute quintet = flute + string quartet.

The standard of playing was really high – sensitive and energetic when it needed to be, and I will certainly look out for this trio again (Daniel Austrich, Tony Rymer, Matan Porat). It is extraordinary that playing of this calibre attracted an audience of only 40 people; but perhaps this is a reflection of the choice of concerts available on any given night. Anyone that slightly preferred Baroque Music, might – for example – have been able to find an equivalent recital elsewhere in the city; and there were certainly also operas, orchestras, bands… any number of other options.

The last trio they played was an arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s “Souvenir de Florence” by the pianist, Matan Porat. The outer two movements were very virtuosic – perhaps bordering on impossible to this amateur’s eye and ear (!?) – extremely inspiring to watch and listen to; the inner two were Just Beautiful and the third movement, especially, sounded like the type of thing that is very pleasurable to play.

I loved it!