Drought

We walked out of our apartment on Monday to see all the cars in our little parking lot coated in a brown sheet of dust.

We haven't had a solid shower of rain here in weeks, maybe more than 2 months. Normally this region is more rainy than sunny during the spring. The winter was abnormally dry, too. Temperatures have regularly been in the high 60s and 70s, instead of the 50s where they should be. One friend told me that this has been the region's warmest spring since they started keeping records here, in the mid-1800s.

Over the weekend I noticed my hair felt dirty every day; I realized it was from all the dust being kicked up in the air. When you look toward the horizon or up into the sky, you see haze. It's from the dusty atmosphere.

http://thewatchers.adorraeli.com/2011/04/24/europe-is-facing-the-worst-drought-in-century/

According to this article, in Zurich officials had to start moving trout out of the Toess river before it becomes uninhabitable.

While I love a good spring or summer storm, I'm less enthusiastic about the more typical cold, drizzly weather that is common here. So I haven't minded all the unseasonable warmth and sunshine. But we live in an agricultural area. Farms and fields completely surround our little village. You are more likely to get creamed by a tractor while crossing the street than to be hit by a car.

It's an immediate reality to me that Europe needs rain.

It needs spiritual rain, as well. It needs the live-giving, thirst-quenching, refreshing, reviving Living Water that God wants to pour out on His children.

We pray for both kinds.

Back from Berlin

We got back safely yesterday from our long weekend in Berlin. We had a fantastic time and enjoyed the company of two friends we've made in our village.

The weather was fantastic -- clear blue skies and moderate temperatures in the high 60s or low 70s every day. We hit almost everything on our list except 2-3 museums that were lower priorities, and a nearby town with two palaces that maybe we'll see sometime in the future.

Took lots of pictures and in the next few days we'll be blogging about everything. We saw a concentration camp, the Checkpoint Charlie museum, a couple chunks of the Berlin Wall, the ruins of the SS headquarters, the building where Colonel Stauffenberg launched Operation Valkyrie to assassinate Hitler and where he was executed, the Brandenburg Gate, a Memorial to the Murdered Jews, the plaza where the Nazis held a big book burning, as well as some fun stuff, like hitting several Starbucks, Madame Tussaud's wax museum and seeing a movie.

The things we saw and read gave me a lot to reflect on in the coming days. I think I'll still be processing for a while. It was completely unintended, but the order in which we saw things seemed to follow the same emotional trajectory of Easter weekend. It was interesting to immerse ourselves in a hellish period of Jewish history during Passover/Easter, and to think about the implications of the Easter story against the context of the Holocaust. I think going to Berlin on this particular weekend added something for me.

It also was interesting to have recently seen some WWII movies that added a lot of imagery in my imagination to what I was reading and seeing. Some great movies I have seen recently that were on my mind while we were in Berlin:

The Pianist
Life is Beautiful
Schindler's List
Valkyrie
The Longest Day
Empire of the Sun
The Lives of Others

Movies I'm planning to watch now:

To End All Wars
Anne Frank: The Whole Story
Enemy at the Gate
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Jakob the Liar

My new best friend

It's sleek, sexy, lightweight and efficient. Oh yeah, and it's red.

Our new Dirt Devil is wonderful. A missionary got a new vacuum cleaner and gave us his old one. Not having to walk outside to another part of the building to get a shared vacuum cleaner (which is occasionally coated with long, black hairs from other residents) is a fabulous new development.

Glorious bike ride

I went on this absolutely glorious bike ride, about 9 miles, with my former German teacher and now friend, with her daughter. It was an afternoon of discovery, because we kept stopping along the way to check out a couple of churches at old monasteries and exploring parks and trails along the river. The weather was in the 70s with a cloudless blue sky, and everything is in bloom earlier than it normally would be.

Amazing.

Learning German II