This was a short week. Monday was a so-called “bridge day” as Tuesday was a public holiday in Germany: the “day of German union”. Of course a lot of the main stream media only highlighted the parts where germans are not so united about. Just further supporting the split in my eyes.

Was recently discussing with a friend some Ossi/Wessi things and came to realise that we should probably just stop doing these stereotypes. It wasn’t a “Wessi” who ripped off the people in the former GDR selling them crap cars. It was an asshole. Tying certain behaviours to a geographical region isn’t helping the cause in most cases. There have been idiots and assholes with bad intentions all over the place. Trying to attribute this to their geographical upbringing is only providing them an excuse for making bad decision as a person.

On October 3rd. we celebrated our own East/West reunion (as we do every Sunday) with a swim in the lake. We take a group selfie every weekend there at the beach. This is the image from the wrong side camera 😉

A short week also means a bit of stress doing all the laundry … had to take it back slightly wet to the countryside and hang it there again for drying.

On Saturday we had our first formal members meeting of our local village “Verein”. Agenda was to close off the formalities of board reports and also voting on the new statute to become a charitable non-profit org. That was unanimously accepted. And of course there is always a bake-off at such occasions 😉 One of the members did some special waffles made out of potatoes and yeast dough.

After that meeting we went to Templin to attend the opening of the freshly renovated baptist church “Kirche am Wassertor“. Thats the church my parents go to and I grew up with. Over the course of the last 4 years the building underwent major refurbishment. As usual with such old buildings it turned out to be much more complicated, involved and expensive as originally anticipated. But the religious community took a joint effort and finished the project with a lot of self initiative and also monetary contributions. The result is stunning. More space, more energy efficient and more accessible.

To celebrate the occasion in the evening, there was a concert of a small band of three women from the church community. They sang songs from various artists and some of their own. It was beautiful and moving. All three of them were actually pregnant so there were 7 “humans” on the stage 😉