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My 3 year old neighbour Milan drew this for me. It’s my favourite map so far.

The smaller squiggly bit with a dot in the middle is Berlin and the bigger one is Montreal (where he was born). The big circlish is earth.

The tree shaped thing may just be a tree.

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It is a rather beautiful Italy. By a rather super classmate.

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I made draw me a map of Germany and its 16 states as well as all the neighbours.

In return I drew a map of Australia with our 6 states and 2 territories and no land neighbours.

I had the much easier task!

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I made Andreas draw me a map of Germany and its 16 states as well as all the neighbours.

In return I drew a map of Australia with our 6 states and 2 territories and no land neighbours.

Altogether I’ve spent about 3 years in Europe since 2002, but I’ve never been in one place to watch the whole transition from deep winter to spring before.

It’s been a lovely couple of weeks here in Berlin. From the first day of April the sun started shining and people started smiling. Then the most amazing thing happened, the horse chestnut tree (Rosskastaniene) in the courtyard (hof) began to change from branches with buds to a tree with leaves. Sure, trees get leaves every spring, but from my regular typing place by the kitchen window I finally could pay attention to the process.

Let me tell you something fascinating, trees burst into leaf from the bottom up.  Over three days I could effectively see the sap flowing up the trunk and along the branches.  From hour to hour different leaves had opened and I kinda forgot to take photos of the process because I kept on saying to my flatmate “Can you see that? It’s like a switch has been turned on or something!”

It was pretty exciting.

Here’s a photo from today, two weeks after the leaves unfurled:

The season actually appeared to burst from tree branch, bulb, seed and sun. I guess that’s why it’s called spring?

I needed to live in Europe before I understood that in my part of Australia, the seasons of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter are Euro-centric ideas laid on top of a vastly different climate.  Even though it would make more sense to acknowledge traditional indigenous seasons, we persist in describing Australian weather with concepts that don’t adequately describe the actual seasonal patterns. I feel that one of the reasons discussions about climate change fail to influence people, is because a large part of the developed (and emitting) world’s population is semantically isolated from what is normal for their region.

Because of the ways in which language and culture are transmitted, the experience of being an Austrlian in Europe (and more specifically Britain) is that of normality: birds whistle familiar sounding melodies, trees are the shape of picture book trees and some houses are actually shaped like childrens’ generic house drawings. It may be ‘normal’ here, but however lovely Berlin in Spring may be, thinking about the contrasts makes me miss and desire the strange shapes, sounds and smells of South Australia, the experiences that I grew up in.

I think the black and white local magpies (Eltern) with their kleptomanic tendencies and dark blue flash of wing are quite beautiful, but there’s something about the sound of Australian magpies which makes up for their more violent tendency to swoop and attack while nesting [mp3].

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The thing I most heartwrenchingly miss has always been the rainbow lorikeet, its swooping flash of colour as it flies through my favourite park and the chatter a flock of them make around dusk [the latter third of this mp3]. When I lived in Finland and made my garden wall, I painted a lorikeet to live in the plants.  If I could be reborn as an animal I’d be a lorikeet.

I had intended this to be more of a post about how marvellous the weather has been, rather than a meditation on climate, language, postcolonialism and the strange experience of being a European (Australian) “other” in Europe. Inevitably though, the feelings associated with new locations, travel and identity lead to a specific feeling of missing what is first known and familiar.

One of the things that motivated me to start learning more about friendship is the modern and instant types of “friend” as represented by social networks.  I sometimes feel that the meaning[s] of ‘friend’ are somewhat weakened by the more binary Yes / No labelling of friendship prompted by “Do you want to add person x as a friend?” *

As part of this learning I’ve started listening to a series of short lectures by  Mark Vernon, author of , recounting and responding to Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship.

In Lecture 3, Vernon elaborates on Aristotle’s idea of 3 types of friendship: Useful,Pleasant and Good friends.  A lovely Australian friend, the zinestress extraordinaire  Maddy Phelan, describes these relationships as Situational (school / work), Activity (music, hobby) and Excellent (life long friends) friendships.  You meet most of your friends at work, school or in situations around your hobbies and passions, but not all of those friendships will last once those situations change. The friends who last despite life changes, are your Good or Excellent friends.

Before listening to these lectures, I’d already begun thinking of people I know as belonging to those categories. It prompts a series of questions: Why do some people stay friends while others drift away? Is this drifting something you can predict? How do you know when someone’s become an Excellent friend? Do you need a life change (new employment, travel) to really find out which friendships will survive? Do you need to share specific experiences / spend a certain amount of time with someone to strengthen and form a long-lasting friendship?

Mark Vernon describes Aristotle’s Good / Excellent friends as people you love for what they are or who they are in themselves. They’re the people you are friends with because of their “depth of character, goodness, passion or joie de vivre”.

As a personal exercise as part of 150 Things I asked myself to write a list of my most Excellent friends. I ended up with 7 people who I feel are my truest soul friends – people who I’ll continue to be friends with for the rest of my life, even if I only see them every few years. These are the friends I know intimately and who refresh my sense of self and personal energy whenever I see them.

I also made a list of about 15-20 people who might be in that Excellent friend category if I could have enough chances to spend time / communicate with them and develop a friendship further.  Luckily several of those people live here in Berlin. After only five months living in this town I feel very happy and lucky knowing that I have potential Excellent friends.

“The better these friends are as people, the better the quality of the friendship. This friendship is therefore also the rarest. And it takes time to grow: they must savour salt together, Aristotle says, and trust one another…

…What is quick to arrive is a wish for friendship – what is not quick to rise is friendship itself.”
Mark Vernon,

*To tangent away from friendship itself, I want to add that the social networking sites I feel most comfortable with and trust more as brands are those which are more honest about the type of connection / relationship that is being made: Do you want to follow person x? (Twitter) or Do you want to add this person as a Conact? Are they a Friend or Family member? (Flickr)

For me, the phrasing of the questions also encourages me to think more about the type of information I’ll share with members of those social networks. Facebook seems to encourages people to share far more information online by the use of the word ‘friend’ to describe contact: “of course I’ll share my home address with this person who I’ve met once – they’re my ‘friend’”.

It’s not like I’m trying to put pressure on my map drawers or anything, but I like to say “So far, the French have drawn the best map, they put little wine bottles and Eiffel Tours on theirs.”

One of my classmates from Babylonia drew me a map of Sweden.

In this map by one of my German language teachers, we see that Steffen thinks that the location of rivers and mountains are the most important things to know about a country.

I can’t name all the states of the USA, let alone draw them. Also, I must find out this guy’s name.