Pippa Buchanan - Photo by Mark Niehus

“Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” -Helen Keller

Hi, I'm Pippa, an Australian living in Berlin, Germany.
I'm passionate about learning, particularly lifelong and self-organised learning styles. I currently work as an educator and developer of learning related technologies.
I make things such as clothes and at least one small boat and cook, eat and read. I like stories. I also like maps, hot cups of tea with milk, Arnott's Western Australian gingernut biscuits, well written songs and plants.

rhubarb syrup label

Sunny warm days have been hard to find around Berlin (and apparently most of Europe) lately. In fact, when I went to meet with friends at the Turkish Market this afternoon, I felt like I could have comfortably been wearing gloves. In addition to my long sleeved woolen shirt, tunic dress, jeans, sweater and wool blend coat. On June 1st. At least everyone in Berlin’s got a topic of complaint and conversation.

And quite reasonable we are to complain too. After putting up with Berlin’s winter darkness we’ve been left with even more cool and gray weather.  I’d managed to slog my way through winter thinking – “oh, in Spring it will be sunny and warmer and…” only to finally get to Spring and have the skies feel dark and foreboding.

The cool weather has been affecting my water consumption, which in turn has been affecting my mood even more, so I’ve been looking for ways to encourage me to consume at least 1.5 litres a day and keep hydrated and happy. For some reason I was thinking “pink lemonade” and then I saw this post from Stephanie of 3191 Miles Apart. Well, it’s not exactly lemonade, but it was pink, pretty, drinkable and i had some rhubarb ready to be used in my kitchen – so I made rhubarb syrup.

I’ve been told that the weather is all the fault of Bjork and other Icelandic peoples and volcanoes, but I chose to not spread my blame to Múm, who despite being Icelandic popped up on my iPod with an aptly themed song “Rhuubarbidoo”. And it’s such things that make you forget that the sky is gray.

I think the syrup is very sweet and only lightly flavoured – as such it could have been modified to include some ginger, or some extra citrus flavour beside a little bit of lemon rind.  But oh! The bottled syrup turned out a lovely pink and beautiful like a jewel! So the bottle deserved a label.

, originally uploaded by .

I’m not sure what cheered me up the most, drinking some more water, listening to lovely music, making the syrup or painting the label!