By Babette, Germany. Babette went to Egypt hoping for a wonderful family holiday. She came home with a wobbly bed, an improvised cocktail, a stingray she couldn’t photograph, four massages and a firm belief that Egypt deserves another chance — just somewhere else. Coming home from holiday is difficult enough. Coming home to three weeks…
By Sylvie, France. From tennis nerves and supermarket calculations to concert crowds, safari nightmares and the quiet art of letting someone go first, an ordinary conversation about waiting kept finding somewhere else to go. Sylvie lost her tennis match 6–2, 6–1, which did not particularly surprise her. What mattered more was that the score did…
By Fabrice, France Janita asked me to explain two local traditions she had never heard of: a wild boar dinner among old military vehicles, and a 12-kilometre Marche Gourmande built around food, wine, music and friends. Janita looked at the photographs and said, “I know absolutely nothing about the wild boar dinner. Start at the…
It started with a drawer full of random things. It ended with the quiet rules I learned from my mother, and the question of which of those rules still matter now. By Alexander, Germany. The famous drawers. We do not have one of those famous drawers where everything goes when nobody knows where else to…
By Fabrice, France There are objects we keep because they still work. Others stay because they carry a story. In my workshop, the difference is not always easy to see. Janita showed me a photograph of a workshop and asked what I noticed first. It was much too tidy. Everything had its place. The tools…
By Sylvie, France. Some things are waiting to be useful. Others are keeping a memory safe. The difficult part is knowing which is which. I like when things are organised. Old batteries have their special place. Cables have another box. The cables I use every day are easy, but the others — from old laptops…
By Alexander, Germany. Some inventions make life easier. Others simply take up space. And then there are the ones we use every day without really understanding them. Before our conversation even started, I had already used several inventions without thinking about them. My phone. My laptop. My coffee machine. The coffee machine is a good…
By Ralf Instant answers are useful. But curiosity starts when you understand why something works — and sometimes when you ask another person instead of Google. The Mayor gave me a new rule: whenever something goes wrong, I am allowed to give only one answer. Just add garlic. I liked this immediately. At home we…
By Sylvie, France. From polishing shoes on Saturdays to reminding grown daughters to clean their rooms, some household rules disappear. Others simply change shape. When I was a child, Saturday meant cleaning. We lived on a farm, so shoes in the house were not a big problem. There was dirt anyway. But every Saturday, the…
By Ismar, in Brazil. I have always believed there is a line between being interested in another person and entering a part of their life that does not belong to you. Then I started dancing, met new people and discovered that sometimes curiosity opens a door rather than crosses a boundary. When I was a…
