Between school meetings, homemade bread rolls and a new responsibility, Babette is already thinking about wool, colours and Christmas. By Babette. Germany. Sometimes I think a school parents’ evening should be a quick meeting. You go there, listen to the teachers, hear what is happening in the class, and then you go home. But that…
Two camps, a catamaran, cold forest showers, tuna with mango, a permanent problem with being late, and a Spanish exchange student waiting at home: my summer was not exactly made for resting. By Sarah, France My holidays were really, really cool. Actually, they were very big holidays because I had so many things to do…
We were supposed to discuss a topic. Instead, we talked about weather, daughters, blood, running, films, pizza and whatever happened to come next. Maybe that was the better conversation. By Sylvie. France. We were supposed to talk about our topic. We didn’t. We started with the weather. It was 24 degrees where I was, but…
Growing up in the village meant freedom, bad ideas, a few painful lessons and plenty of learning by doing. Looking back, some of it seems almost impossible today. By Fabrice, France When I was very, very young, I was sensible. That lasted until I was about seven or eight. After that, I became adventurous. By…
The questions matter, but so do the things around them: who is sitting opposite you, how open the conversation feels, and whether you are brave enough to find out what the job is really like. By Alexander, Germany. I was about fifteen minutes early for a job interview and sitting in my car outside the…
What began as a conversation about punctuality in Brazil became a much stranger question: what happens when companionship arrives after a lifetime of carefully kept routines? By Ismar, Campo Grande, Brazil. The question was supposed to be simple: when is it acceptable to arrive late? For Ismar, punctuality is not a theoretical subject. If an…
From Crete to a German restaurant and the forbidden zone around my barbecue, I keep coming back to the same thing: respect is usually visible in small actions. By Ralf The Grillmeister, Germany. When we landed in Crete, everything was easy. That sounds like a very small thing, but sometimes the small things are exactly…
By Sylvie, France. Some things stay because they are useful, some because they were gifts, and some simply because nobody has decided what to do with them yet. Then there are the things we are quite happy to leave behind. I have a popcorn machine in my house that I never use. It was a…
By Janita & Frank aka The Duo, (or Fruitloop and The Mayor.) Fabrice was supposed to join us. He didn’t. So, while we waited, we did what any sensible Mayor and Fruitloop would do: carried on without him. At five o’clock, there were supposed to be three of us. There were two. The Mayor arrived…
By Sylvie, France. Some inventions make life easier. Others change what we think is possible — and sometimes the same invention manages to do both. Before we reached the subject of inventions, our conversation had already travelled through quite a few parts of everyday life. We talked about the things happening in the world, the…
