Houseguests

With the yellow chair

Two summers ago when the International Choral Festival came to Missoula, we decided to volunteer as a host family for a few members of one of the choirs. The festival organizers need people to house the choirs, feed them, drive them around to practices and performances, and show them around Missoula. I was pretty nervous - what if they don't speak English? What will we talk about? Will our home be welcoming enough? But we felt it was a great opportunity to learn about another country and to share the things we have with a stranger in need of welcome. We never expected to make lifelong friends.

We learned that we would be hosting choir members from Finland and that they would probably speak very good English. On the night their bus was arriving, those of us assigned to Finland showed up at the Missoula Community Theater and waited anxiously. Eventually the bus pulled up and they approached me - Nicke and Johanna, a young married couple, the only married pair in this choir. They were friendly and easygoing. Articulate, funny, full of life. Delightful.

Over the course of the week we spent a lot of time together in the car and at meals and because of their excellent English, delved into deeper conversations. Johanna and I had a lot in common in terms of personality, beliefs, hopes for the future, etc. It was strange and wonderful to meet someone from across the world who was so clearly a kindred spirit. And of course we learned about Finland with its saunas and lakes and forests, its long grey winters and its conflicts between the Swedish and Finnish cultures.

Now that we're living in Europe, we are planning a trip to Finland although it's unscheduled as of now. So we were excited when Nicke and Johanna contacted us last spring to say that they were coming to Berlin in September. Nicke has been brewing his own beer for years and wants to step it up to a professional level, and Berlin offers a certificate program that was necessary for him to begin his professional brewing journey. Best of all they had a baby a year ago, so we would get to meet their little one-year-old daughter, Evi.

We spent the last four days of their two-week trip together. Times had changed a little: Nicke spent long days in class and beer-tasting events with his peers, so I didn't get to see very much of him; Dan had to travel for business so he only got to spend two short evenings with them; there were no late nights with bottles of wine since Evi still wakes in the night; and we spent quite a bit of time just hanging out at our house watching Evi explore our bookshelves and climb up and down our stairs. But it was a nice change of pace! She is a beautiful, happy little girl, easy to fall in love with, loves new people.

What a cutie, playing peek-a-boo on the stairs

And she's super adaptable, so I was able to show Johanna a little of Berlin and Evi tagged right along in her stroller, refusing to nap until we got back home to the bed.

Dance schedule for a beach bar on the
riverbank. Mental note to go there for
date night!

The first day of their visit with us Johanna and Evi and I joined an informal walking tour of the old Jewish quarter of Berlin, hosted by my new club, the American Women's Club of Berlin. We met (eventually, after a grueling public transit trip whose story I won't tell in the interest of not reliving it in the telling; I haven't been so turned around on public transit since my first months in Berlin) in one of the members' homes for coffee and croissants and then she showed us all around her neighborhood, pointing out nice restaurants, shops, galleries and tango bars, and giving us some of the history of the area.

Our tour group with the Ampelmann

It was a beautiful day to be out for a walk and we both really enjoyed it. That night I went to Haley's parents' night at school while Dan took everyone out for a traditional German dinner.

The second day we went to the Berlin Botanical Gardens. I love to visit gardens and this huge complex isn't too far from our house, much less of a journey than the previous day's trek. It turns out that this botanical garden is considered one of the most important gardens in the world and it has over 22,000 species of plants! I have never seen so many different plants all crowded together but each with its own individual space in the display.

All the different species were meticulously labeled and
cared for

And we had another beautiful day for a walk. I wasn't sure what would be blooming in mid-September, but there were quite a few flowers. And really the highlight was these amazing huge glass greenhouses that you wander through.

In one winding and interconnected path you pass through Africa, the tropics, Europe, Australia. It's easy to lose your way, and I did when I went back inside to take a few photos and found myself in the desert among cactuses when I thought I was heading back outside to meet Johanna.

Cactus forest

I enjoyed the day so much that I'm thinking of getting an annual pass so I can go back whenever I want. Maybe I'll take my computer there and write sometimes. After we visited the gardens we had lunch at a nice place nearby, Das Café in der Gartenakademie, that I had been to once before with some ladies from the school. I felt like quite the oldtimer, returning someplace for a second time!

After lunch, outside the Gartenakademie

It's a really neat place kind of in its own greenhouse, with good food and lots of yummy desserts to choose from. We pushed Evi's tolerance for boredom and lack of sleep, but it was a really nice lunch.

Roses in the arboretum

Interconnected greenhouses

Our third day together we took it easy in the morning and then went out for a late lunch at a pizza/pasta place here in our neighborhood that I had been wanting to try. We had a nice, long lunch - very German - the kind of meal where you see people relaxing with beer and pizza in a restaurant at 2:00 in the afternoon and think "Who are these people? Don't they have jobs? How can they just be hanging out at a restaurant right now?" Yep, that was us.

Friday was a bit rainy and cool. I went to my running group alone. I had invited Johanna to come and have a stroll around the lake and a coffee afterwards, but it was too early for them to get up and out of the house, and the weather wasn't good. So she packed and after I got back we just spent time chatting and playing with Evi. Later in the afternoon we escorted them on the bus to the airport. We had a nice photo session at Adenauer Platz while waiting for their second bus which proved to be so late as to make us all really nervous! But it did come, and got them to the airport on time, thank goodness!

What a treat to have this time together! Can't wait to get to Finland and get the insider tour there!