The view from our balcony
It's mid-November and the first early snowflakes are floating by my fifth-floor window, lilting and dancing and wafting upward again as they meet the heat from the street below. Winter has definitely come to Berlin, earlier than usual but convincingly. The kids have been hoping for snow; now that it's here, Hannes is complaining about the cold: "Can't it snow and be just a little bit warmer?" Those early morning bike rides to school are brutally cold on exposed flesh.
Here on the 52nd parallel, it's already beginning to look like twilight at 3:30 in the afternoon, and by shortly after 4:30 it's deep night, pulling us in on ourselves for long evenings of Phase-10 and Rummy and Taboo games.
But while we were in Bonn last weekend to celebrate Hannah's 18th birthday, the kids discovered a new antidote for this dark season—ice skating—that turns the biting cold into an excuse for gliding (and falling) on sparkling ice.
Kids on skates
