It’s Saturday morning, I am sitting in my new „dark room“ next to the kitchen and the stinging smell of Naphtalene pellets covers everything around me. Mothballs. That’s exactly it. We have a very old chest made of dark wood in our basement at home in Berlin, filled with old bed sheets and other textiles. When you open that chest you get exactly that certain smell. So eventually, trying to get rid of this disgusting, poison-like moldy smell, I ended up living in a Mothball-basement-chest-nightmare. Great. I am so so so fed up with bad smells. Good news is that Harmattan brings a lot of dry air around and also the AC (which meant a 50 Euro rent rise for the new room, yay!) helps a little to make the room more „habitable“.
But actually, Harmattan is not really an improvement. You don’t see the sun here often anymore. Behind all this dust there is something very bright that you figure could be the sun but could likewise be the moon. The air is so dusty that you wish for a face mask. And, what is most disturbing – you don’t sweat anymore. There are no little drops running down your spine anymore, no wet and warm washcloth over your face feeling anymore, Harmattan has basically changed everything that Ghana used to be for us, at least regarding this physical feeling we had really got used to over the last few months. Yes, it has been almost three months now that we live here. Kathi wants to move out. My heart is breaking. And eventually, my bank account, too. She found a room for the price of a language course book per month at Lisa’s place and is leaving Africa House by the middle of the month. And I have got a moldy, overpriced room with one window that is not letting any daylight shine through, I guess that sounds like Jackpot. This is horrible and embarrassing, I have been complaining until now. Was there even one positive thing I have mentioned so far? Maybe, this is winter depression? Or quarter-life-crisis? Or Harmattan Blues? Nah, forget about that.

Anyways, the last days I spend working off this typical, well-known Christmas bustle, with endless to-do-lists and Christmas party preparations and of course organising filming dates for my tiny little documentary. I am enormously happy that all my three protagonists picks agreed on starring and so the filming is set for next Thursday and Friday. I am excited, I don’t really have a plan yet but it has always been like that and I guess I am just a postproduction-organiser and outsorter. Oh and if anybody possesses this wonderful German Christmas time film „Die Feuerzangenbowle“ – I would be extremely pleased if you could put me a subtitled version somewhere in the plenty world of Dropbox because I really have the plan to show it next Friday and also have actual Feuerzangenbowle. This is another challenge but I am so looking forward to that and I want the Institut to have a kick-ass Christmas party. My computer is doing weird things. He is not producing capital ds anymore. Well I guess after four years now, the signs of planned obsolescence are no longer to be hidden.

Yesterday was Farmer’s day which meant that we had the day off. The dumsor had again lasted for more than 24 hours but energy was back for the holiday’s morning. We had a nice lunch with Kathi and Lisa at a newly opened Kebab place. Yes, this was the absolute Holiday lunchdelight for us, as we hadn’t seen kebab in months. What we finally got as a kebab was a joke which looked like washed in boiling water but it was delicious and we enjoyed this little reminiscence of home.
Later we were invited personally by Mr. Telenovela-John-Wayne (you surely remember that guy from the airport) to his newly opened pool. At first it felt a little awkward being a Bikini girl among other Bikini girls with him being the only guy in the pool, feeling great – looking great, savouring his shower as if he was posing for a Calvin Klein-commercial and his colleagues standing around the pool, „checking out the scene“. In the end, they were all just absolutely delighted to see that their work, a decent pool made out of honest, sweaty handywork, was finally used by actual people who were enjoying it. At least this was what he told us, not caring about his obvious, south-western accent. He was then later the perfect gentleman or in that case rather the perfect hotelier, being absolutely professional, asking me if I needed warmer clothes and if everything was alright. I said I would like to have a little tour through what he had built up within the last two years. Again I had a bad conscience and felt way too old, figuring that he was a year younger than me but acting as if he knew it all, not even in an uncomfortable way but surely just slightly too convincd of himself. It was a very cool place and you could really see that he was eager to upcycle every material that he found as a building material. From the glasses to the toilet brush to the book shelves, everything was handmade and eco-friendly, either reused or recycled in some way. He told me about when he was a boy and had to build his family house with his dad and brothers which actually annoyed him a lot but in the end he became a kind of eco-architect and what he build up there was really something. It was funny, though. Sometimes you know just too much how some people see themselves and how they exactly reflect that.

It is late already and I actually would like to go to the monthly Flea Market at Goethe. It is trickier than I thought to get some nice Christmas cards in Ghana. I really need to get some. And then I’ll be draming of a white Christmas, with every Christmas card I write. Who knows, maybe Harmattan brings us one. They say anything can happen at Christmas, don’t they? Now, open your 5th little door and tune in for some nice little Christmas song, I can definitely recommend „Christmas with the ratpack“, the whole album, find it on Youtube! 😉