Look at this fantastic video where a sports teacher organizes a race with boys and girls in the US to explain what privilege means.
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Forth week: Meet friends in Berlin
Berlin! How much did I love this city when we were living there in the late 90ies and the early years of the new century! I was amazed by this city that was always in movement, new bars and shops opened every week, so many unauthorized parties in strange locations, so much room for creativity and crazy ideas! When I am walking on the streets of Prenzlauer Berg today I really miss that time. And we miss our friends with their wonderful multicolored backgrounds: Italians, Latins, Germans, Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish, Russian and Sri Lanka. Today when we visit Berlin for a couple of days we only manage to meet some of them and it is always very nice, warm and hearty, as if we had never moved to another town…
Third week: bureaucracy
In the third week of my sabbatical I was busy with German bureaucracy.
My health insurance company needed to figure out how much I will have to pay this year. Therefore they first wanted the official confirmation that I am unemployed. I don’t have this. I didn’t register at the job center because I do not want to get any financial support. Then they asked for my annual tax declaration from 2016 to see how much money I made as a freelance consultant last year. This didn’t make sense, because last year I was still an employee. The insurance systems in Germany are not prepared for workers taking one year off. But luckily in my insurance company I can still communicate with human beings and not machines, so at the end this nice lady and me found a compromise how to handle it that we can both live with. After that I had to deal with some more burocracy but more about that in other blogposts.
Second week: in Tuscany
In the second week my husband and I went to Tuscany, Italy. We went to the place where we had known each other more than 25 years ago, where we lived for many years together and where we could imagine to live again in the future. Finally we had time to look for a small house or flat to live without paying a rent! Now it is the right moment to invest in Italy one says, prices are low, the crisis forced many people to sell. In effect, apart from widows who want to sell because they feel lonely and prefer to move closer to their children, the most common pattern was banks, trying to sell houses of which the owners are no longer able to pay back the loans.
Well, we didn’t really find what we were looking for. But we will keep searching…