My niece and nephew in March 2009

I can't believe I am blogging about something that just happened a week ago. Could somebody acknowledge that please! :)

So in between my 8 days (spread over two weeks) of interviewing I went to Bad Oeynhausen to see my sister and her family for the weekend. It was time to visit because my niece wouldn't recognise her aunt on a photograph shown to her by my sister just before my visit. I arrived really late on the Friday night cause I was interviewing till 7pm, and it took over 3 hours to get to my sisters place. So the kids were of course long gone to bed by the time I arrived. My sister, my brother in law and I sat down for a while and went to sleep pretty late. My sister also casually mentioned that Tim, my nephew, had turned into an early riser, but she had told him not to wake me up before 8am. Well that didn't happen, and prompt at 7.30am he woke me up both days, Saturday and Sunday.

Then it was kids full on for 3 days. The only time without them was when my sister and I went to our brother's house about an hour away. I didn't expect that to happen, so it was a pleasant surprise when we managed to go there. It's very rare that the 3 siblings get together just by themselves, in fact, it must have been the first time ever. Our parents were in Egypt far far away :)

On Saturday we went to Tim's first outdoor football match. Anna was playing with my sister and myself while Tim managed to shoot an own goal to make the final score of 3:3. The devastation was huge and the own goal was not to be mentioned again for the rest of the day. Luckily I had bought him a box of Lego Star Wars stuff, so he couldn't wait to get home and play with that.




Perfectly timed my niece also developed the chicken pocks that weekend. So anything in the area of 20m could have been terminated by her. Luckily the rest of us all had that as children. I told my sister, if I would have gotten ill that weekend my employer would have killed me. But also the downside was that we couldn't take her anywhere public anymore. In the short clip I am posting below she says: Mummy, I have never looked like this before! - Oh my god, she is so cute and adorable.

It was great seeing the kids although they were hard work. As I said Tim woke me up really early both days, and their mouths don't stop until they go to bed at 8pm. So when I got back to Hamburg on Monday evening I actually felt like having been hit with a hammer against my head. And I couldn't believe that I had to get up really early again to get ready for talking about laundry detergents again!

Two weeks of laundry detergents

After two months being out of work I finally went to Germany to start working on this market research project that was suppose to be starting in January. A small market research company based in London were looking for a German speaking Filmmaker - me! :)

The research involved going to Hamburg and interview 16 people about laundry detergents. It was qualitative research - I had to spent 4 hours with each person in the interview! So needless to say that I felt shattered after each day talking, filming and generally looking interested in laundry detergents. On the first day I thought I must die. The thought of doing this for 2 weeks didn't really appeal to me. So the first few days I thought of the good money I was making from this. But then it was actually ok. All the women and the one man I had to interview were really interesting. It sort of made me think about what I will buy as my detergent of choice in future.

All of them seemed to have done market research before, and obviously loved to talk. Maybe just a couple really seemed to have enough after 4 hours, the rest really didn't mind. I also had to ask about their lives and what makes them tick. Probably the oddest things was a lady passionately telling me about her husband's various jobs, like working in a sex shop on the Kitz, now being a shoe maker for transvestites and a body guard for a dominatrix. But all of them were really cool in their own way, many of them I would have loved to have a coffee with and talk about life and other stuff.

I haven't dreamed about detergent yet - phew - but that might change after having logged and digitised the 26 tapes I shot over those two weeks. I now have to log and digitise about 5 tapes a day. Today I managed to do 1. :/ But then I was still collecting the harddrive and deck for doing the work. Any excuse counts. Wish me luck.

ps: I also heard from those women that Klementine, the face of German Ariel advertising, died recently. So this is a tribute to her too.

New Home - first pics

2 weeks ago Alex and I left the relaxed vibes of Stoke Newington and moved to a lovely one bedroom flat on Hackney Road. It's living on a main road as well, but the house is a bit away from the road, and it's definitely less noisy than in the old flat. And we even got our own street lamp in the yard!

Our friend and now landlady Eleanor came on the first day to get the dishwasher fixed. She brought these flowers, and as you can see, the light in the living room is just to die for when the sun is out. Looooove It!!!

The main thing to move when it comes to my possessions are my books. After heavy moaning of the two men who had to carry my boxes - Alex and Jonathan - my apologies again! - this was also the first thing I put in its place. My book wall. And I love every single one of them :)

The one thing that comes second is of course getting connected. So on Monday the Virgin guys came. - that sounds a bit strange... Anyhoo, it took them a while to sort everything out, so I thought I'd catch the moment.