Skip to main content

Happy Birthday, Ilse!

[SERIOUS CONTENT WARNING: THIS IS CHEESY!]

Today is Ilse's birthday and for me, this is the most important day of the year! This day celebrates the birth of my favorite person and I am beyond grateful to have her in my life. As you know, we met on Tinder about one and a half years ago and didn't expect anymore that we would find a person we would really like on this platform. Additionally, I had a serious shortcoming: my bangs! Ilse didn't like bangs at all, but she states that she does like them now. (I would give them up for her, though!) A couple of weeks later, we went on our first date; our second date eight days after that made it obvious: we might be right for each other.

Ever since, we are inseparable. We go on the most amazing vacations (remember our posts on Portugal and Belgium?), have outdoor adventures while hiking, canoeing, or cycling, and explore our city in the best way possible. But our biggest adventure so far is still to come: moving in together! We have just a few weeks left and I can't wait to completely live together with her (although we technically already do).

And when the global pandemic is over, I hope we'll be able to catch up on our missed travel plans to Tel Aviv and Cambodia, to visit the new places we added to our travel list in the meantime. We would need more than one lifetime to go everywhere we want to go, but that's okay as well. I know that we'll always make the best of everything. Or at least try to.

I also can't wait to go shopping for our first walking frames, get our first practical, short hair cut with a permanent wave, and dye our gray hair lavender. And if we should not be able to live independently until the end, we'll find a place where we'll play bingo and moan about the current state of society.

But for now, we'll enjoy what we have, knowing that everything to come will be good. Happy birthday, Ilse. I love you—always and forever.
Labels:
Location: Cologne, Germany

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cochem: A Few Days in the German Countryside

Cochem is a place in the German countryside, in Rhineland-Palatinate. Although it is a district seat, it is rather small with about 5,000 inhabitants. Although it is probably easiest to arrive by car, traveling by rail is convenient as well. And as you know: we will always prefer to travel sustainably! We had booked a vacation home with a surprisingly comfortable Murphy bed (our first time in a Murphy bed!) and a little kitchen. Although Cochem had almost no COVID-19 cases when we visited, we nevertheless wanted to be careful and a place where we could make our own food was a perfect solution. But although it rained a lot, we luckily could enjoy a few patios. Cochem lies at the Moselle and is part of the Mosel wine region. The Mosel wines are amongst the best (if not the best) wines in Germany and the local/regional wines in Cochem were delicious. Since Cochem is a popular town for tourists and day visitors, there were lots of restaurants. But this popularity also meant that prices wer...
Post a Comment
Read more

Our Favorite Destinations in Cologne (Part 3): Skulpturenpark

The Skulpturenpark ('sculpture park') is one of our absolute favorites. When we just started dating, Else told Ilse about this park that Ilse didn't know. So, for our second date, Else planned a walk including this park (we wrote about it in  another post ). 19 months later, we were back for our monthversary, after we had planned to revisit more than once. But we always found other places to explore and somehow kept postponing our visit. In 1997, the Skulpturenpark opened its first exhibition with contemporary sculptures from all over the world. The exhibitions are usually open for about two years; then, a new exhibition is curated. While most artworks are then removed from the park, others aren't—there are still a few sculptures from the very first and following exhibitions. Recently, the tenth exhibition opened and and you can visit it until 2022. While some artworks are huge and cannot be missed, others are smaller such as Lonesome George by Ayşe Erkmen, a tiny snail...
Post a Comment
Read more

Looking Back: A Long Weekend in Belgium

As a birthday gift for Else last year, Ilse planned and booked a trip to Belgium. So, mid-January, we got on our train (Else's first Thalys train ride!) to Brussels. Before our trip, Else, as a dedicated dinosaur lover, found out that the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels has an impressive dinosaur collection. So: off we were to meet our friends, the dinosaurs! The collection indeed was formidable, we probably killed a photo machine (we didn't do anything wrong!), and Else tentatively tried her French skills learned on Duolingo (unintentionally rude, but well ...). Another quick train ride away, we reached Bruges a few hours later. Ilse had booked us a fantastic hotel (even with an outside swimming pool —we hope to be back there in summer!) in the city center. During that time, we both were quite tired and exhausted and Bruges was the perfect place to relax —the city center is rather small and we could reach everything within half an hour from our hotel. Although the ci...
Post a Comment
Read more