Journal

Spring is slowly approaching, I thought to myself last week and bought a flowerpot plus flower for my windowsill. The next morning, the flower was unfortunately frozen to death and I incorporated the flowerpot into our common kitchen in the corridor as a cereal bowl. You just have to be creative.

We've been living on the new floors for about 2 months now: Carolina got a double room on the second floor, and I got a small one on the fourth floor. Though my new room is indeed very small, I now have my own bathroom and it's only the kitchen that is shared. Caro could even divide her two rooms into a study and a bedroom. Luckily, our new home is supervised by several educators as well, which means that the kitchens and corridors get mopped regularly. We even have room inspections on a regular basis in which they check whether various fire regulations and the general hygiene are maintained. Of course I was lucky enough to fail this first inspection, so I had to have my room completely cleaned by the following Monday for a follow-up inspection. Everyone who knows Caro and me should know which one of us is actually the tidier one. When we were kids, you often couldn't see the floor of Caro's room because of all the chaos, whereas I had fun cleaning my windows voluntarily and arranging my pens parallel to each other on the desk. This seems to have changed in the meantime. Only a few days later, the following order was written in the kitchen book for me:

Room 39 – Hermann –
The refrigerator compartment is to be cleaned immediately. It's a shared refrigerator, and this has nothing in common with hygiene.

My problem was that I had accidentally spilled a bowl of tomato juice in my compartment the day before and hadn't had the time to clean this up. Despite all the advantages and disadvantages of a common kitchen, we enjoy our new home. It's super nice to be able to dine with the others after practice or, when you feel like it, even cook together.

Mr. Skotnicky also paid us a visit in Berlin a while ago and stayed for a few days, so we had the opportunity to show him some of our technical exercises that we had worked on during the previous weeks. Unfortunately, Carolina's knee still isn't fully healed and at the moment we can only manage a maximum of 1.5 hours of on-ice training twice a day. I often skate by myself in addition to this and also do strength and ballet training. Nevertheless it was very nice of him to visit us and to take the time for us. We have tried to change a lot about our general skating and we've worked a lot on the technique. Unfortunately, it's not always that easy to just change a few things about your movements, so this sometimes seems a bit arduous. As long as there's progress, though, we're confident to hopefully get some good levels for our steps.

Apart from that, we're already planning our next season, are looking for music, and thinking about the new costumes. We had hoped that we could already create some of the choreography now in March, but we're not sure yet if that'll work out. Since we didn't compete last year, we're not eligible for grants and we therefore have to try to create our programs rather economically.

First we're allowed to skate a little show program at "Holiday on Ice" in March, though. On March 10, we're showing a program that we rehearsed in the last couple of weeks specifically for this occasion. We've long wanted to create a show program and now we've just used our time for this. The music is Pink Panther and we hope that we can put a video online when the show is over.

Best wishes,

Daniel