The Return Flight

Today, after 375 days of travel across 5 continents, I’m headed back to the U.S. I pack the remaining things that Stoytcho didn’t take with him last week, then it’s off to the Berlin airport. Wow Air had the cheapest flight I could find, so I have a 4 hour layover in Reykjavik before flying on to Boston.

I board the first plane in Berlin and fly through overcast skies without incident, spending most of the time thinking about apartment hunting and what I’m coming back to. It has been a tumultuous year in the U.S., exhausting to watch from afar, but likely even more exhausting for those living in the States. I don’t exactly know what I’m coming back to, and though I have a job waiting for me, part of me does not wish to return. It’s easier to not go back to the problems. But running from the problems won’t solve anything, and even worse, it leaves behind those who can’t leave.

I land in Reykjavik just in time for the winter afternoon sunset and spend most of my layover working on blog posts, wandering through the duty free shop, and staring out at the snowy, golden landscape. I am grateful for the warmth of the airport as I board the next plane and experience a brief blast of icy air.

The dusk flight from Iceland to Boston is the most beautiful I’ve ever experienced. The jagged rocks of Iceland’s coast interlace with the dark sea and wisps of hanging mist. Above the clouds the sun dyes everything a golden orange with purple shadows.

I drift in and out of sleep and wake to the captain making a PA announcement: we’re passing over Greenland. Below us, a mountainous landscape cloaked in purple and white stretches out endlessly. The winter extends the Greenland landmass with icebergs in the sea.

Though we are chasing the sun, it outruns us and eventually the plane slips into darkness. I sleep a bit more, and wake to a jolt and the announcement that we’re coming in for landing. Below and ahead, thousands of rainbow lights twinkle on the horizon: the Boston harbor at night.

As we come in for landing the dots become brilliant streaks of light out the window, and then we’re at a standstill, back on U.S. soil with all of its fear and hope for the future. I spent the better part of a decade planning and saving for this trip. Now it’s time to move on. And while our round-the-world trip is over, the journey is not. It will continue, always, in every person we meet and inspire to take their own first steps away from the comfort of home.

Berlin Christmas Market

It’s still only mid-November, but that hasn’t stopped the Berliners from starting Christmas early. And it goes further than just the heaps of stollen, gingerbread, and spiced liquors in the supermarket nearby — they’ve opened a whole Christmas market at Potsdamer Platz. I’m flying out tomorrow, so Cindy, Eric, Anna, and I head out for one last adventure.

Wow, did I mention this place was holiday-themed yet? The little wooden stalls are decked out in lights and doling out delicious winter carnival treats. There’s one doling out hot drinks, including mulled wine and spiked hot chocolates, one selling out decorated cookies, candy, and spiced nuts, and multiple selling the fried food from various cuisines. And then there’s…chili!?!

We wander around, eating as much as possible and watching people sled down an artificial toboggan hill. We wonder aloud when we might see each other again, with Cindy and Eric bound for Amsterdam for another workshop, Anna heading home to California soon, and me flying to Boston tomorrow. I want to keep traveling, but there’s also a pull to stay in one place for a bit where I can accomplish something. That feeling comes from my lab days, as a graduate student. You can’t run PCRs and cell culture when you’re on the road — at least, not yet. But a suitcase lab and interesting questions to chase would be all I need to pack up again*.

I’ll miss the three of them, but it’s only temporary. With friends like these, we’ll be sure to see each other again.

*Ironically, I will not be going back to the lab when I return. I have a new career waiting for me in consulting! We’ll see how it goes.

Berlin with cousins

A parked Trabi limousine we saw on our tour.

Two of my cousins that I haven’t seen in years, Sarah and Daniel, have flown in from England to meet me in Berlin! Their sister Mary would probably be happy to join, but she just wrapped up celebrating her birthday and got engaged so she has work and wedding planning. (Is it just me, or suddenly is everyone you know getting married too?) We buy tickets for a hop-on hop-off sightseeing bus around the city and spend the day as tourists. It’s probably good for me, since I haven’t actually seen much of Berlin beyond our Airbnb, some flea markets, and a nearby grocery store.

We catch one of the buses and spend the day exploring, listening to the bus’s pre-recorded tour information and disembarking when we please.

So it’s not a glorious royal coach. But it’ll do!

Walking around.

There are trampolines with awesome bounce built into the sidewalk near Potsdamer Platz!

Another tourist figures out where we are on an old aerial photograph of the Berlin Wall.

Trabi world, where you can get all of your Trabant-related merchandise. For those who don’t know what a Trabant is, it’s a “famous” East German car brand.

Sibling hug!

At the end of the day we say goodbye over glasses of wine. Sarah and Daniel will return home tomorrow, after less than 48 hours in Berlin. I’m so lucky they came to visit, since I won’t get a chance to visit them in England before heading back. Speaking of, there is less than 72 hours before I board a plane as well, bound back to the U.S.

Temporary Goodbyes

Today Stoytcho and I are saying goodbye temporarily, as he heads home to the U.S. to take care of some personal matters. It’s weird that it’s just another plane ride, but it will be one that he takes alone. I’m staying in Germany for another week.

I take the metro with Stoytcho to the Berlin airport to see him off and we talk mostly about logistics. He’s flying to New York, then on to San Diego. I’m flying from Berlin to Boston a week later to start looking for apartments while staying with his cousin. He’ll join me when he’s done in San Diego, but we don’t know when that will be.

For most people and in most scenarios, this would be totally normal. But it feels so weird when you’ve spent nearly every waking (and sleeping) moment with the same person for the last 13 months. When you’ve curled up in a tiny 2-person tent in the New Zealand wilderness or shared a mattress on a floor in Russia, when you’ve been crammed together in a narrow row of seats in a bus puttering through the Chilean desert or in the back of a incredibly-jittery minivan careening down a volcano in Indonesia. Or when you’ve both squeezed into the same tiny half-person bathroom because one of you needs to use the sink and the other needs to use the toilet, and like hell are either of you are going to wait.

Our journey together has been 371 days long. That’s 8,904 hours, of which Stoytcho and I have spent roughly 8,890 together. That seems like an insanely long time, but this is how things used to be. We spent our lives with the same people, in the same tribe, unchanging save for the flow of birth and death.

Now Stoytcho will disappear behind a wall and in a few hours will be thousands of miles of way. The modern age is weird.

Berlin Flea

The Berliners are thrifty folk and their flea markets are awesome, brimming with everything from antique toys and art deco jewelry to boxes full of secondhand kitchen goods and clothes of prior decades. Though websites online offer curated lists of Flohmarkt, or flea markets (here, and here, and here), some of the info might be out of date, so always go prepared to ask for locations and times of the markets should you show up at a location and find it empty.

Here is the Berliner Trödelmarkt, which had an excellent selection of both cheap and antique jewelry and toys:

And yes, the flea markets happen even when it rains like crazy, like it did when we visited the Mauerpark Flohmarkt. This market had way more handmade goods, clothes, and boxes of odds and ends:

Berlin with Photography Friends

We stay with Cindy and Eric and Anna in a tiny apartment in Berlin for a week, doing nothing in particular but living. The three are here working on photography books and projects and workshops, and for them this stop is just one more in a life of itinerancy. They move to new places every few months to work or think or for Eric to run a photography workshop, but everywhere they work on new projects, connect with friends, and live. Travel is merely another axis on the grid in which they live their life.

I am lucky to know the people I do, and to while away days in quiet contemplation with them. To be not going anywhere in particular, to not be thinking about the next step. Instead, we live our lives and, inspired by Cindy and Eric and Anna, make photography into art. Are we successful?

Who cares? We are having fun.

The Train to Germany

Onward, onward! Today we take the last train on our journey, from Paris to the city of Berlin. While this is a departure from our ever-westward travel, we’re meeting our dear old itinerant friends Cindy and Eric, whom we last saw in Hanoi about six months and half a world ago!

 

Spoiler: Something bad will happen to this bag.

 

We first stop by the local bakery for a bundle of morning pastries to add to our pile of gifts, stuffing them into a spare shopping bag we picked up at Maison Georges Larincol. Then it’s off to the train station to find our train and pick up our tickets, a slightly more complicated process than normal because we’re crossing a border. Still, it’s a breeze when compared to flying.

Once on the train, the familiar flow of scenery past our window and people in the aisles begins. There are short bursts of cityscape strung with thick trellises of telephone and electric wire and dotted with concrete train platforms, followed by long stretches of pasture and woods in the French, then German countryside. The transition between countries is once again seamless, noticeable only by the change of language on station signs.

The flow of people continues as well, French, Germans, and other Europeans getting up and disembarking, boarding and sitting down in recently vacated seats. The only unmoving group is a Muslim family, clearly tired and stressed from travel. The mother desperately tries to handle three children and quell their hunger with cheap, off-brand crackers. She spanks one of them for getting too rowdy and the child wails.

We doze and nearly miss our stop in Berlin, waking up just in time to dash off the train with our backpacks. When we gather ourselves on the platform, we realize we have left the bag of pastries on board! They’re gone with the train, alongside my warm wool leggings I’ve used for the last year. Easy come, easy go.

The Muslim family also got off with us, and they adults are all now hugging a couple who were waiting on the platform and crying. The children just stand around, confused.

Berlin is colder than Paris, so we walk quickly, catching the local metro to a small suburb where our friends wait for us.

Transition to Germany

With a heavy heart we packed our bags, said goodbye to our friends, and headed out of Paris.

On the way out we made sure to stop by our favorite bakery and pick up a pile of delicious pastries for ourselves and the friends we would be meeting in Germany. Some of Natalie’s close friends from college were staying in Berlin and let us stay with them!

On the way to the station we saw even more fantastic architecture! We hadn’t had a chance to wander up this way before – it was less quaintly Parisian and more industrial, closer to a concrete, business-type city. The people were still stylishly dressed, of course.

At the East Station we saw an outdoor exhibit on some of the world’s strangest buildings.

Bonus points for looking like a space colony. Many of these were in Japan, yet another mark for the mutual admiration that the two countries seem to have for each other. It’s such a big cultural exchange that Mariage Frères, a fantastic French tea company has a Japanese division – the only country in Asia that merits a full Mariage Frères store.

After a bit of figuring out where our train was at the station, we got on and peacefully rode through the French countryside onward to Germany and Berlin. Along the way we had to change trains, and about fifteen minutes after we did, we realized that something had not made it with us in the transfer. Our bag full of delightful French pastries was spiriting away from us on another train! Natalie’s leggings were also in the bag, but those were replaceable. After a vain attempt to recover the bag by calling the train company, we let the treats go and continued on to Berlin. A quick walk through the residential neighborhood of Moabit, which borders the station and is surrounded by rivers, we arrived with the rest of our belongings to a warm welcome at our friends’ apartment.