sa bhaile, zu hause, 在宅, at home

I've decided to keep up this travel blog.  I will always have a home in Hilliard, but as my friends graduate, marry, move, and as I begin to do some of the same, home starts to feel like another destination.  Of course, it's a destination where there are smiles and hugs, massages to be begged and meals to be shared.  It's one where I'll always come back and where I'll always be welcome.  But, at the same time, my room has almost become a dumping ground, a storage unit, a sentimental stuff-graveyard where I can spend the night and wander through my past and smile nostalgically. 

With that in mind, then, it would seem ridiculous that I should end this blog just because I'm back on my side of the Atlantic.  Like so many college students and people my age, with how much I move--from school to home to summer job to this new hostel, that new hostel--I start to feel displaced.  Displaced, but not lost.  I'm floating in the world and I've got no direction but where the winds of our generation will drag me (whether it be the path of an unemployed arts major or a rich, hot-shot lawyer, a mother, a dedicated partner in life).  I've begun to realize that life, itself, is a journey.  Where ever I go, where ever I decide to stay--be it for three hours, three days, or three months--it's an adventure worth documenting.

Which brings me to this weekend.  Saturday was Skate for Hope, a skating show founded by my mom's cousin Carolyn Bongirno, a survivor of breast cancer and skater.  This year, with help from the participants and ticket sales, they raised over $300,000 for breast cancer research.  With skaters like Johnny Weir, Ryan Bradley, Emily Hughes, and Rachael Flatt headlining, it was the reasons I came home from Europe when I did (and unfortunately missed Jamie Parker and Sam Barnett in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in London).  Let me tell you, it was worth every bit of longing for Ireland to be able to have gone to this show.  And this is why:

 what a beautiful human.  mom's cousin, kay, weasled me back stage and then somehow convinced tara to bring johnny back to meet me.  just me.  i wish i'd been more prepared.  when i met josh ritter, i had a bullet-point list.  when i met johnny, my brain went "...............................omg."

me and ryan bradley, our current national champion.  he's so fit.  and hilarious!  i kind of love him.

Afterwards, I went with a friend to meet my third cousin (?) at the Axis club in the Short North to celebrate Pride Week and to also maybe catch another glimpse of the Weirman.  (I don't think he made it out, and I don't blame him because wrestling with airports is tiresome, but he had a wristband when I met him, so it was worth a shot!)  I think that's when I changed my stance on the drinking age in the U.S.  As a quasi-teetoatler, I never had a problem with not being able to drink, because, well, I don't really.  But being less than two weeks away from my 21st birthday and being told that I can't is an absolutely torturous experience.

I have a friend at Oberlin that, whenever I would go into her room to paint nails or hang out, she would offer me a beer.  I always said no, but there are no words for how much I appreciated being included like that.  I don't know why I felt like I should start drinking in Ireland (okay, well, we all know why), but I guess what I'm trying to say is that I have reached a point in my young adult life where I actually enjoy a bit of drink with dinner or during a movie or out on the town.  I've never been drunk, but I've been delightfully beyond buzzed and I didn't do anything irresponsible (except for that time I tried to vault over a street pole in a skirt and almost fell on my face).  All I wanted was one fruity drink at the club last night, and the fact that I couldn't, twelve-or-so days before my 21st birthday, after six months of having the option open and legal, was decidedly unfun.  My friends are getting married, fighting in wars, raising children, paying bills, and I don't know where I'm going with this except to say that I am an adult.  It'd just be nice to be treated like one again, you know?

all lit up for pride on the short north.

And that's it for this entry.  Expect a few more about past European adventures in the future.  See you around the interwebs, folks!

one more before the plane.

All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renenwed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.

slán abhaile.

So, as my time in Europe draws to a close (appx. 11 hours before take-off), I thought I'd leave you with a compilation of things I'm going to miss.  Naturally, the list is infinite, especially once people are added, so I've elected to stick to feelings and inanimate objects, much like my list of things I missed from home.  So, here it is folks, the best of the best of my time in Europe--the things I'll pine for during the many lonely hours that await me... so different from the lonely hours I've spent as a wanderer...

 

music.

 does this even need a caption?

sweets.

mobility.

sweet, sweet cider.

trad night @ the crane.

magic.

topography.

centuries old, stone walls.

I can't believe I'm leaving tomorrow.  For those of you still waiting (im)patiently for updates on my other destinations, don't worry.  No job means loads of time and I'll type yer eyes out (like talkin' yer ears off but via the interwebs).  Until then.

Cheers, Europe.

herz voller gold, taschen voller luft...

This just in.  With less than five days to go, I am over-budget by approximately €300.  I was hoping to get by on what I’d left in my Irish bank account after the semester was over and for the first two and a half weeks, I was doing pretty darn well.  Luckily, during those times when I'm waiting on a train with no Internet, I have created a budget that I keep updated partly because it gives me something to do and partly because I thought it would be useful to see where I'd gone wrong in spending my money.  (Even when I was under budget, the outlook for remaining so was bleak.  I have always been an impulse buyer.)  Turns out, it's a two way street.

it's a purple, money-spending kind of day

You can go wrong spending money.  For example, my first meal in Bern cost almost as much as four days worth of food in Munich once I worked in all the exchange rates.  It was one of those "3,70 CHF for a take away container full of food!!!" that only tells you in the small print that it's per #grams of food.  Let me tell you, I shoved a crapton of vegetarian goodness into that take-away container and I paid for it...literally.  (Turns out Switzerland is just expensive.)  I also bought a day pass for Bern's public transportation, not knowing that I would really only need one journey.  Another example, I accidentally purchased two bus tickets in Florence instead of just one.  Those are euros I will never get back.

But, something I realized as I was trying to figure out how on earth I had managed to spend so much money while I'm going hungry 80% of the time in an attempt to make up for the souvenirs I've bought, spending money when you're traveling is what pays.  Dresden, for example, was really nice.  Most of what I wanted to see was free, so all I really needed was a Wochenkarte for the trams and a ticket to Stadt Wehlen for my hiking trip and I was set.  Even the single room I splurged on was, in all honesty, a better deal than some hostel dorm rooms (only €118.80 for four nights).  I found a Lidl and could live off €8.70 worth of food plus a few snacks.  But different places mean different prices, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

radler, salat, käsespätzle

As I grew more comfortable/confident speaking German, it got easier to go out and do other things that are important to experiencing a culture.  I bought strawberries from a woman at a market and she talked to me about their origin and how sometimes they press down on each other but that doesn't mean they've gone bad and how they're organic so I don't have to wash them.  An experience well worth the €3,90 I paid for the strawberries.  I ate dinner in a Biergarten in Munich and had ice cream overlooking Salzburg.  For €8,50 I took a German-language tour through a castle I'd never seen before and understood almost every word and got to experience the best special exhibit on Ludwig II's life.  The list goes on.  Sure, I could have skipped out on things like the €85 Cinque Terra tour and done it for myself, but lunch wouldn't have been provided so I probably wouldn't have eaten it, and I wouldn't have met fellow travelers or known where to go.

eis

Even my tacky souvenirs.  Not all of them are tacky, okay?  And, through these little trinkets, I get to share my experience with the people I love.  So, do I regret the 22--CHF I spent on dinner last night?  Hell yes.  But can I live with it?  Of course.  Learning is a part of life.  So often nowadays you have to pay to learn things, but I guess Newton got it right in more ways than just physics when he came up with the rule that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction.  I take money out of my pocket, but for every piece of paper and little metal coin that leaves my hands, I gain a new experience, and I'm okay with that.

Needless to say, though, my birthday could not come soon enough.

es sah einmal wie das aus...

Dresden is one of my favorite cities in Germany, and I think the reason I have hesitated to write anything about it is because I want my words to do it justice.  People go to Berlin and people go to Munich, but for me, no trip to Germany would be complete if I didn't spend time in Dresden.  It's where I have friends, where I know the streets, where I feel comfortable.  In a sea of uncertainty, it was my rock, and here's why: it's been with me since eighth grade.

My first experience of Dresden came from a little book by Kurt Vonnegut called Slaughter-House 5.  Due to "innapropriate" content, it was removed from our English reading list the summer going into ninth grade, but I read it anyway.  I thought it would be really gory, about death and destruction, the kind of things I pretended to be into at that age so I could be "hardxcore"...  Well, it turns out, it really is gory, in a subtle way, and it really is about death and destruction, but not in that glorified, romantic way I liked in all my vampire books.  It's an anti-war book (which, is kind of as pointless as writing an anti-glacier book, Vonnegut notes, since there will always be glaciers [ha ha, that's what they thought in the 60s!], and there will always be wars) about a boy, not a man, who was a prisoner of war during the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945.

[http://ckck.tumblr.com]

A year later, I did my first homestay in Dresden with Frau Della Flora.  I was fourteen and still too young to drink and really understand much of what was happening.  I looked around with wide-eyed wonder and let Wenke lead me through the streets without really comprehending, without connecting it to anything else in my life.  Everything was so new to me, and I could barely speak German at the time, so as an experience, it just floated around by itself until the next time I was in Dresden, two years later, and the Frauenkirche was open to the public.  Previously, Wenke had taken me by the Frauenkirche, but she had explained that they were still rebuilding it.  Like I said, I didn't connect it to anything, but two years later, two years older, I realized... walking through those doors and looking up into that beautiful dome was really something special.  Later, I purchased a copy of Vonnegut's book in German and I've been attempting to read it ever since...

(On p. 100 now!  Reading German is really cool because every word is like uncovering a new piece to the puzzle and once you've finally put it together, you know what the sentence says, and you're like "Wow..." for a few seconds before you put together the next sentence... I'm getting so good at it!  Not to brag or anything...)

This time around, I was lounging in the sun in the Großer Garten when it suddenly started to rain.  Without a back-up plan since I'd opted to skip out on Pirates of the Caribbean auf Deutsch due to the awesome weather (ironic, I know), I decided to hop on the train and check out the Stadtmuseum instead since it was free entry on Fridays after noon.  With an almost sick anticipation, I nearly blazed through all the information on the city during the Reformation and all the baroque architecture to the floor about WWII.  But when I entered the room, I suddenly felt cold.  I was soaking wet and the building was air-conditioned, but this was something deeper.  There were pictures of burned bodies, collapsed buildings, lonely people wandering, lost.  I sat down at a station where German actors read letters from the month after the bombing.  One was headed "Mir fehlt nur Opium..." (trans: I only miss opium...) and it was about this man who was separated from his wife and child.  I couldn't understand quite what happened but he went into the shelter for something and he told her to wait, that he would come for her in a few minutes.  When he came back out she was gone and he found her body on a doorstep later, lying as sweetly as though she were sleeping.  Call me a sap, but I get so that I really start to feel a history, and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying in public.

Anyway, I like to buy postcards of historical pictures if they're cheap enough, and as I was holding my recent purchase up to create this image, a man walking a dog came up behind me and said very slowly, "Ja, es sah einmal wie das aus," a deep, relaxed voice thick with the gravity and melancholy of the statement.  And then he just walked away, leaving me bewildered, and my arms fell heavily to my sides.  Once I'd worked out exactly what he'd said, I sat there on the square with my postcard lying face-up in my lap, looking at the city through yet another filter, now six years older than the first time I saw Dresden in person.  Later that day, I had dinner with a friend from Dresden outside the Frauenkirche and there was a fireworks show to mark the opening of the Dixie music festival.  We talked about how four years had passed since the last time I was in Dresden, and how that's just too long.  

I think that's when I decided that Dresden was my favorite city in Germany.  Every time I visit, I grow a little before I leave.  The first time, I was about to turn fifteen and I'd made my first almost-twenty-year-old friend who didn't think I was some dorky little kid (or maybe that is what Wenke thought of me, but she was polite enough to treat me like a friend the entire time I was there).  I'd walked around a city at night after nine p.m. and I'd seen a live outdoor music performance that wasn't Classical music.  Oh, yeah, and I'd grown two inches.  The second time I left, I had stories to tell about overcoming language barriers and I started to feel old.  I had been more independent than the first time.  They'd given me a phone and a key just in case I got lost and I was a real Schlüsselkinder for the first time in my life.  And this time, when I left, I knew it was to come back.  I can speak German now, and I'm no longer afraid of it.  I planned things on my own, and when those plans fell through, I had to fix it, not my teacher.  I am almost twenty-one.  I'm exploring Europe on my own, and I left Dresden feeling confident that I can do it.

So, here's to Dresden--a beautiful, resilient, often-overlooked city that has taught me so much about life and how to live it.