After many, many hours (17? 18?) of travel yesterday, we arrived home. The weather was wonderful - sunny, warm - so that certainly helped as we trudged from one point to another, and finally disbarked the bus on our street. How strange it all it seemed, in a way! Travel shifts your perception in subtle ways usually, but now and then it hits you smack in the frontal lobe: I'll never be quite the same again, you realize, and neither will the world.
Following my earlier wish to see the Alps yesterday: no such luck. Wrong angles, high cloud cover, poor sense of direction? Saw some of the east coast of Canada jutting into the Atlantic, at least!
Home. While airing out our apartment, we called our mothers and the woman who looked after our plants. Then we hit the sack like the couple of zoned-out (but happy) travellers that we were. No unpacking!
Bright sun awoke me at 5:00 this morning. I think I will have to take a mid-afternoon nap. If I last to mid-afternoon! After unpacking and sorting things an hour ago, I must head for my community garden and see how it has been trasnformed, in quite another way, during my absence. No matter how tired I am, that is motivating me to get going.
It's amazing how much you can pull through when you know you have to. Our plane from Berlin to Munich was late, so we had almost no time in Munich to go through passport check and security, let alone buy a magazine or final chocolate bar. The plane from Munich was also delayed, but thanks to a tailwind, we arrived on time.
I am glad to be home, yet sad to leave Germany: the feelings run almost parallel.
One thing I don't miss is the pressure of humanity - throngs of people everywhere, most of the time. People and the things they carry and think they need. People and stores full of things. Germany is just like home in that respect: so material.The reason I loved the country was that the material seemed balanced by more spiritual issues - like conviviality, responsibility to the natural world, art, philosophy, literature, science ....
But the material world could not be overlooked.
In the airport, for example, people dragged/rolled bags that would easily swallow most of my entire wardrobe. How much stuff do they really think they need for a week or three abroad? Did they spend all of their touring time shopping? While checking in, I heard the attendant tell a middle-aged couple in front of me (they were "shabbily well-heeled") that not only would they be charged for an extra bag, they would pay for extra weight per bag! They merely nodded as if it hardly mattered. And there I was jettisoning things like newspaper sections I didn't need, just to save weight! I'm glad I did, if not for the plane but for the bother Eddie and I went to while moving our bags ourselves in and out of trains and hotels.
I am eager to walk down the street without carrying as much as I did for nearly three weeks. I am looking forward to touching the soil of my own little plot of ground, listening to my regional songbirds (while very poignantly remembering the German blackbirds), and cooking in my own kitchen again. Such little things, which we take for granted. But they can give us happiness and cost so little. Another value in travel is coming home to what we love, but with new eyes.
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