My itinerary had me catching a train to Salzburg (more Mozartkugeln!) and then a night train to Frankfurt. I'd been to Salzburg before, and I liked it, but this stopover was irritating because it was after dark and too late to do anything. I sat in a Burger King for an inordinate amount of time, people watching, since there wasn't really anything else to do. Near midnight I caught the train to Frankfurt and from there changed to a train up to Hamburg.
The reason for the Hamburg visit is almost the same as the reason for the entire trip in the first place. Everything is connected, and being a Huey Lewis and the News fan has connected me to other people and provided opportunities to see the world. I'd met Jon when I was coming back from some of the band's concerts the previous year in Mississippi, a place I hadn't been to before the concerts provided the occasion to visit. In Hamburg was my friend Stephan, a fellow fan I'd finally met last year at some concerts in London. A long time ago he had invited me to visit him in Hamburg, and I finally was "in the neighborhood" enough to stop by.
He successfully met me at the train station, although it was yet another near-miss as there were two exits to try to find me at and he had mis-remembered my planned arrival time. We very nearly passed by each other on the up and down escalators, but fortunately I happened to look over and recognize him from the year before. He later took me on a tour of the city, with a stop at a humongous record store. The Germans are huge music fans with eclectic tastes and it was reflected in the variety on sale. Then later, back at his apartment we watched his HLN video collection.
In a sense it was odd. I'd just spent nearly two weeks traveling in some of the most profound areas of the world. Even the week in Israel alone is the kind of trip that challenges everything you know and turns your sense of the universe upside down. The week in the Balkans on its own was like that too, and I'd just done them both back-to-back.
So I was exhausted, and watching the videos was easy, like brain candy. The tension is that after being somewhere where life, and peace, is so fragile, the comfortable life you run back to can seem banal.
But that's not really a fair way to think about it, I don't think. No benefit can be derived from feeling guilty about what you have. My feeling guilty about watching videos isn't going to turn the lights on in Pristina. Appreciating the things that enrich your life seems much more productive, in no small part because it allows you to build on them and do greater things, some of which might someday result in turning the lights on in Pristina, so to speak. I built on the things that meant something to me and ended up visiting new places and meeting new people there. It's all about the connections anyway. My trip didn't happen in a vacuum: it happened because of connection to family and friends. And through that so many more new connections got made.
Germany was the last stop on my journey, and the next day I went back to Frankfurt and flew back to the United States. I came back sleep deprived and with a cold, but with so much more than when I left.
Israel | The Balkans | Germany and Home
c. 2004, 2008 Cathy Gellis
cathyg@csua.berkeley.edu
www.csua.berkeley.edu/~cathyg
Blog: www.cathygellis.com