bruecken_schlag_worte

Brückenschläge und Schlagworte

Schlagwort: anticipation

The American Dream – My US Experience

Rewind 13 years. I am now 15 again.

It is Saturday, August 5th. I am due to fly to the US on the 8th to spend a year living there with a strange family, going to a strange school and, hopefully, making memories that will last forever. But I do not know yet where I will go. I don’t know the family yet that will take me. All I know is that I will probably end up in the South somewhere.

Innocent and young, before my departure to the States

As on every other day for the past 5 months, I am anxious as I look in the mailbox. There is a letter from my exchange organization Youth for Understanding. I tear it open. And there I have it. I am going to El Paso, Texas. My hostparents are both 35 years old (not much older than I am now). I will have two little host sisters aged 4 and 7.

It is now Tuesday, August 8th. I am smiling as I pass through security, waving at my crying mother. I am excited and full of naive anticipation. I have so much to look forward to.

Fast forward one year. I am now 16.

Jesse and I

It is July 10th. On my way to the airport, I am holding hands with my friends Angela and Jesse. I am sadder than I have ever been before. I want to go home to Germany. But this, El Paso, is now my home, too. I have memories here. Friends. A family. I am so confused. I don’t know any longer where I belong.

On July 11th I arrive at Hamburg airport. At baggage claim I feel like my legs are shaking so much that they must give in at any second. What will it be like to see my family? I walk through the doors. There is a blur of laughing faces and bright yellow. I am being picked up by my parents, my sisters and ten friends. Everyone of them holds a sun flower for me. I laugh and cry at the same time.

Fast forward three years. I am now 19.

Turning 20 in El Paso

I am going back to the El Paso for a three week vacation. My littel host sisters are now 8 and 11. They have grown so much. Most of my friends are home from college. I fall in love. I turn 20. I sneak away a drink at a restaurant and get all nervous about it. I drive my host dad’s car on the freeway, windows open on a hot desert night. I cry almost my entire transatlantic flight back.

 

 

Fast forward to the present day. I am 28.

Bag on my back, ready to go

I have not been to the US in nine years. I have met up with my host family in Europe, four years ago, and I have seen my host sisters grow on their facebook profiles. I won’t get to see my family this time around. I am not even going back home, home to El Paso. I am going to visit one of my favourite people in the world, my friend Jesse, in Chicago, a city he loves to live in.

There are countless What’sApp messages between Jesse and me in preparation. „What’s the weather like so I can pack properly, Jesse?“ „Mariella, what time do you get in so I can take time off work?“ „Dude, I just saw in my travel guide there were BEACHES in Chicago!!“ „Hey, you wanna do an architecture tour when you’re here?“ „I just learned about the Grant Park Music Festival. Jesse, we have GOT to go!“ „And also, we have got to go sing karaoke in the German neighborhood. Check!“

Germans call this Vorfreude, which literally translateds to pre-happiness. It is something like the English anticipation, although to me that is closer to German Erwartung which also means expectation. Vorfreude is purer, cleaner. Expectations can be disappointed. Vorfreude is just a feeling of great great joy in the face of something happening at all, not necessarily a clear cut idea of what that something is going to look like. Granted, I have some ideas. I think there will be discussions on life and friendship and career and love and music. There will be reminiscing of old times. There will be my 29th birthday. There will be lots of laughter. And there will be the long big bear hug I am planning on giving my friend when I see him again after nine years. All the rest is a big surprise. I am so excited to go to the States again. I am so excited to, in a way, come home.

What’s your home away from home?

Between Travels – Nostalgia and Anticipation

I am not a full time traveller. I cannot tell you how often I have thought about becoming one. The idea of selling all my possessions and being on the road forever, living for seeing the world, moving from place to place and soaking up all the beauty that this earth has to offer – it is appealing and repelling to me all at once. Having grown up in very conservative circumstances where a stable income and a fixed residence were not ever even questioned, the nomad life that many of my esteemed fellow travel bloggers lead is like a dark temptress, a taboo, the conceptual equivalent to what in a romantic interest we would call a „bit of rough“. It fascinates me – but I’m afraid of it too.

Travel at home

Mark Twain and Henry Miller – I keep these wise quotes above my desk so I don’t forget to be curious ever.

As it is, I know that I could probably do that if I really wanted to, but I don’t think I do. Instead when I am sitting at home wishing that I was travelling instead, I revel in the joy of the next best thing to travel: anticipation.

There seldomly is a moment when I do not have a trip planned. It doesn’t need to be anything huge – a weekend in Hamburg with my parents, or in my favourite Polish city Gdansk, or down in Tübingen where I went to university – all these will do, because they give me something to look forward to, and even though I know all these places well, the fact that I do not live there allows for me to see them with a traveller’s eyes.

Travel at home

This wall in my corridor holds pictures of places I love – Hamburg, Greifswald and Tübingen are in there as my home towns in Germany, but also Turkey, Slovenia, Latvia, Croatia and Poland.

Sometimes sitting at my desk, my eyes wander longingly to the book shelf that holds my guide books. Not that I am big on using them. The only thing I ever really use in guide books are the maps and the information on bus and train times (although I don’t really rely on that either). I then dream of all the places in the books I have not seen yet and of all that awaits me, and I also look back a bit nostalgically to my past endeavours and the peace and the joy they have given me.

Travel at home

My guide books – the Eastern Europe one is one of my most prized possessions because it holds so many memories from when I used it on my trip around the Balkans.

Sometimes when it comes to this, I go and open my notebooks from trips past, and I reread what I wrote about those places, wondering if my memory or my noted down immediate impression would make for a more accurate picture of the places I am thinking about. I am grateful for everything that I have written in my notebooks, and I wish I had jotted down even more, because I wish I remembered every detail. But then again it is probably beneficial to my nostalgia that I do not. Nostalgia colours all my memories in a slightly golden tone and transforms the places into something precious. Which in the case of travel I cannot seem to find harmful or dangerous. Because the places are precious and they are special.

Travel at home

The book on the bottom holds my notes from Rome which I never wrote about on here – something I hope to change. The one on top is on a page where I wrote about Hungary.

Of course there is a reason that I am having these musings today. In a little over two weeks I am going to the US on my summer trip. The last time I was in the States is nine years ago. Nine years! I cannot even comprehend that time span. I am caught between different emotions. There is the great excitement to see one of my highschool friends from that year I spent in Texas as a teenager (now that is even 13 years ago!!), to have Taco Bell Seven Layer Burritos, to hear English all around me all the time with thick American accents, and to get to know a new city – Chicago. And at the same time I feel compelled to remember how I saw that country when I was younger, what it did to me, what it gave to me when I lived there. I am between nostalgia and anticipation.

I love being in this place. It makes me feel alive. I try to live in the moment in my daily life, but it is still easier for me to live in the moment when I am away, and that just logically leads up to me being nostalgic and anticipatory in between. As I write this, the excitement is ever growing. I cannot wait to experience Chicago, and, let’s face it, I cannot wait to write about it. I read a great quote by Jorge Luis Borges on twitter today:

A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us […] is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

When it comes down to it, I always come to the conclusion that I am not cut out for travelling full time and that I am better off as someone who has a defined home, a place I can resort to where things are not ever-changing. A place where there is allowed to be dullness, boredom and insignificance. But only under two conditions: I need to be allowed to reminisce and look back on past beauty. And I need to know that if I wanted to, I could pack up my bags and leave, the anticipation of the next exciting adventure.