Hiatus

Hi,

It's been a while since my last post and the while will continue. I've loved having this public diary of my life, especially last year, but now it's time for other projects. If this picks up again, it'll be much different. More reflective and discursive perhaps.

I've just returned from Mongolia, and you can see some pictures of that below. Now, I'm thinking about plans to trek through Georgia and Azerbaijan next year after graduation, and after that to return to Iceland -  hopefully for good. 

Lots of love,
Fiona.

/52/ A cup o’ kindness

That’s it for 2013 then, I guess.

I lived in three different places (1 2 3) in three different countries. I flew spontanteously to Parma with just a change of clothes, a camera and a toothbrush. I turned 21. I wrote roughly 46,000 words in 23 essays (the 24th would have been semantics, but I guess I never wrote it). I went temporarily insane from stress and realised it was time to tone it down.

I trekked through fields full of cows in my festival gear, trying to find a shop that sold milk for my tent-side cuppa, and realised the absurdity of 21st century living. I tracked down a dead poet in the Alps. I went for a night-time dip in Swiss lake and then ate a defrosted, uncooked pizza with one of my best friends in the world. I saw Europe’s biggest waterfall. I petted a goat.

I moved to Berlin and found it challenging. I plodded through autumnal Oslo. I got my first taste of Poland and liked it. I faced Germany’s dark history and responded with many words, even though I really know what to say… I sang karaoke in a gay bar. I started to feel at home in Berlin.

I went home to Bavaria. I went home to the UK. I went ice skating. I had a heart-to-heart with a painting of Mr Darcy in the women’s loos of my favourite pub back home. I had another heart-to-heart with a dear friend on an Oxfordshire bus. I had a third heart-to-heart in a cozy Oxford coffee shop with snowflakes whirling by. Consider my heart replenished.

 

And 2013 ended much like it began, in a house full of friends with a belly full of food and happy. 

I wrote about my year 52 times here – it wasn’t always easy, and I flagged at the end. Considerably. The date tag on this might read December, but as I write this it’s almost the following June. Nevertheless, the task is done. 22,000 words dissecting, documenting and reflecting on 2013. The verdict? It was good, as years go. One of the best I’ve had, in fact.

I’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet – for auld lang syne!

Regensburg Cathedral

See here for my general post about my visit to Regensburg.

The High Gothic architecture of the Dom St Peter in Regensburg is almost one-of-a-kind in Bavaria, where even in the Gothic period, bricks were usually used over stone, leading to the development of the Brick Gothic style which can be seen in churches in Nürnberg and Landshut.

The spire of the Regensburg Cathedral is over 100m high, making it higher than the Sacre-Coeur in Paris, the United States Capital in Washington DC, and Big Ben in London. The building is roughly 750 years old and is part of the UNESCO-protected Regensburg town centre.

The windows are only a little younger, coming in at 800 to 900 years. Stained glass windows were so hugely important in medieval churches because most of the congregation would not have been able to understand Latin, the language in which the services were delivered. As a result, the colourful and vibrant images- depicting the lives of saints, biblical stories, the gospels, heaven and hell - were a fundamental cornerstone of the development of the Christian faith amongst the populace.
 
Even for an agnostic such as myself, cathedrals and churches can be places of wonder. Christianity may not be precisely my faith but it is indisputably my culture, and I see these structures as monuments to the extent of human love, inspiration and devotion.

 

/49/ Oh, brother!

My trip to Regensburg got me thinking.

 

Do you ever look around and get startled by how grown-up people have become – and maybe even feel like you’ve been left behind? A lot of my friends back home are either in their final year of university, diligently scratching essay after essay onto paper and cramming three years of lurning into their skulls. And others have even graduated, moved in with their significant others, and found a job. All while I’m sashaying about in Berlin with well over a year of university left to go. I can’t help but recall the lines from Dr Seuss’ flawless Oh, the Places You’ll Go!:

You’ll get all hung up
in a prickle-ly perch.
And your gang will fly on.
You’ll be left in a Lurch.

In the poem, this “Lurch” goes on to become a “Slump” (which is really just Seussian for “depression”); but for me, it’s really more of a chilled-out Slouch. Because it’s not a bad feeling actually – there’s something delightfully satisfying about being able to laugh and say “Adulthood? Oh, that’s a while away yet.” And I have a Plan anyway, so I’m not trembling in fear of some undetermined future. I’m patiently waiting for it, and trying to take things easy while I do.

 

But when your little brother, whom you used to scare by threatening to tickle him until he cried and who you would play Pokemon with on long car journeys, moves out from home, works a full-time job and has a real and proper girlfriend, it can seem like time has crept up on you. An BAM - you’re in that future which, back when you were fourteen and skiving Chemistry class, you used to wonder would ever come.

 

Not that he’s really any more grown up than I am. And not that it’s a competition – it’s just one of those “oh” moments. And luckily we get on really quite well. Niall (rhymes with “meal” not “mile”) is doing a year at the theatre in Regensburg, which is a perfect little Bavarian town. There are the quintessential alleys and stone bridges and medieval archways, back-street cafes and cozy dens of eateries, and church spires towering over cobble-stoned market places.

 
  

I also have a thing for cathedrals – the architecture blows me away again and again. Since I read Pillars of the Earth I haven’t looked at them the same again. In my opinion, cathedrals are basically Europe’s pyramids (she says, having never been to Egypt). And Regensburg’s Gothic Dom St. Peter isn’t a half bad example. Click through to see more pictures of the cathedral.

   

During my visit, Niall and I hit Christmas Markets, I saw him in a play (Robin Hood for kiddywinks – very fun!), and then I met an awful lot of his friends. Awful in the best way – it’s good to see him happy and with so many people surrounding him. Awwww. All this squishy sibling affection is getting, like, mega gross.

“Another picture?” he groaned. I cackled, as I often do, and ignored him, as I often do.

Best Sister Ever, obviously.

All this brings me right back around to Dr Seuss:

[…] when things start to happen,
don’t worry. Don’t stew.
Just go right along.
You’ll start happening too.

Right now, I feel far freer than I would if I had a flat and a boyfriend and a job and a reason to stay in one place. It’s not my long-term plan (that definitely does involve a little pride upon the shelf / and four stone walls around me); but for now I wouldn’t have it any other way. Being the chief executive officer of my own life suits me down to the ground.

I’ll fill this formless in-between time with trips to visit those friends who now actually own couches - because every student nomad needs a place to sleep before the next adventure begins!

/48/ Everyone has roots somewhere…

The plane touched down on the runway at Flughafen München with a jerk, and my stomach leapt into my throat. I’m not a nervous flier at all. In fact, I fly far too frequently to have a good conscience about it, self-proclaimed environmentalist that I am. But arriving in Munich, whether that means pulling into the cavernous central train station, driving down the Autobahn with the majesty of the Alps straight ahead, or alighting on the tarmac just outside of the city, will never fail to bring up a wealth of mixed emotions in me, which were on this occasional elegantly expressed through a gentle churning in my gut. I suppressed it, and got on the train which would take me “home”…

{The S-Bahn train to my town, just outside Munich}

Of course it’s exciting to return to the city I was born in, visit the town I grew up in, reunite with the family that once surrounded me, and encounter the familiar Frau Krug, a florist who remembers six-year-old me coming in to buy flowers with my Mama. But there is always this uncertainty about whether I am actually allowed to call it (Munich – Bavaria – Germany) home anymore, closely connected to the anxiety that someone will call me their “British niece” or say “oh, that’s Andrea and Bill’s girl, from England”. And I won’t have you calling my anxiety stupid. You try having a well-meaning friend or family member casually and obliviously divorce you from what forms a good half of your identity and see how it feels. Huff.

{My grandmother’s Advent table}

But of course, no such disaster took place. I got to spend an incredible day with my intelligent, inspirational and interesting grandmother, who told me about her youth. She was sent to a convent in Berlin, where she met and soon became engaged to a young man. They fell in love surrounded by a Europe in upheaval, as a failed artist called Adolf Hitler rose and rose and rose. Before long, her young man became a young soldier, and she would spend evenings sitting with his mother, writing him letters. He fought in North Africa, and was taken captive by the American troops, but survived and returned home to find though the war had left him his life, it had not left them their love.

 
{My grandmother on her balcony looking at the Alps} {The view from my Munich hotel}

That evening I walked through the magical Munich Christmas market, eating Germknödel, and realised that clinging to my childhood made no more sense than my grandmother clinging to her fiancé. Times change, and people with them. My grandmother ended up meeting and marrying another man, and I ended up in England. Are those events sad? Are the stories tragic just because they ended? No. Hopefully next time I come to Bavaria, I will be more at peace with my national identity and less dependent how others see me and where I’m from.

{Christmas isn’t complete without Glühwein!}