The One Month Mark

Exactly one month ago today I was sitting on a bench in the train station underneath the Cologne airport, tired, smelly, strung out from 24+ hours of airports and airplanes, and not quite believing that I was back in Germany. The experience was at once new and familiar. Walking down city streets in Cologne carrying a huge backpack on my back, hearing and seeing German everywhere, dodging bikes on the sidewalk, was so reminiscent of my time in Berlin and my month long backpacking trip throughout Europe. The nostalgia was great, and every familiar sight and sound made me smile and shake my head a little. At the same time, though, I had just barely made the first few steps into a year-long journey into strange lands, miles away from friends, family, and everything I know and love. The rush of embarking on something new feels wonderful, but the reality of what you're doing ends up creeping into the back of your head at one point or another.

Those first couple days were a strange mix of happiness and sadness--at one moment I could be feeing like I was on top of the world, smiling so hard it hurts, when one little thing in a shop window sparks a memory, sucks the vitality out of my chest, and reminds me that I'm friendless and alone in a foreign country. These feelings have persisted more or less for my whole time here. The emotional ups and downs aren't as sharp as they used to be, but for every moment when I stop to think about what an incredible experience I've been having, there's another moment when my stomach sinks and I realize that I still don't have a very firm footing in Hamburg.

As I've been making my way through The Lord of the Rings in German, I've also been reading The Hobbit in English. I've never read it, and I figure it would good to give my brain an English break occasionally while I'm reading. I read a particularly relevant passage today. In the story, Bilbo, Gandalf, and the dwarves, still in the first stages of their journey, have just left Rivendell and are slowly making their way up and over the Misty Mountains on their way to their final destination, Erebor, The Lonely Mountain:

Long days after they had climbed out of the valley and left the Last Homely House miles behind, they were still going up and up and up. It was a hard path and a dangerous path, a crooked way and a lonely and a long. Now they could look back over the lands they had left, laid out behind them far below. Far, far away in the West, where things were blue and faint, Bilbo knew there lay his own country of safe and comfortable things, and his little hobbit-hole. He shivered.

What a perfect metaphor for my own experience. At the start of The Hobbit Bilbo is a peaceful, complacent, boring individual; someone who would have been quite content to spend his entire life in the Shire and never embark on any sort of adventure or experience anything new. Throughout his travels he's constantly thinking back to his old, comfortable life, wondering why he ever forsook it to go out and risk his life in the wild. At the end of his travels, though, he's gained a taste for adventure and danger and travels in far and distant lands. At the beginning of The Lord of the Rings he's become so fed up with life in Hobbiton that he decides to leave it forever, traveling far away to live in Rivendell among the elves. I suppose I've been climbing the slope of the Misty Mountains for this past month, wet and cold in the rain, thinking back to Ithaca, Salt Lake City, my "safe and comfortable things." I get the feeling that I'm nearing a plateau soon, though. I can just make out a nice, flat spot on the slope where I can feel secure and sure of myself. It's been a slow and painstaking climb so far, but the slope is getting shallower.

Hopefully this part of the mountain has an apartment on it.