Oh gosh, let's back up.
As I've mentioned, my almost constant travel in the last months has been a deliberate choice, an experiment in how much it's possible to work and travel, seeing more of the world while staying more or less available for translation assignments. I think I can now conclude that having only four weeks between fairly major trips is a wee bit nuts... two months between trips might be more realistic! Heh. My nomadic, netbook-toting life.
First came:
I. The Interregnum
...which in my case I'm defining as "the period between the rule of two different journeys." It was a wonderful four weeks in Berlin, full of friends and concerts and events and conversations, but it was also pretty crazy to be barely finished unpacking and photo-sorting and blog-posting about the last trip before leaving for the next. The "next" is actually made up of two parts, first of which was...
II. Barcelona
...in which my friends Nadia and Gerard got married! It was a beautiful wedding, very international (guests were American, Spanish, Serbian, German, Palestinian and probably various other things I'm forgetting), very quirky (decorations crafted out of recycled things) and very fitting to the personalities of two funny, curious, off-beat people who make a very good pair.
I also got to see Jose, a former apartment mate who moved back to Barcelona from Berlin and now has a great job, despite the odds against that for a young person in Spain right now.
Plus, there was a bit of time to explore the city, even work half a day from a nice cafe, and just enjoy one last hurrah of true summer before fall descends. Swimming in the Mediterranean - or anywhere, really - isn't something I was expecting to get to do again this year, so I was grateful.
And one little bonus fact: Spain, including Barcelona, is the very first place I traveled in Europe, the first place I went abroad aside from Canada and the first time I traveled without my parents (it was a chorus trip), so obviously it made a big impression. This was the first time I'd been back, despite living in pretty close proximity for five years.
I have only the vaguest of memories of that trip 13 years ago (staying up late and walking along wide boulevards... singing a Spanish mass outside the Sagrada Familia...) but there was still something both comforting and exciting about coming full circle, adding a grown-up, here-mostly-to-visit-friends experience of the city to that time as a wide-eyed and desperately excited first-time traveler.
Did I say wide-eyed and desperately excited? I think I still am. And this is no less evident in...
III. Scotland!
At the point Nadia told me she was thinking about getting married in September, I was already committed to this hiking tour in Scotland with a couple of German friends. (What can I say...Germans plan far in advance.) I was lucky that the two events didn't quite overlap, but the timing was close enough that it made sense to fly straight to Scotland from Spain. (And let me tell you, setting off for a hot weather wedding and a rainy weather hiking tour at one go is an interesting exercise in packing!)
I flew into Edinburgh late at night, and was lucky to be able to stay with another old friend - Elena, a Greek friend I also know from that first year in Germany, who now has a teaching position at the University of Edinburgh. Hadn't seen her in about four years!
The next morning, I headed straight out for Glasgow (I'll be back in Edinburgh at the end of the trip), had a few hours there to check out the city (I swear, nearly every building in Scotland is a castle, or at least looks like one!) and meet yet another friend, Honor from Canada, for an abbreviated walking tour of the university area and a game of Scrabble in a cool cafe.
In the evening, I took a bus up to Drymen (pronounced "drimmen," go figure), starting point for our walking tour, and found my travel partners - predictable in any Scottish village - at the pub. They're Kat (friend of a friend from Berlin and walking tour planner extraordinaire) and Maike (a friend of Kat's). Maike is a German who lives in America, while I'm an American who lives in Germany, not to mention that Kat is German but studied in Aberdeen and is soon moving to Cambridge...which makes it all rather complicated when people innocently ask where we're from.
We're walking the West Highland Way, Scotland's most famous and frequented long-distance path, but only sections of it.
So far, we've spent two days mostly along gorgeous Loch Lomond. Today is a bus hop ahead and a rest day. Tomorrow, we start the next leg, toward Kinlochleven and Glencoe.
It rains most of the time, but somehow it doesn't really matter when you're decked out in rain gear anyway, and a misting rain actually makes for more comfortable walking weather. The mountains are gorgeous, the pubs are quaint, and I've even tried vegetarian haggis, which doesn't seem like it should be possible. My feet hurt, but other than that I'm very happy.
You'll hear more from me along the way...but not until the next place I have internet access. And there will be pictures, if I can ever find anywhere with wifi. (I'm writing this from a hotel's ancient desktop computer, which froze up in panic when I tried to connect my camera to it.)
You take the high road and I'll take the low road, and we'll meet again on the bonny banks.
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