California: Leaving

Leaving Oakland:

Flew out of San Francisco at night, dazzled by the sprawl of lights all the way around the Bay: Berkeley and Oakland and San Francisco, all these places close to my heart.

Flew into Berlin at night again, baffled by the strangeness and familiarity of it, the city's contours, the TV tower rising unmistakeable in the middle of it all.

On the ground again, it felt as if I were returning to a place I'd once lived years ago, its landmarks distantly familiar, instead of coming home to a place I'd left just two weeks before.

It seems as if I spent much of the time in California fielding questions along the line of, So, are you planning to stay in Berlin forever? Are you ever coming back? and not getting any closer to an answer.

Maybe the solution is to extend my flexible work-and-travel model to a sometimes-working-from-the-US-on-extended-stays model, moving up the ideal of a life that encompasses both continents from a theoretical future plan to a current life.

Time to start experimenting again.