Returning – Reykjavík

I've been starting to wonder lately if I actually lead a charmed life. (In Iceland, at least, it certainly seems like it.)

I waited to write to friends in Iceland until my very last day in Berlin – Icelanders are the most spontaneous people I've ever met, and in my experience advance planning will get you nowhere but last-minute-ness is all!

So on Thursday I wrote to various friends saying I would be in Reykjavík this weekend and did they want to meet up, and one of them said, oh, I'm going to be away this weekend, but do you want to stay in my apartment while I'm away? It's empty, and the cat would love your company.

Speaking of Icelandic kindness, and Icelandic spontaneity!

If Berlin was a huge homecoming, Reykjavík is at least a small one. Walking down familiar streets, dropping into favorite cafés, marveling at how normal it feels to be here. Staying with the very same friend I stayed with two years ago, cat-sitting for the very same cat. (The fluffiest! gray! cat!). Getting joyfully reacquainted with my beloved Reykjavík City Library (where, two years ago, I spent many hours intently writing/revising to meet a deadline, from one of the desks by the windows on the fifth floor, looking out over the beautiful view of the harbor).

Just as it was in Berlin, it feels like I've simply stepped back into an existing life, unchanged in all the best ways.

(Photo break: a random shot of a bit of the Innipúkinn music festival going on in Reykjavík right now, because it's one of the few outdoor pictures I've taken so far. It's been gorgeous weather these last days, pleasantly mild and brilliantly sunny. And no, I still haven't found out why they always lay down strips of sod in the street whenever a music festival happens!)

I'd forgotten, too, the magic of a late-night flight into Reykjavík. I left Berlin at 10 p.m., but because we were flying both north and west, the sky actually got lighter as it got later, until we arrived in Reykjavík at midnight to a still-bright sunset sky. How I love Scandinavian summers. I don't think I will ever get over that awe at the endless light and color of a near-Arctic summer night sky.

And to add a final touch to the magic:

On the plane here, I got curious to know precisely what day I arrived in Iceland the very first time I came here. That very first, short, just-a-taste-of-what's-to-come trip to Iceland was five years ago, also around July/August/ish. Then I looked back through old pictures and things and realized – I'm traveling to Iceland, now in 2016, on Thursday, July 28. The date of my arrival in Iceland on that first trip in 2011 was...July 28. It was even a Thursday, too. Some kind of very pleasing symmetry about that!

Here was arrival in 2011, on the ferry pulling into Seyðisfjörður, a fjord on the eastern side of the country:

And here's one of my very first midnight sunsets, on my first night in Reykjavík on that first trip. This is literally just minutes before midnight:

Returning to the present: Tomorrow morning I'm off to Ísafjörður, a small town in a remote fjord, where I'm going to learn Icelandic for three weeks. JÁ!

Returning

I no longer write here almost at all – I suppose because this was begun as a travel blog, and lately I haven't been traveling?

But I think it's also because what I would be writing about, if I were writing, is the process of re-making a life in my home country after eight and a half years away, and that's a topic so big I don't really know how to talk about it in any sensible fashion!

Now, though, the "Berlinniversary" name is accurate once more, because I'm back in Berlin on a visit. ...And apparently "returning to Berlin after moving away" is also a topic too big to talk about sensibly, because I started trying to write this post when I first got here, and now it's a month later and I'm leaving in a few days and I still haven't managed it.

Meanwhile, here's the view from an old familiar haunt, one of my favorite cafés:

How can I possibly sum it all up? It's good and beautiful and wonderful to be here, to see friends, to bike along familiar cobblestone streets through the warm twilight of endlessly not-quite-dark northern European summer nights. I'm still glad I made the decision I did, I still want to make a go of it in the US, but there's no mistaking that being back in Berlin feels good.

It feels so normal to be here, as if I'd just stepped away for a few days and now am returning to my life exactly as it always was. I love going to a new and utterly unfamiliar country, but there's also something deeply satisfying about going to a place where I already know exactly how everything works, and can ask for a pastry at the bakery without even having to think about it.

Anyway, Berlin. Too enormous for me to talk sensibly about at all. At most, I'll probably manage to post a few photos, sometime later. (There are more travels ahead, so time's a little limited at the moment.)

For now, I'll leave you with a Berlin sunset – construction crane and all. (Some things never change!)