#90
We are back - freshly unpacked and repatriated.
There is so much to say, there are so many big feelings about this trip. I will just write what comes, but who knows what that will look like.
First I will just paint a picture of the trip logistics, I bet you’re curious. Our itinerary was loosely thus:
Arrived in London, spent two weeks in the UK settling in and seeing family (bigger topics to unpack another time: jetlag for kids, city life, fox obsessions, reconnecting to your family and sense of place/home),
Eurostar to Paris, spent two-ish weeks touring France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands (to unpack: driving on the right hand side of the road, Bavarian hospitality, touring a waste-to-energy plant, being a total tourist, explaining Amsterdam to kids),
Back to London on Eurostar, one more week in the UK (to unpack: Thorpe Park rollercoasters, Richmond Park deer experiences, manners on buses and saying goodbye to your parents),
Arrived in Thailand for one week in a resort (to unpack: Singapore airport layovers, coping with tropical heat, sharing ‘pristine’ lagoons with 50,000 tourists, swimming in ketchup sachets, plastic wrappers and more),
Two nights in Singapore then back to NZ (to unpack: getting sick, feeding a family of four from a service station shop, searching for nutrients, developing pro-level travel admin skills)
It was a big trip, we saw a lot. We showed them the world (OK, some of it).
I know the kids will be forever changed by it, but it’s hard to know at this stage exactly what the impact has been.
In true ‘me’ fashion I wrote us some outcomes and principles to guide the trip. We knocked them all off ✅
Outcomes: see UK family, see friends in Europe, do cool sightseeing, eat great food, have a relaxing holiday portion of the trip.
Principles: choose sensible, affordable accommodation and transport options, make the sightseeing active and immersive, prioritise family time, look for learnings about where we are from/whakapapa, everyone gets to do one special thing, maximise variety.
I had very few ‘must-dos’ on my own list, I didn’t really have a clear ‘special thing’, but I did insist we track down and visit a part of Berlin that I’d read about.
Here’s a photo of the treehouse on the wall. Have you heard of it?
This ramshackle, put-together building ‘taunted the Berlin Wall’ from it’s inception in the 1980s. It sits in a no-man’s-land where jurisdiction and oversight between East and West German authorities became very muddled and vague. An old Turkish gentleman, Osman Kalin, set his sights on this odd triangle of unwalled land and began a guerilla vegetable patch, growing onions and garlic. He played innocent when questioned by guards and soldiers from both sides of the Berlin wall, played them off against one another with their own bureaucratic void - and stayed. He stayed and stayed. He built a house. In time, Berliners saw this house as a symbol of reunification. The house and land have now been officially gifted to Kalin’s surviving family members.
I wanted to see it myself, walk around the edges and marvel and one man’s ballsy, simple move. What a legend, Osman Kalin.
It’s a part of this world that I was drawn to see, to experience myself. I guess I wanted to be reminded that superheroes aren’t real, but special humans are a very good second option. They live and walk among us, breaking rules, planting garlic, slowly but surely building themselves a humble home in a time of great fear and tension, inadvertently representing opposition to oppression.
There are Osman Kalin’s in this world. Many. I am glad we took our kids to a random part of Berlin to show them Kalin’s house and talk about his story.
I don’t even know how to tackle all the gazillion other stories that could be told. Maybe you could let me know what you’d like to hear more about? What questions do you have for me? I will answer…
That is all for today. As always, I look forward to hearing what you heard, saw and felt when reading this.
With love,
Michelle xx