I’d rather just say…
SO instead of getting all ranty about the return to Brooklyn travel meltdown, I’m going to instead talk about the great people I spent time with on either end of it.
On the Hamburg end , I met up with Heike, who was a student in the ICP program in our second graduating class. She took a brief break from her trip to Marseille via Bremen to meet up with me in Hamburg and show me around the town for the afternoon. We had talks about her time in the US (I remembered her tangles with an insane landlord the first couple months after she had arrived) and her current teaching strategies at the school where she now works, punctuated by walks around Hamburg’s boho neighborhood, which could have been Valencia Street, or Avenue A or any number of other spots given the mix of used clothing stores, cafes, graffiti splattered walls and outlests for kid robot products. It felt very homey in a disconcerting way. Heike is as smart, and sly as ever, and it was wonderful that she was so generous with her time.
Hamburg was definitely intriguing, and I hope to get back there for a longer stay at some point.
And speaking of generous, a couple of weeks ago Thor had requested my return flight into and then offered to pick me up in Newark upon my return for a dinner and then a ride home. Once I got in transit on Saturday and found out that my flight had been canceled and that I was going to be heading into another airport entirely, I called him from the airport and told him about the change, letting him know that I understood if it wasn’t going to work out. Amazingly, after all of the wrangling of customs, lost baggage, and everything else, I was met at JFK not only by him but also by Patrick and Lolita. They had braved the insane traffic of Queens in a Zipcar and after a side trip to Roll N Roaster, brought me safely home.
Thanks guys!, I’m lucky indeed to know such good people.
Tags: daily photo, friends, gratitude, travel