wow, so apparently i am not at all good at keeping a blog

see title

no, but seriously, it’s been a while. how does one keep a balance between wanting to write about life, but also wanting to have one as well? evidently the solution is to post once every two months or so. at this rate, you can expect another 5 or so posts until i get home. hah! we’ll see how i go.

to systemise the contents of this post (i am in germany after all), i am going to post photos chronologically, and attempt a narrative through captions. hopefully you will arrive at circa now in my trip-timeline by the end of this post. (edit: you will arrive at 7 weeks ago at the end of this post.)

here goes:

hong kong

i spent a few days mid-august in hong kong with my dad, visiting my grandparents and my dad’s siblings. hong kong is a beautiful city and i can’t wait to spend more of my life there. 

the very beautiful victoria harbour:

holy shit, this feels like so long ago

HK museum of history

my extremely awesome dad and beautiful aunty on victoria peak (just doing some casual touristy stuff for my benefit)

at the temple

birthday celebrations! for me! food!

the food in hong kong really is insanely excellent. it appeals to my asian taste (obviously) and is cheap and EVERYWHERE. holy crap, the 2-3 meal times i have at home somehow stretched in to about 6 separate instances in the day in which one has a full meal. interspersed between are bouts of high energy, fast paced walking exercises (shopping). probably hence why the hunger thing happens.

mad.

but yes, hong kong is the love of my life. i absolutely love berlin and being in berlin, but nothing can compare. going to hong kong feels like going to a home i never knew i had. 

london

everyone i know seems to talk bout absolutely looving london, but i didn’t really feel it when i was there. it was obviously lovely, and full of history and interest… but i don’t think we really clicked, london and i.

thus far i have been able to narrow it down to a few defining factors:

1. i had just come from hong kong, and i was utterly in love with hong kong
2. i was strangely overwhelmed just by the amount of stuff there was to do and see - i think as a result i spent too much time trying to fit EVERYTHING in, instead of maxing and relaxing and staying chill.
3. i was more than über jetlagged and it pretty much took me the entire 3 days we were there to get over it.

the ceiling at the british museum is beauuuutiful! so excellently integrated in to the architecture of the buildings and so simple but well designed and executed.

you’ll notice there was an australian exhibit! i didn’t go to it.

i think we went to chinatown three times in three days. we were in london just after the riots, so for some (cute) reason, he wanted me to take a photo of him and the poooolice.

general tourist necessities

v&a was by far my favourite museum, out of the many we visited (though, i didn’t get a chance to swing by the tate or tate modern)

and then suddenly it was time to check out of london and more on to sunnier shores. first took a train to a ferry

and then from the ferry to the train

and from there to Lowlands, a music festival, with DutchBoy and the Frenchman, and from there…

amsterdam

to the absolutely beautiful city of canals (let’s ignore venice for now, at least until next summer)

had the absolute pleasure of seeing, and staying with, DutchGirl again.

i am more than most definitely looking forward to going back in the next few months. i can’t say a bad word about the wonderful city.

introduction to dutch culture 101: bike riding

i can’t explain why i like a city more or less sometimes. it’s often based on an idea, based on a short glimpse of a place, mixed with my emotions at the time and the people i met there. sometimes i think that maybe, for me, cities are shaped by people and my experiences with people (i guess this may seem obvious, due to the entire purpose of cities). hong kong was home because i had family there. london was foreign because we knew no one, amsterdam was lovely because DutchGirl is such a lovely person. there is maybe a case for that here. perhaps cities and place are arbitrary. perhaps their importance is not in their form or geographical location or pretty sculptures, but in how they allow us to interact with one another.

and finally:

on the way to my new home

down memory lane

so i got to berlin on friday night, after a 6.5 hour train ride from amsterdam centraal (the dutch like their double-letters). berlin is not the topic of this post, however. after a short stint in my new home, i’ve sojourned in leipzig, the place where this german madness all began.

it’s so strange being back here again. i spent the summer of 08/09 here, just before the beginning of my last year of high school. i stayed with a very lovely host family, and went to school for a few short weeks (i was only here for eight weeks in total, and that included christmas and new years), 

what baffles me about being back here is just how different my experiences of this beautiful city are. for those of you that don’t know (and i really don’t know anyone that does), leipzig was the biggest city in the former east german bloc (i think dresden is now technically bigger), with about 500,000 inhabitants. for a german city, this is actually reasonably large… big enough to have 3 H&Ms on one street in any case (though, this could also just be the european standard). 

when i was here last, it really was the first time i had lived away from home and it felt like quasi-independence, as cliche as it is. i was making new friends, living a different life for a little while and the possibilities seemed, to my youthful mind, endless (when really, i probably had the exact same constraints). i’m probably looking back on it through rose-tinted glasses, but i think it was really a turning point in my very short life to date.

so what’s it like being back here? in contrast to the synonyms for freedom i previously associated it with, it’s actually strangely oppressive. it took me a while to put my finger on why, but i think i’ve pin pointed the difference (okay, i’ve only been here two days, but still, it took a solid few hours). where leipzig was once an open door to a new life with a new school and new city, i no longer feel like i have any purpose here. i’m in some kind of limbo between where i have a life and want to be (berlin or melbourne) and a feeling of obligation that i have to be back here, somehow.

my dad once told me that he doesn’t really like going back to guangzhou (the city where he grew up) because it’s depressing being back there. depressing because he’s long out of contact with all the people he once knew, or the ones he knows (including his family) have gone elsewhere. it’s like going back to all these places he once knew and loved, and seeing them empty, and having no hope of once again filling them up. of course, comparing my situation to this is definitely a dramatisation, as leipzig is not my hometown and i still know a few people here and there, including my host parents. but i guess the moral is that instead of being a place where one feels hopeful about the future and what it holds, it’s a place where only the past exists. still dramatising, but i think that’s the most accurate way that i can articulate my thoughts at the moment. perhaps it’s only so for me because i am making it so (cause and effect), but being here makes feel so restless and i’m itching to be elsewhere.

so here i am, sitting in my old bed on my baby laptop. it really does seem like a fitting way to start my ‘spiritual journey’ (aka funtimes) in germany, by returning to where the obsession began.

i must indeed apologise for the lack of photos and the word vomit. i left my hard drive in berlin and i’m feeling emotionalé, hence a long post with few photos (i’ve been a bit lax with taking them too, oops). i promise promise, however, that there will be more fun colours in the coming days. for now though, good night, morning or day (for wherever you are or whenever you read this) and know that i’m really touched that you made it to the end of this post! 

just a quick update…

i am currently in sunny Amsterdam! the ‘sunny’ part is perhaps more of a delusion, as it is defiantly unsunny, but Amsterdam is beautiful. staying with the very lovely DutchGirl, who i know from her exchange to Melbourne last year, and it is so excellent to see her again.

no essays for now, i’ll leave you with this photo… yup. i like to call it ‘DutchGirl, two icecream cones and i reflected in a window in Amsterdam’. how artistic.

a test post to begin

so i’m leaving the day after tomorrow and i still have a hundred things to do! stupid.