Where were you ten years ago?
It's December 2015, and I'm getting ready for what has been one of the most formative trips of my life. We're slated to have a family reunion just outside of Dublin with the entirety of mum's side of the family. They are loud, they are a lot, but it was going to be a Guinness-fueled fun-fest, and those weeks ended up completely changing my trajectory, somehow landing me, ten years later, here in Berlin.
By this point in time, I'd been living in Wellington, New Zealand, for the last two-and-a-half years. I love New Zealand. It is gorgeous, the people are like the calmer, cooler versions of Australians (we could learn a lot from our Kiwi-cousins), and my life is in shambles.
My Finnish-ex and I had arrived in Wellington way back in 2013, trying to figure out how to do a life. We gave up on Australia because we had absolutely no money, and to stay there meant we'd need to magically come up with a lot of it, but New Zealand had a beautiful resident scheme I could take advantage of, and we could get her onto my residency somehow to make it somehow make sense. It's been awhile, but let's just accept that it worked.
We had a good life, working hospitality, just kind of chewing the fat of being a young, very dumb (me, not her), pair of early-twenty-year-olds just out of university, trying to figure out what was worth doing. I was pursuing coffee as a career, which looking back was actually kind of awesome, that despite having completed my Bachelor's of International Relations, I realised how much I disliked politics enough to completely toss that education away in return for minimum wage at a cafe. Good on me. She was doing hospitality and kicking off an artistic career in photography. Somehow it worked, as Wellington truly is a forgiving and accepting place. It works there.
Jump to the end of 2015 and I'm living in this shared-flat with a bunch of folk who were really lovely, but fuck me did that place smell of mold, and even better was when I lay on my bed, I began to roll down hill because of the slant from the crap-shack slowing falling down the hill. Beautiful country, it really is. On top of that I'd quit coffee work because the money was shit to go and work in sales, because the money was also shit. We sure did party a lot though.
Anyway, Mum let's me know I'm coming to the family reunion and I practically begin to fly myself to Dublin, so eager to get out of my smelly crap-shack.
Family reunion aside, what this trip does is bring me very close to my brother, Brad, who is just about to turn 19 at the time. We do the Dublin thing until after Christmas and Brad tells me we're off to Berlin to go celebrate New Year's Eve with his school mates, shoot fireworks at each other, and drink copious amounts of Jägermeister.
We get to Berlin and post up at a hostel near Anhalter Bahnhof. If you know Berlin, you know we are nowhere cool at all. Berlin is weird on that part of town and is very much where clueless tourists end up, but we sure did party hard there. However, not as hard as an English guy at the hostel who came in, slept a night, the next day on the 31st he left to some place called Berghain and never came back until the day we left. His stuff is probably still at the hostel waiting for him. Maybe the Piss Goblin got him.
Berlin was, and is, kind of out-of-control, and New Year's Eve 2015 is one of the better parties of my life down at this bar-converted-to-club in Kreuzberg. We get there, party super hard, and I end up on the floor of this Airbnb. As I extract myself from the Airbnb, I am walking back along the gunpowder-laden streets of Kreuzberg, watching kids still set off crackers at 8am, and it hits me how much I liked this city. It hits me how much I love Europe. It was a place that matched perfectly the freedom I was hoping for. I remember making a clear decision then that New Zealand for me had ended and that I wanted to be in Europe.
We wrap up Berlin (lucky for us and the locals, to be honest), and Brad and I plot our escape to Spain.
We'd spent six months or so in 2008 living in Chile, me just out of school, Brad just starting high school, Mum doing god-knows-what, and that really had sunk in the flavour of the Spanish-speaking parts of the world. We wanted to see the source.
Madrid is kind of a blur, but according to my emails, some dude we met lost his hat there, I found it, then actually mailed it back to his house in California so he wouldn't be sad without it. Young me seems to have been pretty cool.
We travel all of southern Spain and it's magical. I vividly remember us on a bus, Brad next to me, music on (Action Bronson's "Mr Wonderful"), and just watching the sun set as we traversed the country side. I'll never forget that moment. It solidifies Europe again and again in my mind.
Brad and I meet a huge amount of people, all wonderful, but our bond really becomes something I miss so often these days. That trip, while short, meant so much to me for what it gave me of him. There was one evening in the hostel in Granada, where we played "Hit the Road Jack" probably tens-of-times in exchange for cheap wine from the other travellers. By the end, we are lit beyond compare, and I'm upstairs on the bathroom floor with Brad, his head resting in my lap as he tried to return to earth after a wine too many. Him snoring away, I just sit and think about how much I love my brother and how I'd do anything for him, including cradling him on the Granada-hostel shared bathroom floor. Miss you, Brad.
We wrap it up. There's obviously more to the story, but that's mine, and what matters is that we finish our travels and it's clear: I'm leaving New Zealand as fast as possible. What had morphed a bit was that I needed money, so Europe began to drift away from my grasp. How could I earn money where I had only coffee as a skill to support. I think there was also some element of being scared of what to do, and I remember thinking, "I can just stay in Australia and work on a farm." Kind of glad that didn't end up that way. The world is big and needs explorers.
Four days later, it's the 18th of January, I'm back in Wellington, and I decide to pack up my entire life and get out of there. My flights are booked back to Australia and I have less than two weeks to wrap up the last two-and-a-half years of my life.
I left behind a lot of good friends in New Zealand, but I'd tasted adventures even further than New Zealand could take me, and I needed to be out there again. At that point, I just didn't know how. I still think of them often, and hope they're all and living the lives they'd hoped for or deserved, and that which they deserved is good indeed.
What comes next is 2016, and that is another part of the story, the one that ends with me right here, in beautiful Berlin. But it began with this trip in December, 2015, ten years ago, and I will forever be thankful to the universe for aligning the relevant matter exactly as it did, to make this possible.
What were you doing ten years ago? Did it lead you to where you are now? If you want to share, I'd love to hear about it: [email protected].