Aging = Hard

My god, that was a long trip. I was only gone for about three weeks, and yes, I have lived abroad for up to a year at a time before, but my god. That was a long trip! I blame this reaction to the trip on my advanced age; I am not in my early twenties anymore, and some things just aren't the same. Like air travel. The value of the euro against the dollar. My ability to go two days on an hour of sleep and still want to go out dancing. And the way strangers relate to one another in public places. Ok, maybe just my tolerance of the way strangers relate to one another. Now get off my lawn, you damn kids!

I was also reminded that I'm old by the fact that my travel style has changed completely. Not just in terms of how much my body can take in order to get from Point A to Point B, but in terms of how I am in transit and what I do once I get where I'm going. I shushed a middle-aged man in the night train from Munich to Berlin because he was too loud (what is it with men and the inability to whisper? I don't know a single woman with this problem...). I paid three euro for a bottle of water on that same train because I was thirsty and my water bottle was empty; not once did it occur to me to double-check about whether the bathroom water was drinkable.

I'd be a little more ashamed of how aging has impacted my attitude toward travel, except several of the people I visited have also aged disproportionately to the time that has passed since I saw them last. It's been just over two years since I moved away from Berlin, and now Sandra's idea of a night out is going to the sauna. Patrick and Inga are expecting their second child. Their first, Mathilda, is walking and talking and seems to be a little person. Leo, who had the hilarious/excruciating job of assistant to marginally famous/scandalous director Christoph Schlingensief, now studies economics at some fancy schmancy EU feeder school. He wears suits.

One of my favorite parts of travel used to be discovering new, amazing things. Granted, this was mostly food-related: I will never forget that weird restaurant in Paris where Mom made me try snails and then made up for it by ordering creme brulee for dessert, or the place I stumbled across in Rome where I had the best seafood linguine of my life, or the carmelized apricots with ice cream and pistachios that Rob and I had at this funny little back-alley restaurant in Turkey. Of course, there were also museums I discovered and loved, and train stations and opera houses and flea markets and parks, but they aren't nearly as memorable as those caramelized apricots. The difference is that now, I'm more interested in going back to that food than in finding new things to try. I went far, far out of my way to eat currywurst at Curry 36. I missed my bus to buy a pretzel at Ditsch, even though I wasn't really hungry. I dragged Sandra to my favorite doener stall in town on our way home from the sauna, and when I learned that they were out of meat, I nearly cried, but I did not just run to the stall across the street. Or the one in the train station on our way home. I actually would have left Berlin doenerless, except Sandra forced me to stop at a place just before her apartment, where I ate what has to be the best doener the world has ever known, which I would have missed. Because I'm old. You could call it cynicism, or risk-aversion, or habit, but you know it's really just that I'm more in touch with my inner octogenarian than I used to be.

It was a good trip, but it was surprisingly hard on me. This makes me worry a little - how bad will this be in 20 more years? Am I just punishing myself by choosing a career that will inevitably involve a lot of international travel? These questions were not helped by brunch with a friend who is quitting the program, or the rumor that our department is going to be restructured along with other European languages, or the fact that teaching made my German worse. On the other hand, I can't imagine not going to Germany on a regular basis, and I got some great books this trip, and I'm being paid to read them. And I have a new favorite doener place I need to get back to!