Leaving Berlin again!!

There we go!
After five months I'm leaving Berlin again without knowing when I'll step it's ground next time.
Next stop will be Barcelona for a few days training and then a six months stay in Bissau, capital of Guinea-Bissau, In West Africa, for my first mission with MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres - Doctors Without Borthers).

Zoo Garden Station. PICTURE PRIVATE.

I'll miss ya ol'fella

Back in Berlin

Three months have passed since I am back in Berlin. Yeah! I had no plans to be back to Europa at all, imagine to Berlin, but just the way life is, full of surprises and coincidences, I find myself back in this city. Back in Berlin.

My story with Berlin is an old and very, very special one. To be precise, it is an eighteen years old story. A story of challenges, learning and transformation. A milestone was set when I first came here and I use to see my life in two different phases: before and after Berlin.

Siegesäule in middle of the Tiergarten. PRIVATE PICTURE.

Everything started with an scholarship from the German-Brazilian government back in 1997. With a certain level of reluctance but pushed by a good friend I decided to apply for it since I fulfilled all the requirements. I was granted it! One and a half month passed between the moment I got to know I was selected and landing in Germany. There was so much to prepare and to do and so little time for it: finish the semester at the university, submit project reports, get a bunch of papers and documents sorted out, see the family, which lived far away, get a passport, do shopping, farewell to friends, etc. Then I departed for a year in Germany. First time abroad. First time flying. First time in Berlin.

Zoologischer Garten, the heart of Berlin. PRIVATE PICTURE..

One specific moment I remember well, later on, as I was changing planes in Lisbon. I finally had time to come to myself after the stress of the last few weeks. As I stepped out of the plane, for one second I felt my legs trembling. It was dark, rainy and cold. +17C "cold." I realized that I was far away, going to a place I couldn't even speak the language and, on the top of it, I was alone. I put both hands on my head like trying not to lose it and thought: "What the hell am I doing here? Of course, I knew what was expecting me in Germany and I even had a detailed plan of it in my luggage but I just couldn't suppress the overwhelming dimension of that moment. Well, happily all that insecurity vanished as suddenly as it appeared, I got back to myself and a couple of hours later I was landing in Berlin. 

Party complex at the Warschauer Straße. #streetart. PICTURE PRIVATE.

Once in Berlin, we, the other Brazilian students taking part in the same program and I, where place in Charlottenburg, in a complex of student dormitories with a lot of green area close by. Charlottenburg is a nice, quiet and pretty central part of the city. At first we engaged intensively in learning the language. It should happen as fast as possible. Besides, there was a lot of traveling, cultural activities, exchange with other international students, getting used to the German way of life and, obviously, a lot of party. Concerning the academic part of the program, what we actually came here for, there were courses at the university to attend, projects to work on and an internship to be done in a German company. It was an intense year with a lot of hard work as one can imagine.

Berlin Hauptbahnhof (Berlin main train station). PRIVATE PICTURE.

We all went trough a lot of changes and learning during that year. I saw a world of possibilities and challenges in front of me. Nothing I had experienced before in life. The systematic of the everyday life in a totally different country, the language, the academic life, the weather, all those different views of the world and life I was confronted with. I used to have a very strong introspection side of my personality what gave me a hard time till I found a way to starting opening myself and being able to interact easier with people.

Berlin worked on me like a transformation machine. I went through an deep and intense process of destruction and reconstruction of who I was, bringing down old walls and setting the foundation for new ones. Many years later it would reach its climax with me resetting my entire life, quitting my job, leaving my friends, change the continent and starting over. But this is stuff for a future post.

Somewhere at Schönhauser Alle, ancient East
Berlin. PRIVATE PICTURE.

This is what Berlin means to me: change, growth and learning. Berlin like infected me with an unique disease. A disease, which symptoms consist essentially of restlessness, cravings for detachment and constant search for transformation.

Departing from Berlin after that year was a hard moment. For the first time in life I got a precise picture of what the expression "broken heart" means. That blunt pain in the chest, the difficulty to breath, the crying sighingly. It was incredible the way each of us felt connected to this city and the burden it was to leave it.

Bibliothek der Humboldt Universität at the surrounding of the Friedrichstraße.
PRIVATE PICTURE. 

I pondered many times on staying for good in Berlin but wasn't sure if that was what I really wanted and if I could manage it all on my own. Anyways, It didn't take long for me to know what I had to do and as soon as I stepped on Brazilian ground things cleared up in my mind. Being back felt like I was losing everything I've gained while abroad and becoming the same person I was one year before. Everything was there in the same place where I left, everyone was doing the same things, the same way. Nothing had changed and I was a completely different person. I just didn't fit in anymore. I left Berlin in that occasion, but it never left me.

 The holocaust memorial. PRIVATE PICTURE.  

Today, eighteen years later I find myself roaming around in Berlins streets recollecting memories. It's really a funny, and it the same time, overwhelming feeling. Maybe I was just supposed to be here to close another circle in my life curing that disease, completing a long transformation process and creating space for new ones to come.

Berlin Mitte at the Spree river. PRIVATE PICTURE.

Waves Of Transformation...I'm back!

Just love this passage of the book "Eat, pray, love" by Elizabeth Gilbert.

It teaches me that life can changes its courses in the blink of an eye and this is the most spectacular thing about it. One must get adapted and ride life's waves. This is the magic of being alive!

Marsyas under Appolo's punishment. Museum for Plaster Cast in Munich.
PRIVATE PICTURE.

"On my way back home I take a little detour and stop at the address in Rome I find most strangely affecting—the Augusteum. This big, round, ruined pile of brick started life as a glori- ous mausoleum, built by Octavian Augustus to house his remains and the remains of his fam- ily for all of eternity. It must have been impossible for the emperor to have imagined at the time that Rome would ever be anything but a mighty Augustus-worshipping empire. How could he possibly have foreseen the collapse of the realm? Or known that, with all the aque- ducts destroyed by barbarians and with the great roads left in ruin, the city would empty of citizens, and it would take almost twenty centuries before Rome ever recovered the population she had boasted during her height of glory?

Augustus’s mausoleum fell to ruins and thieves during the Dark Ages. Somebody stole the emperor’s ashes—no telling who. By the twelfth century, though, the monument had been renovated into a fortress for the powerful Colonna family, to protect them from assaults by various warring princes. Then the Augusteum was transformed somehow into a vineyard, then a Renaissance garden, then a bullring (we’re in the eighteenth century now), then a fire- works depository, then a concert hall. In the 1930s, Mussolini seized the property and re- stored it down to its classical foundations, so that it could someday be the final resting place for his remains. (Again, it must have been impossible back then to imagine that Rome could ever be anything but a Mussolini-worshipping empire.) Of course, Mussolini’s fascist dream did not last, nor did he get the imperial burial he’d anticipated.
Today the Augusteum is one of the quietest and loneliest places in Rome, buried deep in the ground. The city has grown up around it over the centuries. (One inch a year is the gener- al rule of thumb for the accumulation of time’s debris.) Traffic above the monument spins in a hectic circle, and nobody ever goes down there—from what I can tell—except to use the place as a public bathroom. But the building still exists, holding its Roman ground with dignity, waiting for its next incarnation.
I find the endurance of the Augusteum so reassuring, that this structure has had such an erratic career, yet always adjusted to the particular wildness of the times. To me, the Au- gusteum is like a person who’s led a totally crazy life—who maybe started out as a housewife, then unexpectedly became a widow, then took up fan-dancing to make money, ended up somehow as the first female dentist in outer space, and then tried her hand at national polit- ics—yet who has managed to hold an intact sense of herself throughout every upheaval.
I look at the Augusteum, and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic, after all. It is merely this world that is chaotic, bringing changes to us all that nobody could have anticipated. The Augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who I am, what I represent, whom I belong to, or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday I might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough—but to- morrow I could be a fireworks depository. Even in the Eternal City, says the silent Augusteum, one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation."

On route to Norway

I didn't plan any further trip in Europe after being in Ireland in November but, unexpectedly, my dear friends Anja and Frauke just came up with the idea to spend New Years eve in Trondheim (Norwegian Trøndelag), Norway.

Since I haven't been to Scandinavia before and wasn't counting on visiting any part of it before I leave Europe next January it's going to be great to see the Fjords and, with some luck, the northern lights. A perfect farewell trip!

Now sitting in the bus (meinfernbus.de) and heading from Dresden to the Schönefeld airport in Berlin and from there taking the direct flight to Trondheim.

Along the way again!

Ready for Brazil

The time has come!!

I can't wait to sit in that plane tomorrow and land in Rio de Janeiro. There is no better feeling than the one of being "along the way".

Presents are bought, clothes packed, electronics loaded and packed, and backpack ready.

Travel companions coming from Berlin and Frankfurt. Meeting point in tomorrow morning in Amsterdam Schiphol Airport agreed.

Just a few more hours to go!

Excited!

" The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving. Saves on introductions and good-byes."