The End: how Europe turned me into a ball of anxiety but at least I had some good pastries

The morning we headed home from Switzerland, I got a text message from the person watching the dachshunds for us saying that not only did Milly have worms, but they also had enough fleas for her to not be able to sleep because of how many times she’d been bitten and we should probably find a hotel for the night because she needed to tear the place up to try to get rid of them.

This was obviously not welcome news. 

Dallin had seen a flea on Joey a couple weeks earlier and we messaged their owners to inform them and ask for their recommendations since they didn’t have their dogs on flea prevention. We picked up flea collars, which seemed like a reasonable option at the time as we weren’t sure how big the problem was. 

Teddy had woken up one morning with about 15 bites all over his head and I panicked–not knowing if they were fleas, mosquitos, or bed bugs (Dallin’s worst fear)--and also felt bad that Teddy was bearing the brunt of the bug attack. There wasn’t really much to do besides stress-google various kinds of bites and useless things to do about them. However after the dog watcher ended up with a bunch of flea bites, I’m going to assume they were also the perpetrator against our poor baby’s head. 

Anyways, this left us really not wanting to come back from Switzerland because the Berlin apartment was apparently flea ridden and fun fact it was another 99 degree day without AC. We ended up staying at a hotel a couple blocks away from our apartment back in Berlin as the dog watcher went into intense flea-cleansing mode (bagging up and washing literally every piece of fabric in the apartment including all the pillows, wiping all hard surfaces down with various oil vinegar sprays, setting off a flea bomb, etc). We ran over to pick up some clothes for the next day and it looked like a war zone. Seeing the apartment in a state of chaos made me wonder how we were going to survive another week and a half there.

Back at the hotel we ended up calling United using my dad’s special help number to see how much it would be to fly home a bit earlier. It ended up not costing too much, so we decided to change our flight home from Saturday to Tuesday.

Making this choice should have been easy considering the stress of the fleas and the general sense of homesickness I’d been feeling, yet the post-phone call left me crying on the bathroom floor in the dark in our hotel room while trying not to wake Teddy. 

I had this overwhelming and irrational sense of failure—like I’d set out to run a marathon and then realized I wasn't actually fit enough for that so I moved the finish line up a few miles. I know a few days isn’t a big difference, but it felt like so much in the moment (both the relief that would come from being home a few days early and the guilt of cutting my time in Berlin a few days short). 

One of the really hard things about being abroad so long is that I feel like I have turned into this ball of anxiety that wasn’t part of me before this time. The weight of decision making for our family fell especially hard on me as this was my fellowship that brought us to Germany and I was the German speaker and thus default communicator to the outside world. There were just so many new stressors—getting up early with Teddy who decided 5am was his favorite wake-up time + climbing down a ladder from our loft bed at 2am for a nightly Teddy feeling , making sure the dogs had enough time outside, cleaning up their accidents inside even with enough outside time, deciding what to eat and not having a microwave to easily reheat leftovers, figuring out transportation, feeding Teddy both milk and solids, trying to get my own research work done (which was predictably difficult with a less regular schedule), dealing with bugs, slowly going insane without AC during heat waves…

I’m not sure why my anxiety was so bad in Berlin, and I’m not sure if that anxiety is a part of my Bloomington self now too, or if just being in new places with a baby strapped to me will forever mean anxiety is strapped to me too? 

Changing our plane ticket made me feel a bit like a fraud as well. I have always wanted to be someone who was well-traveled and someone who loves adventure and new places and cultures. But honestly one of my favorite parts of traveling is coming home because of the sweet relief of lying down in your own bed knowing where all your things are. So admitting I’d rather be home in Bloomington than in Berlin felt like admitting to myself that at my core I’m someone who craves the familiar rather than the restless wandering soul I want to be. 

Anyways, all these thoughts spiraled down on me on as I sat on the bathroom floor that night, but the next day things felt so much better (as they always do). I was happy with the choice to come home a few days early and we went back to our Berlin apartment to help put things together. The physical action of washing, cleaning, and moving things was actually pretty empowering for me and I felt totally capable of finishing the week (which included a nice trip to the aquarium with a visiting friend and a truly lovely visit from my high school exchange partner and her boyfriend, who both live in Munich).

A lot of terrible things happened in the US while we were gone that made me think maybe we shouldn’t live in America if we’ll have to worry about things like our kids getting shot at school + women’s reproductive rights and medical decision-making (not to mention the monetary costs of medical care), a failing reckoning with racism and mass incarceration, the apparent uncertainty of marriage equality… But for every political thing that frustrates me about America, there is no denying I love living there. Is it just because it’s the place I know best? Maybe. By no means is the US better than every other country out there. But maybe I have never felt more patriotic than seeing the Manhattan skyline and surrounding green when we were flying back from Berlin? 

I do love this country.

O America, land of soft toilet paper and plentiful AC.

What else do I love? 

I love many things about my life that aren’t particular to America, but they all happen to be there right now, so maybe my patriotism is also tied up in the life I have been offered in the US—our lovely home and big backyard, our dog, family close by, community we’ve spent time building, getting to go to grad school and have funding to do so. 

The flight home was long but Teddy was pleasant enough so it was okay. We made it back to Bloomington and everything wasn’t as perfect as I dreamed it would be, but the sweet relief of sleeping in my own bed was still incredible. Everything smelled mustier than I imagined and it was also greener than I remembered. 

Humid as hell, but Bloomington’s home.

And I love it.

Miss Swiss

We made one last Europe trip before heading back, visiting Basel for a few days before heading back to Berlin.

Why Basel, you may ask? Isn’t that a 7 hr 36 minute train ride from Berlin and aren't there cooler places closer?

Yes the first questions and it’s all relative to the second. We booked our trip to Basel back in May when my boss (someone I do research for on the side) was planning on being in Basel for two conferences. I’ve done all of my work for him remote for the past three years, so I was really excited to get to meet him (very cool and impressive human–his website is a little out of date in that he’s now doing a postdoc at Stanford in bioethics/genetic research). However, because summer travel has been cursed by some very angry gods, his flight from San Francisco to Europe was canceled at the gate, the day of his departure. It was too complicated to try to rebook, so he ended up not being able to come at all (and presented remotely at his conferences). Really disappointing, but that’s the way summer travel has turned out for so many people!

So we still ended up in Basel (just Kevin-less) and it was actually a really nice time still. I’m glad we took the trip overall. I did not feel that way on our train ride out (or maybe even on the one back) as Teddy decided that he no longer likes sleeping on trains because there is way too much to see and way too many strangers to try to win over by being the cutest, smiliest baby ever. He did so well sleeping on them when we were gallivanting across Europe back in May, but that was two months ago when he was still taking 3 naps (we’re down to 2 now). He’s apparently both out of practice and way more social than he was then.

By the time we made it to our hotel, Teddy looked a little like he did that very first day in Berlin being super jet lagged. He fell asleep while nursing and so I put him to bed, only to have him wake him screaming in distress and confusion about where he was 45 minutes later. It took him a good long while to calm down and finally sleep. And then he woke up at 4:45am, which has been his recent favorite time to wake up in Europe for the past month no matter what time he put him to bed. Joke is on him though because both Dallin and I fell asleep before 9pm the night before because we were also exhausted and were thus mostly rested by 5am. The only other time Dallin has gone to bed before 9pm in all the time I’ve known him was our very first day in Berlin, so you know we were pooped.

You’ve probably heard about the crazy heat waves affecting the UK, Spain, and France. We got a little taste of it too and the highs were between 95 and 100 degrees F while in Switzerland. I had booked us a hotel with an outdoor pool when we booked our train tickets a couple months ago, but upon closer inspection earlier last week we noticed this hotel did not have AC. I had terrible flashbacks to past sleepless, hot nights in Europe without AC, knowing I would pay any amount of money for an AC unit. Dallin quickly found a place not only with AC but closer to the city center and we canceled our original booking and made a new reservation. I honestly think this set the tone for the whole trip because every time we returned to our blessed cool room after being outside, the instant relief from the heat made me want to cry tears of gratitude. 

Day 1 in Basel included lots of walking around, climbing up one of the main cathedral towers, complaining about places being closed on Mondays, and eating expensive but tasty Flammkuchen (it seems that most things are expensive but tasty here?). 

Here are some sample English Teddy got while there:

“What a beauty!” (woman in a very British accent who sat next to us for 4 minutes in the train from German Basel to Swiss Basel)

“He’s happy to have chocolate!” (woman in a New Jersey accent as we bought Swiss chocolate and Teddy flirted with other people in the store)

Day 2 in Basel included an impromptu morning trip to the charming city of Colmar, France after we realized we could get there in 45 minutes. We had about an hour to run around with Teddy, buy 8 different pastries from 2 different pastry shops+macrons from a cookie shop, and take pictures because WHAT A CUTE LITTLE DOWNTOWN. Colmar makes me understand why some Americans think Europe is like Disneyland and forget that people actually live there. 

We also visited the Basel art museum and ate at a nice brasserie that was considerate enough to be open at 4:30pm because every other restaurant seemed to not serve dinner until 5:30pm, which is approximately when the wind-down needs to start happening for Teddy. 

It was hot (did I already mention that? Because it was quite hot). Basel has a lot of neat little fountains throughout and we saw dozens of people just submerged in them. I put my legs in one and it was amazingly cooling. 

We are back in Berlin until heading home next week—Details of the last days along with some unexpected stressors will be featured in my last blog post about this summer venture coming soon to an internet link near you.

I also wanted to spotlight the treasure that is the German drogerie dm. It’s like 80% CVS and 20% Target (in that many of them also sell some baby clothing). I’m obsessed. This is one of the stores (maybe THE store) I’ll miss the most. I’m an even bigger fangirl after this most recent trip because I was particularly aware of how baby-friendly they are. The one closest to our house has a nursing corner at the back of the store, some toys out for children to play with alongside their baby clothes selection, and a changing station, complete with different size diapers and everything. If every store had something like this, it would be a game changer–just an easy way to take away some of the stress of taking your baby out in public. 

Nearing the End

Our time remaining in Berlin is short and both Dallin and I are feeling very ready to be back in our Bloomington house (and see our Bloomington dog, who requires much less labor than the two dogs we are taking care of here). I’m in this constant mental battle of trying to appreciate this time abroad and counting down the days until we get home. We have about two weeks left and I’ve finished the to-do list I made while here, so I’m torn between creating another (short) to-do list and…well, simply not. 

We hit up several museums over the past couple weeks–when in Rome, right? Berlin has around 170 museums, so it is of course impossible to visit them all while here, but we’ve gotten in a good dozen or so. 

The Jewish Museum has been one of my favorite museums we’ve visited. The architect of the museum (Daniel Libeskind) said in 1998, “The official name of the project is ‘Jewish Museum’ but I have named it ‘Between the Lines’ because for me it is about two lines of thinking, organization and relationship. One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments, the other is a tortuous line, but continuing indefinitely.” The bottom floor feels very abstract in its ways to honor those who were murdered in the Holocaust, and then you move to some general Jewish German history on the top floor, and then you end with the “memory void” (because what can come after the Holocaust?). 

I paired with visit to the Jewish Museum with a visit to an undergrad seminar at the FU discussing Holocaust poetry (featuring Paul Celan’s “Todesfugue” and Nelly Sachs’s “O die Schornsteine”--which are two of THE poems of Holocaust). I bring this up mostly to share two comments from undergrads giving short presentations on the poems. 

1. “The Holocaust changed the lives of those of those survived.” (yeah no duh sherlock)

2. “Nelly Sachs talked about Israel because Jews wished they had been in the country of Israel instead of Europe during the Holocaust.” (even though the state of Israel wasn’t established until 1948?)

We also made it to the Pergamon, where Dallin fan-boyed over the many examples of cuneiform (the earliest writing form) and we both gawked at the Pergamon Altar from the second century BC. 

Teddy has become quite the connoisseur of fine things between old temples and small palaces. 

We toured the Charlottenburg palace on the west side of Berlin and it was lovely. I had originally intended for us to just walk around the grounds, but Dallin rightly suggested we go inside. I especially loved the interior of the new wing and found myself wondering if I could ever mimic any of the styles for my own future home/palace (spoiler: I cannot).

During one of Teddy’s 3-hour wake windows, we squeezed in a very quick trip to Potsdam. We just walked around and ate ice cream and baked goods before needing to catch a train back, but it was still a nice outing.

Food has been both a great part of a traveling and a great source of anxiety for me. Teddy took a while to warm to solids (namely he has strongly resisted eating anything besides bread until recently), but I still took on the burden of trying to get him interested in various foods for a half hour twice a day. That has gotten better, which is a relief since he’s coming up on 9 months, but somehow it has also been difficult to feed myself. Both figuring out what to make for myself at home and making food choices when we’re out and about have brought me greater anxiety than food has ever before. This has resulted in me eating something quark-based (a yogurt-like substance), fruit, or chocolate for meals more than I’d like to admit. 

Anyways, I also hate talking to strangers generally. My little brother made me go through my first drive through when I was a senior in college and it was terrifying. The first time I ordered pizza (also in college), I started by asking “Do you sell pizza?” And all that stress comes after you’ve already made the decision of WHERE to eat. Anyways, all that to say that I had yet another panic attack when we struggled to find food and Teddy was also hungry but I couldn’t find a place to sit to feed him and we were turned away from our favorite pizza place and after finally finding a place that looked decent (some Georgian street food) I tried ordering food and the food stand people only spoke Russian. It’s kind of funny now, but all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe and started crying and well...yeah. Life is sometimes like that.

The easiest food decision of the past week was eating pizza twice because turns out I love European pizza and also I’ve been chasing the perfect margherita pizza ever since a transcendent experience in–you guessed it–Niagara Falls (long story…actually wait, no, that’s basically the whole story). One of the pizzas delivered, the other was still good, but more of an excellent cheese pizza than margherita. 

Oh, also PS one month ago we also went to the Berlin Zoo. 

You’d think this wasn’t noteworthy since I didn’t bring it up for an entire month, but they had pandas there and that was pretty neat. I simply forgot until now that this happened because, well, it’s just hard to keep track of everything when you're a living being.

COVID and Travel

Turns out Dallin coming back from Hungary with COVID made it really easy for both me and Teddy to get sick as well, so we all spent a week at home with the doggos. Fortunately, Dallin’s test came back negative the day I tested positive, so at least we had someone who could run out to get supplies for us.

I didn’t get too sick in that I mostly just had some body aches with a fever and (later) some congestion. I actually thought I had mastitis AGAIN, which I was a bit panicky about because I’d told myself that if I got mastitis for a fifth time, I really should stop breastfeeding. Also I did not have easy access to more antibiotics. But as soon as I thought about stopping breastfeeding, I got really sad and realized I wasn’t emotionally ready to stop, even if it kept making me sick. So I was SUPER glad to find out it was not mastitis, though yeah, also very bummed I tested positive for COVID after having avoided it for two and half years of a pandemic.

Way worse than my own body aches (which I could treat with tylenol) was seeing Teddy get sick, even though it didn’t last very long for him. One afternoon after a walk, he very suddenly spiked a fever of 104.9 and I flew into a panic thinking our baby was going to die in Germany and it was my fault for dragging us here. I rationally acknowledged that babies get sick literally all the time and usually don’t die in this day and age from a fever. We still called our pediatrician (and PA brother-in-law for good measure) to get some advice (namely: keep him hydrated+baby tylenol). 

He woke up basically every half hour that first night and felt so hot every time. When morning finally came, he just kind of looked dead inside and his eyes wouldn’t focus on me or anything and he just wanted to be held. He is usually such a smiley, active boy and it was heartbreaking to see him be this sick shell of himself for about 40 hours. His fever broke that second night and it was so relieving to see him giggle and coo like normal the next day. He was basically fine after getting over the fever, though he also seemed to have lost his voice a little bit (did someone say old man coos?).

One of the big bummers about getting COVID was that my brother Taylor was supposed to come visit us last week and I was worried about the timing after testing positive. He booked a hotel for the first couple nights he was supposed to be here, just in case our symptoms were still bad. However, my 5 days of quarantine technically ended the first full day he was supposed to be here and I was feeling much better by then, so we thought it would work out. Taylor had two academic conferences in Europe with a few days in between them, so he had arranged to stay a few days with us. 

You have probably heard about or experienced the massive flight delays and cancellations going on due to staff shortages all around the world (is now the right time to become a commercial pilot?!?). Turns out COVID was the least of our concerns because Eurowings kindly canceled his flight the day before he was supposed to leave without rebooking him. So he rebooked independently to arrive on Friday instead of the original Thursday. However, his flight on Friday was so delayed that his 2.5 hour layover in Cologne was too short and he missed the second leg of his flight to Berlin. He stood in line for 6 hours at the airport to try to get things sorted and though unable to get him on another flight, the airline did get him to a hotel by midnight and pay for him to take a train from Cologne to Berlin the following day (Saturday). 

We finally greeted Taylor Saturday late afternoon instead of Thursday night. We were really happy to have him here, even if it was for a much shorter period than expected. He babysat for us so we could go out in the evening after Teddy had gone to bed and we took him on a short Spree River cruise where I received an excellent sunburn, to the Berlin Wall memorial which is pretty close to our house, and to a flea market. It was a whirlwind, but nice to have another visitor!