Close your eyes and remember the times you went on a trip. The excitement starts with packing your bags…

I moved through London like the wind.

Some time ago I was talking to a friend about my self-portrait project. Much to my surprise, my friend thought that someone else is taking my self-portraits. After assuring that no one else is involved in my self-portraits-making, she was wondering: “How does this work? How do you take your own pictures?”

I have seen it all. Almost all.

Do we really travel or are we mainly posing for “the ‘gram”?

So more and more people travel and that is great. I’m all here for it. Heck, I’m doing it myself for the past two years straight now. Traveling is wonderful. An otherworldly experience in a worldly place. It widens your mental horizon, gives you joy, excitement, new experiences, gives you a break from your regular life, opens new ways, promotes tolerance and destroys prejudices towards other cultures, relaxes or pushes you (depending on where you go and what you do) and so much more.

Yes, technically, I am not a kid any more, but I am fortunate to call myself a kid of curious, often open-minded and generous parents, who decided to go on an adult version family vacation back to my old stomping ground New York. To join them was a no-brainer for me.

The timing was perfect.

After a whirlwind year of traveling around the world, I took some time off, stayed put in Berlin and traveled more within. The winter months were quiet, yet full of insights.

As they say every medallion has two sides and my fantastic year of traveling was no exception: Besides the incredibly beautiful places I’ve seen and the amazing connections I made with new friends, locals and fellow travelers, I also lost some people along the way. Some of these realizations came with my return to Berlin.

Rome - welcome to the eternal city, abundant with not just history and picturesque corners, but also pasta, prosciutto, Nutella, Aperol Spritz, and serious coffee culture.

Rome is one big open-air museum of historical sights and old buildings, which invites its inhabitants and visitors to get lost in its many nostalgic streets. It is called the eternal city since the 1st century BC because Rome persists. Robert De Niro said once: “Italy has changed. But Rome is Rome.”

When my good friend and old roommate Suzanne told me that she’ll do a stint in Amsterdam for her midwifery studies, we tried to put together a reunion. After all Berlin is not that far away from Amsterdam. Yet after some back and forth, we discovered that although Germany and Holland are neighbors, the trip wouldn’t be that cheap and it would have been also pretty cumbersome. So we agreed on “Skip Amsterdam, let’s meet in Ireland”. Suz is from the emerald island and I only managed visiting her once so far. After checking the flights, it was a no brainer: Ireland it is.

They say Bavaria is a different world. The language, the climate, the holidays, the traditions.