Travel Day 802 – Detmold, GERMANY
It was my second week in Germany after finishing my world trip and while I was slowly accustomed to everything, all of a sudden I had to deal with some of the aftermath that a long trip can bring with it…
Old Fachwerkhaeuser in Detmold, Germany
One thing that caused some trouble to me was driving a car. While on the one hand I was not used to driving any more at all, on the other hand I was completely confused about which side to drive on. Since the beginning of the year I had been in South Africa, India, Indonesia, and Thailand. The one thing all these countries have in common is that everyone had agreed to drive on the left side of the road and so obviously for the past 10 months I too was only driving on the left side. If it was in taxis, busses, tuk-tuks, rickshaws, or on motorbikes, everything happened always on the left side of the road. Now I was facing a little bit of a challenging and dangerous time while re-adjusting to the right side of the road again…
The next challenge I was facing was meeting old friends. While it is obviously nice to meet people you have some connections with, it turned out to be not quite so easy to relate to each other since many things had changed. First of all there were a lot of babies around. Actually some of my friends were on to baby number three with the baby number one not really being a baby any more. For me personally they were all cute and all nice, but also a giant symbol for how far our worlds have grown apart. The result was that I could not really relate to baby questions and my friends could not really relate to travel life. And as it turned out to be impossible to summarize a two-year trip around the world over dinner, we always ended up rather reminiscing about the good old times we had together…
But the biggest challenge was probably dealing with a lot of bureaucracy. From multiple visits at the unemployment office and job center, over the mission to re-establish health insurance, which is required by law in Germany, to a new passport application, I was more than busy for quite a while. Actually some of the government offices turned out to be willing to help, but since I had been out of the system for too long, in many cases there was not much else they could do but refer me to the next government office. Only the passport application turned out to be fun, because I managed to fill it up entirely within my two years of travelling round the world. This left the government employee with quite some headache as the computer did not let him file a new application for me because the error message always claimed that my current passport was still valid for 8 more years… : )
Despite all the challenges of a world trip aftermath, I found at least some time to stroll around and enjoy the local architecture on a few sunny days. The most amazing thing for me personally was how clean and well maintained everything looked. But I mostly loved to see all the old “Fachwerkhaeuser” with the little shops on the first floor and apartments above. They were not only historic structures of great craftsmanship, but also something that I hadn’t really seen anywhere else in the world…
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