Memories
A moment lived in Germany by A-Lotta-Travelling, a traveller from Finland
Memories are a peculiar thing. Sometimes the smallest things such as a familiar smell bring back the strongest memories and emotions.
I lived in Kreuzberg, Berlin between the age of 3 to 5, back in 1993-95. My dad worked for a company that was relocated to Germany, and at scarce times after the recession in the early nineties my parents decided to move to Germany for a few years. With a newborn baby, myself and my older sister. Because, why not.
I don’t remember much from my time in Berlin, and when my parents organised for us to go back there in 2000 on a trip I was very excited but also a bit hesitant as I wasn’t sure how much I would get out of it.
When we arrived in Berlin we did some sightseeing around the usual places, and we spent a whole day revisiting our “old life”. My life back then consisted of walking between home, kindergarten and the local playgrounds, which I thought would be moderately interesting for a 10-year old me.
However, upon seeing these places something hit me. I recognised the places mostly from photos, but there was something so familiar with them at the same time. I got a wave of memories that I didn’t know I had and oddly enough I remembered the places as a home from a long time ago. It wasn’t the typical big things such as buildings and parks, but the smaller things such as the smell of a doughnut shop in a corner and an uphill road that felt so steep for me as a child. The things a three-year-old paid attention to.
Granted, a lot had changed in the neighbourhood that back in the nineties was a poorer part of town. You could still feel the strong annotations to a very recently fallen wall back then, but now it is the trendy and hipster part of Berlin. However, it was still amazing to come back to a part of my life that I thought I had forgotten about, and finding memories I didn’t know I had. It truly was a special moment in time, and I hope to be able to go back to Berlin one day and experience it again, and perhaps find some more memories in the cracks of the pavement and the swings of the playgrounds.
This traveler has a travel blog : Lotta
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