leipzig

I went to Leipzig at the end of May to attend a conference at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. It was my first real attempt at travelling alone, which was much harder than I thought it would be. Something that should be obvious about travelling alone (but wasn't to me) is that everything is on you. No one is there to catch the things you miss or don't want to do. This meant thinking about things that I was not used to thinking about like arranging when I was arriving with my host, making sure I had cash, figuring out how to pronounce ß, fixing a broken bike chain, admitting I'd lost a key to a bike lock, making friends at the conference, asking primatologists to make time to talk to me, etc. It was kind of a mess. I cried, I got sick, I lay in bed, I got lost (not in a glamorous way, in a walking-along-a-dark-highway way). With every setback, I had the same thought: 

On one day of my trip, I decided to explore the area I was staying in. I'd read before booking my lodging that Plagwitz was a hip neighbourhood that attracted a lot of artists, which seemed like as good a place as any to stay. While I was walking around, my eye was constantly drawn to the street art. Montreal has a good amount of street art, but the street art in Plagwitz was on a whole other level. I did a self-led street art tour through the cobblestone streets, looking excessively touristy with my camera draped around my neck.

Leipzig was absolutely messy, but there was also some not messiness. Crying over a pizza in the back of a taxi and marathoning bad Netflix romcoms were parts of the trip, but so were discovering the street art, sitting in a park with a new friend, and speaking to Carel Van Schaik (whose papers I've cited many times). Spending time alone gave me the room to sit down with my flaws and hold my own hand. All my flaws were my own, but all my triumphs were, too. And I think it would be okay if my whole year was like that.