Inception Traveling

A trip within a trip.

We’ve all seen the movie Inception, right? The one where Leo goes into a dream within a dream within a dream and so on. Well that’s what my traveling experiences have felt like.

These past couple weeks I’ve gone from Amsterdam to Berlin back to Amsterdam and then off again to London. It’s been quite the adventure, and an interesting form of traveling that I’ve never experienced.

We arrived in Berlin excited and ready for a break from Amsterdam. We stayed in a super awesome hostel and met countless young world travelers like us. We went on an incredibly fun and slightly terrifying bike tour through the city (being sandwiched between two busses on a little bike is scary, okay?), I went to my very first beer garden and saw the remnants of the Berlin Wall. We were having a blast, but as time went on I could sense a feeling of homesickness in not only myself but also in a lot of my friends in the program. We were homesick for Amsterdam.

The same thing happened to me in London. My roommate Nicole and I took a trip on our own to this wonderful city, but we only had a couple days to squeeze everything in. After running like madwomen past Big Ben and The Eye to The London Dungeon, figuring out the quickest tube route to get to the West End to sob over the beauty that is Les Miserables, speed walking across the Abbey Road crosswalk, and rushing to the Buckingham Palace in the morning to see the changing of the guards, we needed to take a breather. Returning to Amsterdam was a relief.

It’s as if we have built a home here without realizing it. Time went by and we subconsciously grew roots in this city. The comfort I felt upon returning here caught me off guard, and still does sometimes. I feel like I’ve finally become a part of Amsterdam and that there’s a part of Amsterdam in me.