Coasting at 15,000 ft on my first descent into the Europe, I was suddenly struck by the strangeness of the tapestry below. I peered down at the expanse spread out before me, pressing my forehead against the glass, while I struggled to pinpoint what it was that made this "new" landscape so different from what I had seen dozens of times before in my domestic flights.
Quietly it came to me-- the reason rested "squarely" in geometry. Squares and right angles, that's what you get when you look down at the landscape of the American countryside. Small farms on ordered parcels of land, laid in neat grids of gingham. And now, wonderfully, something new hovered below. The German countryside seemed chopped, disordered, an intricate weaving of tiny parcels with rounded edges. In particular, my eyes traced the boundaries of one enormous handful of land, which was suddenly bisected by a tiny sliver of smaller parcels crammed into a jagged row. Unlike the large quilt of squares and rectangles I had become accustomed to in the States, whose boundaries represented the agreed-upon terms of real estate transactions, the little plots below me seemed somehow weathered. I couldn't help but think of river stones, or crackers that had been nibbled at the edges.
Chalk it up to the romantic notions of a girl from the "New World" who had read one too many history books and an Anthro degree. I couldn't help but to interpret the disordered landscape as one intricate story, which was itself made up of countless subplots and storylines. In my mind, the shape of each individual parcel existed as an artifact of long-forgotten circumstances-- battles, family feuds, fortunes made and fortunes lost, each event leaving its trace on each parcel of land. With the luxury of many centuries to develop, the landscape seemed to have morphed into one massive German fairy tale.
I landed at Berlin (Tegel) Airport within the next hour, but wasn't to arrive in Berlin quite yet...First I jumped on an Alitalia flight to Milan, to see my dear friend Camilla, and her Belgian roommate Nele. More to come...
