It changed my life.
(Now, how often does one get to use that sentence and have it be true?)
I remember trying my best not to say goodbye. I have never lived abroad before. A trip down south to Singapore, a beach vacation in Phuket, a couple of weeks backpacking in Australia, yes. But living in a country where I didn’t speak the language and I wouldn’t be able to afford to fly home and see my family till I finished my studies? Harsh, man.
Still, I was twenty-two and ready to take on the world. Time to leave my shell. I had said goodbye to my sister and her kids in Malacca, and my parents were driving me to the airport in Kuala Lumpur. (That was a luxury then, going to the airport, before I started working and every visit to a flight terminal could mean days or weeks away from home… working.)
I would keep in touch, I said. I told my father and my mother this, and I told my friends back home the same. I had just started a weblog – I will write about what I did in Munich, I said. It’d be just like you were here with me.
I did write, one brief entry after another, each a snapshot of the late Bavarian summer that greeted me, then the new friends I made from all over the world, the unfamiliar sights, sounds and tastes. I wrote about 9/11 and how we were stranded in Augsburg, a small town outside of Munich with no access to what was happening. I wrote about how each of us, our little mini United Nations had a friend or a family member in New York City and how we bonded over this in the coming days of desperation and useless horror. We found ways to laugh again while we waited and counted the number of missing, found, dead. We taught each other to appreciate the knowledge that something good will go on.
I wrote about missed opportunities and missed affairs. Of infatuations and weekend trips traipsing across Europe. I wrote about my first winter and my first snow; how I made snowballs and had a snowfight with my friends from Chicago. I wrote about falling in love with Italy and with Italians simply for their unyielding clamour for life.
I wrote about summer again, and the best beer in the world being drunk from a one-litre Maß cradled in one’s palm, sitting with friends at long wooden benches under the sun-dappled shade of chestnut trees. It was the best time ever. Munich.
It changed my life.
Meet this kid from Malaysia, somewhat OCD, an engineer by training. Uptight, restrained, uncertain. Meet this kid again, after some time in the company of some crazy Americans and some, oh yes, even crazier Italians. Still uptight, still uncertain about the world around him but curious now. He’s begun to seek out answers to questions he’s never really asked before. He’s searching.
I am still searching. But I may never have begun searching at all, if it weren’t for Munich. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote that “There are no classes in life for beginners: right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.” Life is difficult. What matters is in the living, in the search for answers, and the wonders we encounter during the journey.
This is why Munich matters to me. This is why my friends matter. And this is why this blog matters. It’s a record, it’s a testament, it’s the living and the journey and the wonders.
We are all beginners in life, and this is a beautiful, beautiful thing.