It was April of 2016, and we had made the decision to move away from Calgary and explore the capital city of Germany. We uprooted our lives, left everyone and everything behind, and moved to Berlin.
It's October of 2018. It has been over a year since we left Germany and made Toronto our home. It was time to head back to Berlin, and wow, I did not expect the reaction that I had upon landing.
It was April of 2017, and we now embarked on a new adventure, leaving behind Berlin and moving now to Toronto. We once again left everything behind and packed our suitcases and began to make a home in Toronto.
Walking through those streets, eating at the bakeries, taking the subway (U-Bahn), shopping at Primark (lol), rediscovering our most visited streets, staying now at one of our favorite hotels, Hotel Amano in Mitte, the district where we felt the most alive and inspired, the place where we told our Berlin friends we were moving to Toronto, the place where Monika met old friends on her solo trip to Berlin last May. How much memories a simple place can have!
It made me realize just how important our move to Berlin was - for us to find an apartment in Germany for living and working, for us to find friends for Christmas, Halloween and New Years, find supermarkets for groceries, find bars for drinks, find shops for fashion.
The autumn sunshine in Berlin was so vivid (and so warm!) that we genuinely enjoyed walking around, sitting at old spots where we met friends or had brunch or shot outfits.
And for us to do all of this together - this is all that Berlin holds for us. A reminder of resilience, of challenge, of adventure, of overcoming fear, of accomplishment.
I had no idea being back would bring up that much inside me, but it definitely did, and also instantly made me ache for a return to Europe. Not just for Fashion Week, but for a longer term return...
I am so happy I had the opportunity to return to Berlin again, and also so grateful for everything that it taught me.
