Maya's mama in Berlin

First photos: View from my window, Day 1. The bear, symbol of the city. And the flea market I wished for!

Tomorrow, I will get on an airplane and fly to a foreign city I have never visited before, and a woman who has never met me will welcome me into her home and let me live with her and her partner. It is this kind of travelers code of hospitality that gives me hope for our world and for humanity, a hope I had somewhat misplaced of late. Back before we became a paranoid nation who only allowed those rich enough to afford a US Visa and the lengthy expensive process to get one to come here and find out that we really are incredibly nice people, back when we used to host young ladies from foreign lands for the summer before one of them was summarily deported because she could not understand the questions (the questioners made no effort to translate the questions and she was, after all, coming to the US to learn English) they asked and she mis-answered them, back when I believed that we were a nation that believed what was written on the base of the Statue of Liberty, I used to hope for world understanding and peace.

I have always known that traveling to other countries helped us understand, in a tangible and visceral way, that we are all one human family mostly motivated by similar hopes and dreams—a chance to actualize our innermost best selves and a shot at a better world for ourselves and our families. I also found out, after a summer abroad in my 20’s in a land with anti-American protests and anti-feminist traditions, that not everyone sees the world through the same lens I do, and that has changed my life. I could never go back to a single minded world view. I had learned, in that summer, to look at the world from a bunch of angles and refract what I knew through a series of prisms called history, culture and belief systems. I know that what I have learned around a table just talking with folks over coffee or café or tea or lassi are things I would not have learned in my own insular world. Reading the news story about my home country in another land, about how others interpret my world has been a mind expanding experience. Trying to communicate in other languages opens a universe. Standing in a strange land where no one literally speaks your mother tongue is an eye opening disorientation, and a truly critical one for each of us to have, because I have found that the world is truly full of wonderful personalities. The world keeps getting smaller and smaller and we need to get to know the neighbors….as I reach out of my curmudgeonly shell, they are reaching too.