About

Me: I’m a 25-year-old former New Yorker who graduated from Columbia University  in May of 2008 and came to Berlin on a whim. I had originally planned to stay for only two months (September and October, a decidedly perfect time to come to a new city), but after about a week here, realized I had to stay forever (or at least, for as long as forever could be). So, I went back to New York for two more months, tied up loose ends and freaked out a bit in preparation, and now I’m a full-blown Berlinerin, wondering just how I got here, and what to do next.

The Blog: I decided to start a blog to update my friends and family on what I was doing, and to have lasting documentation of this, surely the most daring and crazy thing I have ever done in my life. I have no aspirations of becoming world-wide or even city-wide famous; I had a blog long ago, about the New York music scene, which I constantly wished would turn into something more than it was. This is basically just for me and people who know me, but if you happen upon it in your internet travels, I would still love to hear from you, so drop me a note or leave me a comment!

The Inspiration: Baedeker was a German publishing company that put out a line of guidebooks by the same name, starting in the 19th century and continuing well into the 20th. The guides became so famous and ubiquitous that the name “Baedeker” was soon a standard reference to guidebooks and travel-writing in general. They were once a trusted source of knowledge for travelers of the famed European Grand Tour, and are now collector’s items, relics of a bygone era in which travel was considered to be part of one’s upbringing and education; the only true way to understand the world and one’s place in it.

A Room with a View is a novel by E.M. Forster (and incidentally, quite a good film as well), which begins with a formative trip to Florence. The heroine is a young Englishwoman entrusted into the care of her much older cousin. Together they encounter a free-spirited female novelist traveling alone (quite unusual for the Edwardian era) who is staying in their hotel. The novelist takes them out of their normal routine, shows them the hidden, secret, and more real Florence behind the one they’ve already seen, and implores them to leave their Baedekers at home. The quote above, of course, is from this novel.

I was fascinated by this idea of “Baedeker-less” travel for many reasons. First of all, because although I love paging wistfully through guidebooks, I strive for an ideal of travel in which I do not need them. I will almost inevitably end up leaving them at home, and asking real people for advice, or simply wandering and seeing where I end up. I also studied the little-known but fascinating anthropological subset known as “tourism theory” in order to write my senior thesis, and got really interested in the psychology behind travel. There is a way we act when we are abroad that has a lot to do with how we have been told we are supposed to feel, and a lot to do with guidebooks (for which Baedekers are of course a stand-in). We are all seeking a way to have a “real” experience when traveling, whatever that means, to leave the Baedeker at home and just be able to happen upon things without being told in advance that they are there. We all would like to be able to think that we are the first one to discover something wonderful and beautiful, whether at home or abroad, and in that sense we are all hoping and fearing that we will one day be lost in a foreign land; lost, with no Baedeker.