Although I missed my Georgia State University graduation a few days ago, I didn't even remember until my mother mentioned it in a recent Facebook message! That shows you how much I am enjoying myself abroad. Actually, it's almost like I am living dual lives. Each day, I think back to my former house, car, and even bills and responsibilities. There is a whole new set of responsibilities now in Abu Dhabi but I often have to divert my attention away from my former life in America.
While I will definitely miss my traditional trip to Connecticut to visit my mother, sister, and niece, I am excited about the new memories I will create over this holiday break. I decided to visit Amsterdam and a few different cities in Germany. I just got some exciting news that I may be featured in Berlin at the top of 2012! Thanks to a poet friend by the name of Marc Marcel, I will be featuring in Europe for the first time in my poetry/spoken word career. "Berlin?!", you may ask. Well, through my research, this part of Germany has become a hotbed of spoken word in recent years. I am interested to see how they will receive me. This is definitely a milestone in my ten year run with spoken word. Aside from winning the National Poetry Slams with Slam Charlotte in 2007 and the Southern Fried Poetry Slam individual competitions in 2005, this will rank up at the top of literary accolades.
The main reason I chose this trip is surprisingly not for the "coffee shops" in Amsterdam! I actually decided on this vacation because I want to connect deeper to my Polish roots by visiting Holocaust memorials including the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam as well as a couple of concentration camps in Germany. I have already booked my train trip to Weimart, the former capital of Nazi Germany, to see the Buchenwald concentration camp (Click here for more info on Buchenwald). I am also considering the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. (Click here for more info on Dachau). Few people know that my mother is Polish-American and that the majority of my great cousins died in the Holocaust. My grandmother, Jean, had wise parents that moved from Antipolia (now in Russia) a few years before Hitler invaded and sent everyone in that area to the camps.
While many other places would have been nice, I think this trip will be a spiritual home-coming for me in a few regards. I never was really connected to the Jewish side of me and I am hopeful that I will become more aware of that ancestry after the trip is over. All in all, this trip should be a great respite for me as I look forward to starting out 2012 in a new land with a new career and new optimism for my future.
Awesome! Have a great vacation! Lesha R.
ReplyDeleteWhat a great trip you have planned. It should be exciting to connect with a part of your life you've never connected with before. I think it'd be so very "interesting" for lack of a better term to visit the site of one of the Jewish concentration camps. As an english teacher I've taught the book "Night" by Elie Wiesel for many years. It is fascinating, yet very sad to me. So sad that after a few years I decided not to teach it anymore because I couldn't handle such a heavy topic. The gross disregard for human life is too much for me to think about at times. I hope this trip is eye opening for you. And by the way, I didn't participate in graduation either. There were too many work related responsibilities that I had. Congratulations.
ReplyDelete