Post Poznań

I follow the train tracks further east. In two hours I will be in Warsaw. Not much of a consolation price for the cancelled India trip but still enough to reconnect me with the outbound journey. Mesmerizing German anthropology, a short glimpse of how everything could have been very different before returning to the ubershallow world of Monocle. In this issue, there is a photo suite from Tangier with some hipster guy assertively reading a guide book on “The U.S. and British Virgin Islands” in a café. I do not want travels to be like that. I want them to be about the indefinite, about that mix of linguistic uncertainty and playfulness, about actually seeking out the unknown. Yet, at the same time I am great proponent of the “global living room” as a generative metaphor for the future, of slowly “domesticating” the international, of daring to dream of a day when unbounded physical mobility has become a reality for everyone on this planet and not only for a privileged few.

As for the world of research, I am afraid that the Wallenberg post-doc scholarships for Stanford on global sustainability issues went to two chemists and one biologist. This does not mean that I will give up on all plans for California, I still have a good contact there and I will try to put together a more traditional post-doc application towards the fall.