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 guidebook 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 remain a strong proponent of the “global living room” as a generative metaphor for the future: of slowly domesticating the international, of daring to imagine a day when unbounded physical mobility has become a reality for everyone on this planet, not only for a privileged few.

As for the world of research, I learned that the Wallenberg postdoctoral scholarships to Stanford on global sustainability issues were awarded to two chemists and one biologist. This does not mean that I will abandon all plans for California. I still have a promising contact there, and I will try to put together a more traditional postdoctoral application in the autumn.