Last summer, I was in Europe for two months. Because it was such a long time, I need to split up my travel posts about it into five parts. In this part, I’m going to talk about the six weeks I spent in Germany in a general way, leaving the more specific day-trips and such for other posts. Honestly, this post will likely be more of an infodump with a lot of photos, because how do you wrap up six weeks of time in a single post?

I’ve probably told the following story on the blog already, but frankly, I don’t feel like doing the work to go back and check, so ignore me if this is old news. The whole premise of this trip came from a few random ideas tossed back and forth between Rainstorm and me over the two years that we’ve known each other. When they went to Pride in Cologne in 2024, we chatted about how I should come join them for Pride 2025, especially as I’d never been to Germany. Then later, we snagged tickets for The Ineffable Con, which would be held just outside of London in late August 2025. What with Barcelona in April and TIC in August, I couldn’t also come to Europe for Cologne Pride in early July 2025. That’s way too much overseas flying!

A new idea got floated: What if I came a week before Pride and stayed until after TIC? That would be about eight weeks, and it was a much bigger idea/ask. It required commitment, basically living together for that time, as I would be staying at Rainstorm’s flat. They would have work during the day. It would be life, not vacation. Mostly, anyway. Was our relationship ready for this? Would living together destroy what we had? Or would it possibly be wonderful, making us feel awful separating again after two whole months together? But if we said no, would we regret it, given that we didn’t have any future plans to meet after TIC, and didn’t know how long it would be before we saw each other again?

After lots of discussions (with each other, with our friends, etc), we decided that it was better to risk regretting a thing we did, rather than a thing we didn’t do. I changed my out-and-back flight to London to the wider date range and location, happy that with a gift card, the change only cost about $50! And honestly, Rainstorm and I are both so, so grateful that we made this decision, because a month later was the Barcelona trip and the subsequent divorce proceedings, and if I hadn’t made the change to the tickets already, it wouldn’t have been an option anymore, legally. (As it stands, we still don’t know when things will finalize and the two of us can see each other again, sigh.) And spoiler, those two months didn’t ruin anything, and in fact, we grew a lot closer in that time.

But this post isn’t to talk about relationship stuff! It’s to talk about my six weeks in Germany. Thing is, I didn’t know a lot of German before I got there. My second language is French (semi-fluent), and while I’d studied a tiny bit of German in the past, I def couldn’t have gotten around on my own. But throughout the six weeks, I began to recognize phrases, words, and language cadence. When you take the train all the time, you begin to hear patterns in the overhead announcements. When you cook, you learn to recognize the names of certain ingredients and steps in recipes. Because this wasn’t vacation, there was a lot of simply living: grocery shopping, going to the bank or post office, traveling by train, haircuts, birthday parties for friends, nights out at gay bars or clubs, taking walks along the river, exploring different restaurants, going to summer festivals, watching TV together (including German ads!), learning to use a totally different kind of washer/dryer, trying to pet neighborhood cats, etc. Once, I even accompanied Rainstorm to Urgent Care when they were sick, and we had to stop in a pharmacy for help after they got stung by a giant hornet on a bus (!!!).

When you visit a place, you only see it in brief. When you stay there for a longer period of time, you learn it on a deeper level. Now, when Rainstorm tells me about where they’re walking or what store they’re at, I know exactly what it looks like and how to get there. I learned what foods I loved in Germany that I don’t necessarily like in the US (like bread!), and vice versa. I had the most German interaction ever in that Urgent Care with an old man who was gesticulating at a window and clearly saying the German equivalent of “But what about the Lüften?” (Note: Germans believe open windows = better health and even in winter they should be opened at least once a day. I’m told that there are two cultural things I must know to live in Germany: Lüften and Raufasertapete. Personally, I think Bernd das Brot is a close third.)

Anyway, it was lovely. It was lovely to have coffee in bed with Rainstorm in the morning. It was lovely to have the windows open all night. It was lovely to not be boiling hot over the summer (except for the first few miserable days, when there was a terrible heat wave and no a/c). It was lovely to just exist side by side, to go to the climbing gym together, to meet Rainstorm’s friends, to shout at a horrible Netflix “documentaries,” to work on my writing or photography or blog while Rainstorm was at work in another room, to cook together or for each other, to take walks and explore new spaces, etc. It was better than either of us expected. The time passed far too quickly.