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My bucket list

As I enter my 40th year on this earth, I find myself with the need to create a Bucket List. Not because I have a sudden fear of death or because I feel my life has been empty until now. Neither of those are true. Rather, "new decade, new me".

I want to travel the world. I want to discover what new cultures, new languages, new foods and new people have to share. 

I want to go to the happiest place on Earth, and I want to discuss whether the flavors I am tasting are rather red or purple fruits, while the sun sets on the west coast and my purple dress floats with the cool breeze of the pacific fall. 

I want to go back home and drink coffee while sitting on the veranda, knowing that this cup was harvested, milled, dried, ground and prepared with love for me, exclusively. I want to get lost trying to find out where the mountains of the Sierra Nevada blend into the Caribbean Sea, while the birds drown the silence and the fresh caribbean spring breeze wisks my curls across my face. I want to hear my kids laughing with my parents, while my sister sits with me and listens to my stories from 20 years ago.

I want to be a tourist in Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg and serve as a translator while I try to define the differences between the stereotypical German and the dogmatic German cultural tradition. I want to look up at skyscrapers and old statues in that green hue of ancient (patriarchal) history. Maybe even take a kayak ride down a German river and see what this German life in a big metropolis is like.

I want to go to the Dominican Republic and get drunk on the salty smell of the ocean and high on the coconut rice and plátanos. I want to have dawns merge with dusks because time is irrelevant and the warm, summer breeze intoxicates with its musical hum. I want to disappear into a hotel and not think, not ponder, not wonder - just exist, free of duties of accountability.

I want to go to Paris and stare out of my hotel window into the river Seine, then have dinner at the Eiffel Tower and walk down the Champs Elysées during a cool, fall evening, listening to La Vie en Rose playing on some bohemian accordeon somewhere in the background. I want to go to the Moulin Rouge and walk down the stairs of Mont Martre and get literally lost in the Louvre, while soaking up all the beauty that humanity has had to offer in the past centuries.

I want to go to Las Vegas and try my luck - experience the Strip, the shows, the dry, dessert air. 

I want to go to Iceland and sink in the natural hot springs and visit the fairies and experience a land of matriarchy and equality.

I want to go to Peru and get served plates that combine flavors I once thought to be incompatible, while being absolutely amazed by the explosion of feelings happening in my taste buds.

I want to travel the world. 

I don't need a juicer, a grinder, or expensive ear pods. I don't care about the price of the things I have. I care about the experience I will be living - and mostly, I care about being able to have an adventure worth writing about. 

And while the fact that every single paragraph above started very purposely with myself, the truth remains that as much as I want to find myself traveling the world, I am also very much looking forward to being found.

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