As you may already know, I wrote a research paper that was (somehow) selected for presentation at the European meeting of the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management—wonky, nerdy, economic-data driving researchers who love ‘p-values’. The conference happened to be centered on migration as a study of analysis, and well, despite my lacking said math, I happen to have a bit to say about asylum adjudication.

So the conference is in idyllic college town of Maastricht, Netherlands. And you’re asking, where is Maastricht? It’s about equidistant to Brussels and Koln, a city of 100,000 or so in the Limburg region in the south of the Netherlands. And, fittingly, the city is split down the middle by a river, the Maas—see how that works?—and, more to the point of my being there, is home to the many faculties of Maastricht University (UM).

Maastricht is not the kind of city you’re likely to visit on your Perillo Tour, but it’s brimming with the European charm (read: cobblestone streets, drinking beer from cans on the street, BMWs for taxis) you likely went to Europe for in the first place. Because the UM is mainly English-speaking, the town is friendly and easy to negotiate. Because it plays host to university kids, it’s also a bit easier on the wallet than much of Europe. The University brings a certain amount of traffic and culture—art museums, regular train service, 24-hour food carts—but still prides itself on not being Amsterdam (xenophobia, weed as cultural tourism, prostitutes). Two hours by train away, Maastricht is decidedly more austere and inward than its’ big sister to the North, but the result is a clean, safe, education and culture driven community that runs on a heap of coffee and books. Travelers that meander to Utrecht, Holland’s arts university hub, will find similarities between Utrecht and Maastricht, but where Utrecht paints and sings and creates, Maastricht types and leafs through Kant.

My presentation itself went well, despite my worries. I did stay up the night before at my hostel (totally a swanky and full-featured hostel, I must say) and tore apart my entire powerpoint to build it back up again. I awoke disheveled, noticeably addled, the combination of reading American law decisions searched for on Norwegian Google and prosecco from our conference social the night before. A rockstar professor confided in me, at the peak of my anxiety to present, that the objective was trying not to put people to sleep or be the worst. I’m fairly animated so the sleeping wasn’t a concern but objectively offering up a lousy talk was still a possibility.

In the end, people liked it. I presented in front of professors and graduate students from all over the world—and managed to hold my own. I celebrated by tearing open a pack of stroopwafel and people watching along the pedestrian bridge over the River Maas. A deep, contemplative, sigh. This is the life.

Berlin, 2005

Look at that kid. He is so happy. All he wanted to do was smile for me, a paunchy, goofy-looking, American with a backpack that could hold the rations of a small army. Especially those dehydrated curry bags they give the British soldiers. It was Sunday, my last day in Berlin and he was doublefisting paper airplanes. There was an idealism even a cynical college student could reach out and grab.

After a childhood with a German grandmother and a Jewish mother, I was in college with enough fascination over the elder’s accent that seemed to command unflagging reverence. And guilt. Shitloads of Jewish guilt. Admittedly, the best way to reconcile your pangs of guilt is not to, in a stupor over studying for finals in the library, bandy about the Lufthansa website. Despite however appealing those German flight attendants are, we can appreciate good decisions don’t tend to happen in the haze of a Chicago winter at 1:30 in the morning on the internet. Somehow, after three hours of scouring, there it was: an open-jaw ticket. I would spend 10 days in Germany, starting in Munich, heading back to the States from Berlin. There were winding train rides—including a foray into Utrecht, Netherlands, where I, self-conscious of my snoring, hid in a private sleeper car to avoid scrutiny. (Did Europeans not snore? I didn’t know, but I was not about to be the subject of ridicule or the standard bearer for the United States.)

Finally, I ended up in Berlin, because I wanted to and because Lufthansa said I had to. And I would only obliquely acknowledge the touristy crap you’re supposed to see and I would eat doner kebab both in my obsessive desire to crack into the urban underbelly and because I really was just that broke. Frankly, I hung out in shady places where the German sounded less like I remembered from Schindler’s List and more like some noisy mix I’d imagine hearing in New York—there was a mix of Spanish, Russian, Afrikaans swirling around me. Despite an expectation for cultural tourism, St. Pauli girls and schnitzel were not on this part of the S-Bahn. In exchange for the tchotchkes I didn’t buy and glossy veneer of Berlin life I then bypassed, I amassed—in four days, mind you—a ragtag collection of tour guides, all who gushed with excitement to show me ‘their’ Berlin. And so, there was bocce ball outside a theatre, beers in the East, beers in the West, poker in the breakroom at the Westin, and hookah (admittedly not a very easily transportable contraption) on some guy named Jurgen’s deck overlooking the train station. (I remember, despite the deliciousness of a peach hookah and a bitterly cold March evening, feeling like seven people might be too many for his wood suspension deck. Paranoia that I would fall, through and on to a train going to the Black Forest consumed my thought process.)

I’ve attempted to reconstruct my time in Germany by keeping in touch with this pack of kindred spirits and through my obsessive cataloging of photographs. Both have proven futile. And as the news crews head to Berlin, attempting to teach those who weren’t there or weren’t alive, what happened 20 years ago—it becomes a sludge of headlines and mirage of old news reels. The obsequious use of CAPITAL LETTERS TO TELL US THINGS ARE REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT. And scrolling. And flashing. And breaking. So, when Tom Brokaw stood at the Brandenburg Gate yesterday and offered up images of 20 years past, I could only think, well, you just had to be there.