“One’s destination is never a place,
but a new way of looking at things.”
– Henry Valentine Miller

Any conversation evoking the word ‘regret’ ought to be subject to a clearer definition, so here is mine. 

This is not a piece about ‘regretting’ Germany. It’s a piece about regrets I managed to singlehandedly chalk up when I was in Germany. Germany didn’t do me wrong. It was I, who did Germany wrong.

When the notion of Quarantine-Free Travel first came up in Singapore way back in August 2021, the buzz that went around the nation felt like sky-sprung electricity, and it filled my heart with so much butterflies I couldn’t sleep at night. It was the type of hope that carried more possibilities than a mind could ever be conscious of, and the general sense of elation was simply an outcome of not having travelled for two full years.

I was pretty sure that any countries announced for Quarantine-Free Travel would be the ones I would dive headfirst into, no matter which part of the world they were in. I daydreamed about revisiting the region (surely there would be an ASEAN country), exploring newfoundland (UK? US?), perhaps even heading down south where so many of my friends are right now; and so when it was finally announced that the first country we would be establishing Quarantine-Free Travel with was Germany and only Germany, I was… stumped.

In all my imagination’s worth of make-believing life in Europe, Germany for some strange reason, never once crossed my mind. Portugal, Spain, Finland, Greenland, even Ukraine and Belarus, I’ve once done scant research on at some point of time in my life – but not Germany. I knew nothing about Germany. It does austerity like few others, that I knew; but other than that… what does one do in Germany?

I dawdled for a week or two, changed my mind every 24 hours – found reasons to go, found excuses not to; and eventually when I started to fatigue of my own indecisiveness, I decided that, even as I might not have entirely understood it fully as a travel destination at that point, there was one thing that I was certain of; and it was that whatever I thought about Germany, I damn well needed a good dose of it.

Except, I didn’t think you could actually forget how to travel.

And instead of cherishing this opportunity as a once-in-a-lifetime formative experience to jumpstart my journey into Europe – in a time when travel was so rare- I, instead, booked a trip, absent-mindedly amassed a list of hotspots and squeezed them all into three weeks, and then proceeded to spend an inordinate amount of time pairing berets with coats and deciding how many camera lenses to bring.

Is there any wonder why I am sitting here right now, penning what I am penning, wistfully wishing for another chance to return to Germany but knowing full well I probably never will? I made the fatal mistake of seeing Germany merely as a place, and for that, I failed it, and I failed it terribly.

I Packed Too Many Things Onto the Itinerary.

24 months was not only the amount of time that had lapsed since I last took a proper trip (Malaysia does not count); it was also, apparently, the amount of time required to unlearn everything that I had learned in the past 11 years from taking to the road on my own.

I thought I had corrected my perennial problem of wanting to do too many things with too little time; I thought I had outgrown needing to check off ALLLLLL the touristy places; I thought I was calm, and mindful, and all the things you’d perceive yourself to be after 11 years or keeping at something – but in reality, I was more like a cat on a hot tin roof, severely unprepared and constantly running out of time and missing train stops and utterly overestimating my own speed every single step along the way.

What was I thinking? Of course I was still the same me. Perhaps it was because this was my first real trip to Europe (Iceland doesn’t count) and so I didn’t see past the stereotypical headline attractions, or perhaps it’s just that I just haven’t learned much of anything even after all this time; but somehow, I managed to make the rookie mistake of jampacking my daily itinerary with more activities than my energy span could muster – almost all of which were highly touristy and not necessarily aligned with what would have personally interested me. I did not explore, but simply turbotouristed through star attractions; and wanting to see every church and every castle and every Alstadt on the list ended up leaving me so spent. Every night, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I’d failed because I never once completed my list in full – even though in reality, given the amount of time I’d allocated myself, it was just simply not possible to.

I Did Not Give Every City the Due Attention It Deserved.

Can you believe I managed to spend six days in Frankfurt? Well, of course you can’t; because out of these six days, four were set aside to explore – sorry, did I say explore? I meant barely skim the surface of, four different cities in four different day trips – cities which, for the record, well deserve more than one day’s worth of anyone’s time.

My daily itinerary was replete with castles and churches and historic monuments; and some of the places I’d bookmarked to visit in these ‘day-trip cities’ were actual full-on day trips in their own right. In retrospect, it is amazing how I thought I could pull off incoporating a day trip within a day trip. Every morning I would take the 7am train out to a different city, come back after 8pm, and wonder what I’d done. I missed the Schloss Drachenburg in Cologne, couldn’t spend as much time as I wanted at Kaiserpfalz Kaiserswerth in Dusseldorf, literally had less than TWO hours at Lake Eibsee before I had to head back…

… and the result of all this? A dizzying dread in my conscience that I hadn’t quite seen anything at all.

Now, Go HERE if you want to know what other cities you shouldn’t be squeezing into your itinerary as day trips.

I Planned For Places, But Not For Experiences.

About that two hours at Lake Eibsee.

Of all the places that I went to in Germany, I think I feel most regretful towards Bavaria. If I could redo my trip over, I would most likely spend my full 3 weeks exploring various parts of Bavaria and ditching everything else which, in retrospect, was just seen for the sake of being seen.

I’d forgotten how much the mountains make me feel at home. Bavaria, the untouched heart of Germany with its idyllic landscape of mountains, lakes and meadows, scattered with little villages and farms; and I barely gave it a glance, even as it was the one place that made me feel most alive in my three weeks there.

I think I only registered just how unauthentically touch-and-go my itinerary was when I was back in Singapore and was scrolling through my Instagram, and came across an influencer who went only to Munich; and yet seemed to have not only more but also richer experiences than I did across the entire span of Germany. She did a bunch of stuff I never even heard of – including the Alpine Coaster that I never knew existed until I saw her feed. How could I have gone to Bavaria and barely skimmed the surface of it all?

In wanting to just see and see and see and see, I missed out on the one critical thing that truly makes or breaks any travel trip: Experiences.

I Was Also Woefully Unprepared for the Weather.

I made the lethal miscalculation of assuming autumn weather meant golden hues and and crisp breezes and leaves waltzing in the southerly winds. I expected autumnal air, an energizing earthiness… and I definitely did not expect to be mocked through the span of my trip by a cold so bitter that some nights I almost lose my will to prevail.

I was definitely NOT ready for the cold in Germany, I was definitely not dressed for it, and I definitely paid a heavy, heavy price for it. From city to city, each so big and heady in its own way and each so full of poise and promise, and I couldn’t stop to admire anything in its entirety. I couldn’t take in the details, couldn’t get my fingers to cooperate to take a proper photo, couldn’t stay outdoors long enough to watch the bustle of local life, couldn’t do anything, really, without being constantly reminded of just how painfully cold I was, every single second of every single day. Everything I did, the cold was at the forefront of my mind. When I visited the concentration camps in Sachsenhausen and Dachau, my main thought was, how did they survive autumn and winter out here (as if that were the only point of contention)? When I passed the homeless on the streets, I was consumed with wonder about how they keep warm through the night. In Frankfurt, I paid for admission to two exhibits at a Jewish museum, just so I can linger for a couple of hours and use my phone in warmth. My memories of Alstadts are a glorious jumble of me darting in and out of churches, U-bahn stations and curio shops, where I’d dawdle just long enough to warm up before heading out into the cold again.

Can you imagine the amount of time I wasted, doing all of this on repeat?

I was Irrationally Fixated On ‘Creating Content’

The amount of cringe just admitting this.

I honestly thought I’d outgrown it. But whadya know, with every cobbled street and winding alley and grand historic square that my feet trodded, my mind was constantly scanning every nook and cranny and wondering only one thing, “How would I fit into this photo, and how would this photo fit into my feed?”

I hated everyone who got in the way, hated that I couldn’t make my camera see what I saw, hated the low light, hated the harsh light, hated the weight of all the unnecessary equipment I had to haul around like a dead body, every single day; and in the end, I just simply, hated, every photo and video that I took. I went to so many places but saw nothing. I did so much but felt nothing. Every place I went to, I went for a reason; and it was to eventually work it into ‘content’. A photo, a video, a blog post, a Story. As if I had an audience of a million awaiting my post-trip reflections with bated breath.

I’ve been back 2 months since and even now, anyone who asks after my experience in Germany receives nothing beyond a non-commital, “It was okay”. I’ve been back 2 months since and even now, I still can’t bring myself to touch my camera again. I don’t think I’d ever pressurized myself for content the way I did when I was in Germany, and that sheer compulsion utterly, utterly ruined what should have been a wonderfully liberating trip for me, coming out of 2 years of no-travel.

I wish I could just rid my mind from all that social media entails, go back ten years where I took ugly photos and slapped on uglier filters; and still came out of it all happy. I look at the artistic disaster that is my Cambodia album from 2013, and I still remember every single detail about every single photo I took. I remember the places, I remember the moments, I remember the smells, I even remember the strangers I came across and the awkward short conversations I had; and these memories makes me ache terribly to go back.

In contrast, I look at my photos from Germany, perfectly categorized, perfectly composed, perfectly poised; and I feel nothing.

I Was Not Honest to Myself About What I Wanted Out of This Trip.

I guess it’s really a thing, we can really forget how to travel. This time, I could not pinpoint my intention of travelling with a comforting exactitude, and so I unwittingly created an itinerary that stuck mostly to the hotspots.

Apart from the mountainscape, one of the other things which intrigues me most about Germany is the Third Reich, but you would never be able to tell by looking at my itinerary. Because it was not even something I admitted to myself… or perhaps leading back to my previous point, because I knew the Third Reich isn’t exactly Instagram-digestible content? *withers from the cringe*

Collectively, my Third Reich moments were carelessly scattered across my three-week itinerary like an afterthought, handed out like a pitying self-reward for having ploughed through yet another day’s worth of zipping-about-everywhere-and-nowhere at the same time; discovered without approval to explore beyond the surface. I stood outside the Reichstag in Berlin with absolutely no intention of going in- because I had no time. I missed the Nuremberg Trials Courtroom when I was in Nuremberg – because, you guessed it, I had no time. (And yet I lingered an hour and a half at some dead man’s house whose name I now don’t even remember.) These were the places I’d dreamed of touching; and yet when I was there, I could not connect to them.

My frenetic classic sightseeing had fatigued me, and I was unable to fully immerse myself in the experiences I genuinely wanted, even as I was there. By contrast, I distinctly recall visting Hue in Vietnam 8 years back, and signing up for a tour that covered the significant spots of the Battle of Hue. It had a 3hr commute each way – our time on the ground was short, but we visited tunnels, the Hamburger Hill, saw the last deserted tanker at a US Marine Combat Base, even stood at the line of demarcation that once divided North & South Vietnam (so I could be in 2 places at the same time); and even as this must sound mindblowingly dull to most, it was unique to my interest; and I sit here 8 years later, still remembering huge chunks of that day and how immersive the whole experience was for me. Believe it or not, I actually even remember what I had for lunch that afternoon. 8 years ago. (It was Pho.)

I wish I had been a little more honest with myself when I was shaping my itinerary in Germany; had enough courage to drop the hotspots that didn’t speak to me, and just did only what truly nourished my soul.

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Go on and make me feel better (so that I can make you feel better too). Tell me if you have a travel regret you can’t get out of your mind too, and I’ll swoop in and lift you out of your misery. See you in the comments below!