As I write this post, I’m peering out of the window of a long pressurised metal tube hurtling through the air 39,000 feet above sea level, watching a mesmerising sunset as the plane passes over Baku. The sky has turned from bright blue to deep red to deep purple to pitch black in a matter of ten minutes. It is yet another 4 hours before the plane lands in New Delhi and the officials stamp my little travel diary signalling the end of the events of the last 7 days.

I’m still trying to make sense of the last week.

Perhaps writing this post will help me figure out how I almost made it without crying for a decade only to have to let the floodgates open on the flight back.

On the 31st of August, I left India for the very first time in my life, for Berlin, to attend QtCon and Akademy, the annual world conference of the KDE Community. I had expectations from the trip. I expected to finally put a face and a voice to all the IRC nicks I geeked out with over the last 2 years. I expected to attend talks that would blow my mind. I expected to eat some really good food. I expected to see a few things around the city.

All of that happened. And then some more. A lot more. I fell in love. With so many things.

The city. The cars. The roads. The public transport. The complete strangers who would always make eye contact, smile and say hello. The one time I was travelling on the U-Bahn well past midnight and ended up singing the cup song with two people whom I had never seen before and never will see again. The architecture. The sleepless nights spent walking all around the city exploring because we’d have events during the daytime.

Spending a week four thousand miles away from your daily life does make you think.

Is it just the first Akademy that turns you upside down, or is it every Akademy? Does it make a bigger impact on me than on others because as she put it, very emphatically, “You’re still such a child!”?

I wonder what it will be like 10 years later. I may have a completely different life, a completely different career. KDE may be a distant memory for me. I may not even remember QtCon 2016 as a whole. But the first KDE e.V. AGM, the first time I stepped into the BCC and spent the entire day in the back office trying to get video recording to work. The time we dressed up and walked in the freezing cold to Checkpoint Charlie just because we felt so crazy. The last night before I left when she wouldn’t let me sleep - “It’s your last night in Berlin! It needs to be special!” - and then we went down to the East Side Gallery and couldn’t get back because it was well past 2 AM and neither the normal buses nor the U- and S-Bahns were running. These will be permanently etched in my memory.

Thank you everyone who made this week so memorable for me. All these go out to different people - thank you for taking us to the Russian restaurant, thank you for grabbing hold of me one night when I had lost my phone and making me justify to myself why I even am in KDE, thank you for making it financially feasible for me to be there, thank you for dragging me down to the hotel with the aquarium, thank you for giving me so many reasons to be so incredibly happy to be there. Thank you for being so gosh darn energetic, infecting me with said energy and making me get by with 3 hours of sleep a night.

And last but by far the most, this is for you. You, the eyelid-batting, compulsive hair-untangling, soft-talking little bundle of joy. I have so many things to express to and about you, but words fail me. Thank you for all that you did, and did not. Thank you for completely decimating my blocks and filters. Thank you for making the best part of this trip not the fact that I was in a different country for the first time in my life. Please don’t get lost :-)

Auf wiedersehen Deutscheland, und danke für alles!