October 1, 2021 began for me at 4 a.m.. I woke up and found my mother in the kitchen, preparing toast to tuck into a corner of my backpack.

“The road is never known,” she said as she carefully wrapped the slices of bread. “It’s a long way to Poland.”

“Mom, I have another request,” I said, laughing. I brought my hands from behind my back and revealed my “baby” — my childhood doll.

“If I take the ‘baby’ with me, I’ll always have a piece of the family with me,” I told her.

“Okay, but let me sew up her leg first,” she replied, taking the doll from my hands to fix a part that was nearly torn. As she sewed, she advised me to keep it safe in my suitcase and not to forget it in Poland, where I would be staying for five months after earning an Erasmus+ scholarship to complete the fifth semester of my bachelor’s degree in journalism.

At six a.m., we left Gjakova and headed to the Prishtina airport. At the entrance, I met Donjeta, another student who had won the same scholarship. We were both traveling to the city of Wrocław.

After hugs and countless photos with family members, along with farewells and wishes for a safe journey, my mother’s endless advice took center stage. She reminded me to be careful and to stay with Donjeta at all times.

I was traveling to a foreign country for the first time. As the only and youngest daughter in the family, this was also the longest time I would spend away from home without being near any relatives, which made my mother worry.

To keep our emotions in check, Donjeta and I avoided looking at the tearful eyes of our family members. From a distance, we gave them our final wave of the day. Standing at the airport door, we bid them goodbye. COVID restrictions were still in place, preventing them from entering the airport.

With that, we headed to our first flight.

A long journey that lasted a short time

In the airport, we encountered a series of procedures, some of which I had researched online a few days before departure. However, with each step, a nagging worry crept into my mind. Every minute, I checked my pockets and bag, unable to shake the fear that I might have forgotten my wallet, passport, COVID vaccine certificate, or some other important document somewhere in the airport.

After completing the procedures and checks, we wandered around the airport, taking in everything around us — gift and souvenir shops, the music and announcements echoing everywhere, the uniforms of the security guards and flight attendants and the planes taking off and landing.

When it was time for our flight, we boarded the plane. The flight attendants guided us, demonstrating the emergency exits, how to fasten the seatbelts, the proper use of oxygen masks and life jackets and the emergency evacuation procedures.

When the plane’s engines started, the noise spread throughout the cabin, filling every corner with a deep sound that stirred a mix of emotions in me — a bit of anxiety, a touch of adrenaline and a hint of curiosity. As we prepared for takeoff, a slight tremor ran through my body and my heart rate quickened.

The plane sped down the long runway and with each passing second it seemed to climb higher into the sky. In an instant, I felt a strong push from the seat pressing me back; the wheels lifted off the runway, and I immediately felt a hollowness in my stomach. I knew there was no turning back — we were leaving behind the earth and everything familiar to step into another world, that of the heavens.

As the plane went higher, Donjeta and I shook hands. Smiling, we turned to the girl next to us and asked if she had noticed that it was our first time on a plane.

“Yes, a little,” she said, laughing. “Don’t worry, everyone reacts like this the first time,” she added, as if to give us courage.

I asked Donjeta, “‘The flight attendants are also distributing food. Do you want some, or did you bring snacks with you?”

“I brought two sandwiches, but they’re squished; they look like slippers,” she replied, making us laugh and distracting us from the experience, which was both scary and beautiful.

The higher we went, the smaller the city, the fields and everything below became. The familiar details melted into a distant, hazy mosaic. The sky opened up before us, blue and endless, and the clouds appeared to stand still, soft and white, ready to be touched.

A new world

After two hours of travel, the pilot’s voice announcing that we would be landing in Berlin in a few minutes woke me up. In Berlin’s airport, unlike the one in Prishtina, the Albanian language was not as prominent, replaced by a mix of dozens of other languages spoken simultaneously. The signs and announcements on every corner were no longer in Albanian. This created an atmosphere that made us realize we had arrived in a new, unfamiliar place.

We lined up in the customs line for countries outside the European Union, where we heard more Albanian. There, we also met a girl from Kosovo, for whom traveling to Germany was a common experience. After our passports were checked, we followed her to the subway.

There, we realized we were in for a longer day than we had anticipated.

First, we forgot to pick up our bags, thinking we hadn’t reached the luggage pick-up yet. After a few minutes of worry and stress as we wandered around the airport, we managed to tell the airport employees, who directed us to the luggage section. Because most of the suitcases looked very similar, we feared that ours had been mixed up.

But when I opened one of the pockets and saw my childhood doll, I was relieved.

We bought tickets to travel by metro, another form of transportation I was trying for the first time. As the metro moved quickly, tall buildings with beautiful facades, walls covered in graffiti telling different stories and narrow alleys full of life appeared before our eyes.

The girl from Kosovo got off at her station, and we continued on. We started looking for a place to buy tickets to Poland and the platform where we would wait for the train. The Berlin train station was located inside a large building with many floors, which posed a real challenge since we didn’t know where to wait for the train.

The cold October weather made everything harder. During the four-hour wait to board the train to Wrocław, we felt disconnected from everyone — with no internet to contact our family or tell them how far we had come.

Our heavy suitcases kept us from going for coffee at the bars on the other floors of the station. Added to this was the anxiety of possibly missing the train, which held us hostage and kept us tied to that spot. We were just counting the minutes.

But we had something that brought us the warmth of home — my toasts in the pocket of my bag and Donjeta’s sandwiches. As I ate and savored the taste of home, I remembered my mother’s words from that very morning, which now felt like they had happened hundreds of hours ago: “The road is never known.”

Feature Image: Atdhe Mulla / K2.0.

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This blog was published with the financial support of the European Union as part of the project “Diversifying voices in journalism.” Its contents are the sole responsibility of Kosovo 2.0 and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.