Being in Hannover as residents for the very last time we tried and still try to fill those almost two months with more than the administrative crap and work - we try to spend a lot of time with our families, as well. Eat together at least once a day, have some wine in the evenings, talk, laugh, hug and do other fun stuff. Like going to the lake for a swim, bake together or, the classic, hike. Last Sunday we drove to beautiful national park ‘Harz’ and spent a day out in the woods, crossing rivers, resting at a beautiful lake and afterwards had a nice dinner out on the porch of some mountain hut with bestest strawberry lemonade and caramelised waffles. It’s been an amazing day with perfect weather, warm and breezy. We hiked through the forest, had good conversations and quite a few laughs, made plans for the future, talked life and holidays and outdoor sports. It’s been one of those days where everything makes perfect sense and you feel utterly happy. A day that you wouldn’t want to forget. So, like always, we took a lot of pictures. The kind of photos you take because you want to look at them whenever you feel blue. When we miss our old home and want to go over all those amazing memories we've collected here. Pictures of moments that will forever remind us of how easy life can be sometimes, how effortlessly beautiful. With us arriving back in Hannover we finally held the HP Sprocket in our hands when we walked through the door three weeks ago. This is the very first time we made use of it. Back home, we picked our fav pictures and printed them - as perfect little reminders for a beautiful summer day. They will be put up in our office in Iceland (which we have yet to find, but whatever). They also will be part of a massive ‘Germany’ album in which we will collect pictures of beloved moments we had - and still are going to have - in our country of origin.

Spending more than a month in Germany comes with a crazy mix of emotions. It’s all the memories, the incredible warmth but most of all… the smells. While Iceland smells pure, fresh, clean and like a new beginning, Germany smells like flowers, sunscreen and nostalgia. Yes, nostalgia has a scent and it’s a blend of humid air on the porch and the lakes we used to swim in, years ago. Germany smells like our youth. It feels like our youth. It sounds like our youth. And being here, saying goodbye for good, is bittersweet. We cleaned out our rooms these past two weeks and next to packing six (!) moving boxes with clothes and shoes to put up for sale we filled even more of those with kitchen utensils, books, accessories, unused beauty products and more clothes for donation which is all being picked up by a local help-organisation next week. We rearranged the furniture so our old stay can now be used as guest rooms. And that was it. A few administrational things and our past life is almost ‘erased’ here in Hannover. While going through old boxes and drawers we found tons of stuff from back in school. Letters of long gone friendships and drawings, poems, stories written back in the day. A whole chapter of both our lives resurfaced and even though we had a GOOD laugh about most of the crap we found - some letters moved us deeply.

2238 kilometres or 1390 miles or 1208 nautical miles - that is the exact distance between Reykjavik and Hannover. The exact distance between us and our families. The walking distance would be around four million steps. 3.730.000 - look at that number. If you consider every kilometre a heartbeat then we are speaking of approximately 32 hours of heartbeats. Since there is no measure for the amount of how much you miss someone this is the best insight we can give into how hard it is sometimes. 2238. We never, not one day, regretted or doubted our decision to settle down north. No 3°C in spring, no hail, no storm, no limited selection of cheese (it can be a drag, though) and no lack of sunlight in winter had us ever question this move. But let’s face it - all of this doesn’t keep us from missing our families. Our loved ones. Our old homes. The places we grew up at. The memories we made. The hot summer days, the melon lemonades, the strawberries, the BBQs on the porch, the laughter. We miss it. We miss it a lot. Building a bridge between two countries isn’t as hard this day and age as it used to be. We talk on the phone at least once a week, we send cellphone pictures back and forth, we text, we communicate via email. We try to still share as much with each other as possible. A room tour video through the new home, the fresh flowers on the breakfast table, the blooming roses in the garden, the nieces riding their first little bikes, selfies taken on a hike or proof of the snow we’re having beginning of May. Since literally everyone in the family has a soft spot for Iceland we share as many pictures of the country we love so dearly, as we can. We zoom in to the icy crystals on the ground, film seabirds circling over the ocean, we try to capture the light in all it’s incredible variety - when the sun rises, sets and the golden hours in between. And yet, it of course is not the same as actually sharing the moment.

So we moved apart. Not just into two different apartments but also two different parts of the south western island. While Einar and I are already done moving, Caro and Logi are still waiting for their newly bought home to be free, with their moving date being around first of July. When they have left our old house and successfully moved into their new home a 20 minute drive will separate us. It's the first time after more than five years that we are not sharing an apartment. It broke my heart in the first place but after the several sleeps in my new home a certain understanding dawned up on me: this is actually gonna do a lot for our friendship. With us living together and working together the past few years our conversations slowly grew into 'nothing-but-work' talks and whenever we headed out for adventures we took the camera with us to take pictures for the website. Just now we realised how that actually stole real and honest friendship time. We want to go to cafés together, ride bicycles together, travel together, have our long chats and massive laughs - without work being any part of it. Just two friends that share dreams and hopes and plans for life, not projects to work on. We have always been radical in our decisions, moving apart is yet another one of them. We both need some time to reconnect with our creativity, to get out of the shallow waters of routine and jump back into the deep end of unlimited possibilities.

We all are driven by something. Have a passion, a calling. We feel drawn to paintings, music, nature, sports, people or books. It's easy to find and difficult to live. For us, it all started with traveling. Our parents luckily felt and feel the same love for the world as we do and so for as long as we can remember we have been on journeys. Through Europe and the world. We consider ourselves very lucky that we had such privileges. That we were able to see what this planet has in store for us humans from our early years on. And we fell in love with all of it. The new places and spaces, the people, the always different smell in the air, the way the sunlight had a different color in all those corners of the world, the change in pace, the incredible range of languages, the beauty we got to witness in all four cardinal points, whenever we boarded a train, a plane or the family car to go somewhere new, somewhere exciting. Of course, you don't really consider it your passion when you are younger. It's just something your family does. Like all the other things you grow up with. When we got older we realized that traveling, like everything, of course had a price. One we couldn't really afford. So we dreamt ourselves to New Zealand and wandered the Californian coast in our hearts. We stood on rough cliffs of the arctic in our minds eyes and danced along white sand beaches in our conversations, instead. We traveled where we could afford to go to and worked hard to be able to visit a few places that had been in our dreams for so long - but it was never enough. Not enough to not see it all. It became our biggest dream to go abroad. To live someplace else. It was one of those dreams you hold dearly but never actually take as something that one day could be your reality.

What would you do if everything was possible/who would you be if I could be anyone? We all asked ourselves those questions a few times in our lives, right? And we most likely heard people say 'you shouldn’t think about that ‘cause it makes you unhappy, makes you feel like your own life is not good enough' just as often. I claim the opposite. I dare to say: go for it! Dreaming is such an important thing as is opens your mind, gives you a certain kind of freedom, keeps your fantasy alive and most importantly: it makes you happier. - At least this is what I experienced. Reality can be harsh sometimes so why not go someplace else every now and then, jump into another life for a while and make it one hell of a trip? Even if the experience itself isn’t real your feelings very well are and isn’t that what life is all about? Feelings? I mean, what about that subconsciousness everyone is talking about? Which you can apparently influence so greatly and positively by thinking only positive thoughts. I read a lot of guides about getting rid of negative thinking because I had a phase when I got sucked into that spiral of negativity pretty bad. So I read and read and read and they basically all said the same: write down positive stuff and read it out to yourself every single day; if you notice you have a bad thought turn it into a positive one – so I did and it felt nothing but wrong and totally stupid. So I quit. The reading. The writing down notes. There had to be another way for me which is why I started looking for the reason I ended up on that one way road of unhappiness in the first place. I digged deep and concentrated on what was so different back when I was happier person. At some point it hit me: I stopped being happy when I stopped dreaming my life away.