There is a water bottle in my bag that has been to more places than I have words for. It is scratched all over now, plastic rather than metal, turquoise and neon green, the most colourful and least heroic object I own, and somehow it has become the truest map of how I want to move through the world. I refill it everywhere: at station fountains, at a friend’s kitchen tap, once from a stream in Brandenburg that I probably should not have trusted.
I did not always think about how I travelled, only that I did. That changed the year my family sat at the kitchen table and looked honestly at what our holidays cost, not in euros, but in carbon. The next spring we took the train to Paris instead of flying. It was longer. We watched the landscape change, field by field, language drifting at the borders, the journey becoming part of the place rather than a gap to be skipped over. I have never gone back to thinking of distance as something to erase.
In Berlin I move mostly by bicycle, sometimes by U-Bahn, never by a car I do not own. I shop, when I can, where things come without packaging, and I keep using the same plastic bags long past their first life, so one supermarket bag becomes my bin liner for weeks. None of this is heroic. It is just a series of small, repeatable decisions: refill rather than replace, keep rather than discard. These are, in plainer language, the UN goals of responsible consumption (Goal 12) and climate action (Goal 13), lived at the scale of one student’s day.
So when I think about Aberdeen, where I will study in the coming year, I am already thinking about how I will arrive. I want the going there to be as deliberate as the staying, with journeys planned to minimise emissions and rail and sea favoured over flying wherever possible. I imagine the granite light off the North Sea, the hills I plan to learn slowly and on foot, the particular kindness people there are known for. Once there I will live without a car, eat largely vegetarian, and keep my footprint small. I want to read law in a system that is not my own and discover where its assumptions and mine quietly disagree, because the most useful thing a place can do is show you the shape of your own thinking by standing outside it.
I do not believe an international placement and environmental responsibility are in tension. Studying abroad is not a gap to be crossed but a landscape to be travelled through, attentively, what I learn in Aberdeen and what I bring from Berlin one continuous route. The bottle will come with me, of course. I will fill it from a Scottish tap and keep walking. Some habits are small enough to carry across a sea, and large enough to be the whole point.
