I’ve always loved to travel. In the past year or so, I’ve come to realize I feel more at home when I’m living out of a suitcase, spending entire days in airports, than I do in Reno or Winnemucca. On my first solo trip out of the country, a five-day jaunt to Puebla, Mexico via D.F. to visit my then-girlfriend studying abroad, I came to find that everything I love about travel is brought into much sharper focus when I am abroad.
Allow me to better explain.
I think (and this is just an educated guess because, as anyone around me knows, I really don’t have anything about myself figured out completely) that the reason I love to travel is the thrill of exploration, and not only physical exploration, either (though I enjoy that, too). In addition to finding new restaurants, buildings, neighborhoods and bars, I love getting a taste of the people and their culture in each place.
While in Puebla, D (my new blog codename for my ex-girlfriend, out of respect for her likely wish I not write about her on the Internet. Those who really care probably know who she is anyway, though) left me alone for a morning while she was interning at a hospital. During those few hours alone in a city I’d just arrived in, without knowing more than the most rudimentary of phrases in the local language, I managed to find and purchase breakfast, buy the local newspaper (which I plowed through enough of to get what I still believe were the most important parts) and strike up brief conversations with a handful of people.
The conversations ranged in complexity from a maid asking how I was doing that morning (she kindly corrected my response of “Bien… err… ¿bueno?” to a confident “Bien, ¿y tú?”) to a gentleman who saw me reading the paper and asked what I thought of the proposed Volkswagen factory expansion (through the conversation, which was actually rather long and intelligent for my beginning-level Spanish, I learned that he thought I was a German at first glance) to college students interviewing me on camera in both English and Spanish about what I thought of their city (there was three girls, one a French major, one an English major and the third a German major – they had all the languages they would need covered, I guess).
Though the entire experience lasted no more than a few hours, it is among the things I remember most vividly about my trip to Puebla. Since then, I’ve tried to do the same thing in every city I visit. A week later in Austin, Texas, I managed to strike up conversations with a number of journalists attending a conference with me and even had a (then illegal) drink with a local girl I later learned was my age and a mother of a two-year-old child and wanted nothing more than to leave Texas. While in Washington, I managed short conversations with the District’s locals in coffee shops and bars in Adams Morgan nearly every weekend and by the end of the summer I was giving directions and Metro advice to tourists from the Bible Belt.
I’ve always thought of myself as being a little shy, but something about being taken away from my home (I’d say “out of my comfort zone,” but I already said earlier I am more comfortable traveling) makes me the outgoing person I always want to be. It’s the feeling I get when I’m reporting, but better because it’s not so combative and agenda-driven. Something beautiful inside me bubbles to the surface when I am learning about a new place that I just can’t replicate at home.
I know Santiago is going to challenge my shyness again. Though my Spanish has improved since last fall when I went to Mexico, it is still only conversational. But that’s good. I want to have to work at this, to force myself to learn this language so I can get to know Chileans. I want to kill the image I have of myself as the shy kid in the corner, and what better way to do that once and for all than to live in a county – hell, a continent – I not only have never been to, but don’t even fully know the language of? I’m ready for this.
OK, so that was sort of a long (and, against what I said in the last post, a little self-centered and narcissistic) post. If you read the whole thing, thanks, and feel free to leave me some feedback. Oh, and Mom: It’s not that I don’t want family to read this; it’s just that I’d like some friends and others to see it as well.
