One of the main reasons I wanted to go abroad and forced myself to get off my ass and do it is because I wasn't sure if I would ever be able to afford to support myself and live in a foreign country for an extended period of time (longer than a vacation) after college or ever in my future. (I have no real desire to work a high paying corporate job, so I viewed this as potentially my last opportunity.)
The last time I was in Europe I was enraptured by the phenomenon that, from the brief time I had to get aquatinted with each country, it always seemed like everything was foreign but weirdly similar at the same time. For 18 years the only country I had been to besides my own was Canada. I was always shocked because I expected it to be so crazy not a single thing could remind me of America. I was oceans away in countries we only see pictures of in World History textbooks, why would it be like where I live?
But it was. It wasn't as wild as I thought. You could look at dogs or people on the street, you could look down garbage-filled alleys or up skyscrapers full of well lived-in apartments with clothes drying over the balcony, and it could take you back to the US, to the garbage filled alleys and dogs of Seattle, Olympia, or wherever I was thinking of at the time. It's not that I didn't think Europe had garbage or dogs, it was just I didn't realize how mundane, how absurdly normal it would be to see these things while on a tour of some of Europe's most famous attractions and cities that we had anticipated for six months.
At any given moment on that last trip to Europe that changed my life, just three years ago when I was freshly graduated from high school, I was on average five thousand miles away from the home I know and love. But there were times when it seemed like I could've been an hour away.
I remember looking out the bus window and staring at endless pine trees and pathetic-looking bushes as we cruise down the highway. I could've been in Federal Way, but I wasn't. I was in France. All I could think about was the thought that if you just took that single frame of reality out of context it looked like I was 50 miles away from my home rather than 5,000. It wasn't super different, the landscape wasn't coated in chocolate or diamonds just because it was this crazy enigma we all grow up thinking about. Ooooh France! Ooooh twinkly lights and wrought iron balconies and the Eiffel Tower! Sure, I saw plenty of all of those things. But the most surprising thing was that the countryside of France looked literally no different than the rolling forests of Western Washington.
But who would ever dare to think that France and Washington state are similar in any way? Who?! In fact who would ever consider the fact that they could be compared? To me, before going abroad for the first time, these two places were as different to me as two planets. We put these insane images of foreign countries and cities and landmarks in our minds as we grow up, but it isn't like that. The world isn't that crazy and intangible. It's small and it's real and it's fathomable.
In our travel dreams we often don't consider the fact that all of France isn't Paris, all of England isn't London; there are people that live in these places that are just like you and me; they live in a small town surrounded by forests and nothing to do and are thinking about cities and traveling the world. They're probably thinking about coming to visit the US while I'm thinking about going to Europe or Australia or New Zealand or Asia. Everything you see as exotic is normal to someone, and everything you know is foreign to someone else, which is a crazy concept for me to wrap my head around. When I was a little kid I often wished I was born in a foreign country because I thought I would be so much more exotic and cool, not at all realizing that if I was born there it wouldn't be exotic to me.
As odd as it was, being in the middle of nowhere in France, in a place where the highways and roadside landscaping looked just like home, was more thought provoking, more poignant than the sightseeing moments of my travels. Walking through the quiet neighborhood streets of London alone was so similar and so different at the same time. I remember one time, one of the first times I found myself alone abroad, I was supposed to be meeting my group for a tour of the British Museum, but I was walking through some smaller alleys and streets and a teeny tiny shop caught my eye. It was comical in the fact that it had large amounts of Beatles and One Direction merchandise hanging up among other famous UK bands, surrounded by Union Jack flags, tea cups, etc. I just thought it was the cutest little store. Having no respect for time, I just wandered in and bought an Arctic Monkeys sweatshirt, a band I've loved for years that hails from Sheffield, England. I don't really know why that moment is more vivid in my memory than what I saw at the museum, perhaps just because it was so absurdly normal. It seemed like something I would do if I were a young person living there in London, and for those few moments I kind of imagined that I was.
Maybe I was so fascinated with these moments because no one would ever be able to see it how I saw it. The sweatshirt doesn't even fit me anymore, but it's still one of my favorite possessions. It seems like such a small thing, but it had me daydreaming about what my life would be like if I was here for a month, six months, or a year, about how many little shops and cafes I could get acquainted with just like I did in Seattle until I felt at home in the city. I thought about what life would be like if I was someone else and I was born there. Because of this weird yearning feeling I had, I began to think about why people want to see foreign countries aside from the Instagram photos we all fantasize about and getting more stamps on our passports, about why it's such a cultural obsession. Why do I hunger so much to have these tiny moments where I feel at home, at ease within a new culture and a new city when I'm on the other side of the world?
Now I'm experiencing this same phenomenon again, this time a little bit older and a little bit wiser, 6,000 miles away in Greece. I dodged (and sometimes fell in) massive holes and cracks and tree roots in the sidewalk on the trek from my dorm to the Deree college we're attending in Athens. This took me back to my endless daily walks from my sorority house to UW's campus, where all the sidewalks on Greek row and the surrounding areas are fifty kinds of fucked up. But this made the 6,000 miles feel like 6 for just a split second, and I found myself being comforted by the crooked sidewalk chunks jutting out from our pathway.
It wasn't this picturesque solid white city with identical buildings and intricate tile work like we imagine. It wasn't the ancient city with fountains and statues and Socrates. And thank the Lord there was no 'Mamma Mia!' type action. It was just a shitty suburb bordering the city. I grew up in a nice lil small town, and this was shittier than any of the cities I've been in around in my area. Not once did I think going to Greece I would reside in a grey suburb that often smelled like garbage. But that's not necessarily bad, its grounding. Similar to other European cities we see in history books, Athens isn't philosophy and warriors and marble columns all the time, and, depending on where you place your value within the realm of travel, that can be a hard pill to swallow.
On the bus I looked out at Athens as we came across a massive construction site with piles of sand-colored rubble and massive half finished rebar structures left abandoned, looking as though it hasn't been worked on in months. Ah, yes... Seattle. I laughed to myself and felt weirdly relaxed at the sight of this, knowing that no matter where you go in the world you will still find huge unfinished construction projects taking up precious real estate in the middle of the city.
Just walking down the street in Downtown Athens seeing the lavish stores and street vendors and people heckling you, trying to sell you things; even that made me happy! It reminded me of walking down the main street of Santa Monica or on Melrose Avenue in LA or even Downtown Seattle, and I feel like without these experiences I wouldn't know the magnitude of how much I treasure those places. I was in love with the idea of finding the exact things I love about cities and about my life and experiences, but thousands of miles away in different countries and seeing how they operate and play out in a culture that we dub as so different than us. What other countries can I travel to and find the same thing? And all the while I can learn about and enjoy the things that make these worlds I've been in so different.
I think this is what I love so much about the mystery of the world and of our perspectives. We all go through life and we carry with us the beloved places we've been, lived in, spent extended time in, made memories in. For me it's Olympia, Seattle, Hope (ID), Waikoloa (HI), Los Angeles, and who knows where else. We carry those places with us everywhere we go and we use them to make tangible connections to the new places we explore. In the future, should I get the opportunity to visit more countries in the world, I have no doubt I will compare them to my time in Greece and draw connections there.
I sit here on a tiled balcony in the warm night at my dorm in Athens writing this. I sit out here pretty much every hour of my free time. When I first got here it was kind of the only area of my dorm that brought me comfort. In Hawaii we call these Lanais, and as it's a hot place we can hang out there late into the night, something you could never do in Washington. I find myself wrapped in a blanket of familiarity when I sit here with my laptop, because that's what's I'm used to. I could walk back in the lanai door and find my brother and dad wrestling and jumping on my mom while she protests. I know I won't, but for a split second, if I just imagined, it seems like I could.
I sit here pondering why our culture is obsessed with travel. A culture that's obsessed with posting pictures at ridiculously famous national monuments and glittering oceans and spotless beaches. We go and spend unrealistic amounts of money traveling thousands of mile trying to find something so vastly different than what we know, like the Swiss Alps or the Great Wall of China or the Cliffs of Moher. We go to these places expecting something so spectacular, a different universe. You go far away to find something akin to a different universe that you saw in a postcard just to discover its so much more than just that postcard, that the further you move away from that assumedly magical landmark the more and more normal life becomes. But the amount of how unbelievably normal it is makes it magical in a different way.
It's just the world and it's just life and you have to go out there and see it to discover that it isn't this mysterious enigma that's untouchable and unreachable forever. We make these little connections between what is known and familiar and what is unknown and we make it so much more within reach, within our reality, within what we can comprehend. We draw the world into us by making these connections and we make it smaller.
When I was a kid I was obsessed with this ride in Disneyland called It's A Small World. My parents are pretty good at traveling so usually when we went to Disneyland it wasn't a high tourist traffic time of the year, giving us free rein of a calm park with sparse people.
I was so obsessed with this ride, late in the evening when there was barely any people around and literally no one in line at It's A Small World, I was told my mom asked the guy running it if we could just keep going around and around and without getting out and going back through the line again (which is what we would do anyways because I wanted to go on it again and again).
So we went on this ride literally dozens of times some days without stop, the dude probably thought we were crazy but we would come to the end of the ride and my mom would smile or nod at him and he would just send us right along again. It's not a crazy roller coaster-y thrill ride of any sort, because I was a scared little kid and I hated those. I think one of the reasons I liked it so much is because it was calm. It's just these plastic boats in a lazy river (I always had to have the pink boat though) and all through the ride are displays of dancing dolls and animals and sunshines dancing, depicting dozens of different cultures. The dolls are dressed in sarapes, kimonos, grass skirts, clogs, anything you can imagine. It was gorgeous. We would sing and point out different things we spotted each time, and I was having the time of my life.
As a kid who loved drawing and painting and colorful objects, it makes sense that I was drawn to the visual stimulation of it. It was and probably still is my all time favorite ride, and it holds a special place in our hearts. I loved looking at all the different outfits, the different skin tones of the dolls, the flags and tiny replicas of famous landmarks, all so colorful and bright.
The speakers blasted a joyous song (that my mom somehow isn't tired of) about the similarities we all share despite the world seeming so big and foreign.
"It's a world of laughter A world of tears It's a world of hopes And a world of fears There's so much that we share That it's time we're aware It's a small world after all It's a small, small world
There is just one moon
And one golden sun And a smile means Friendship to ev'ryone Though the mountains divide And the oceans are wide It's a small world after all
It's a small, small world"
Thinking about it now, whoever wrote this children's song had a point. I mean I get that it's supposed to be about world peace and inspiring kids to accept each other's differences and everything, but you can think about it this way too. There is only one sun and one moon. We all have hopes and fears. There's so many similarities, the world is way smaller than we think on a day to day basis.
Usually we use the phrase 'it's a small world' when we discover we have the same mutual friend as someone we meet, but this isn't how the children's ride uses it. It's giving kids this implicit message that we're all so similar despite being all around the world. And the phrase comes to me when I walk around, 6,000 miles from my home, and I talk to a tourist that has the same mannerisms as my mom, and suddenly I smile, seeing that the world truly is not as big and mysterious as we think. There's a family here in Greece somewhere just like mine, they're just addicted to Greek food instead of Chipotle.
I think this is why I'm in love with the concept of just living somewhere and seeing normal, average, everyday life so far away from home. I just love seeing myself in other people and envisioning myself in different places. It's so new and it's so weird and complicated, but it's also completely the opposite at the same time. It's familiar. Going on vacation somewhere is so different to me because you don't do things like go grocery shopping or sit at an obscure coffee shop or wander around at night finding new bars to explore, really just living life like you've lived there forever. Going about it this way gives you so much more of a deeper connection to a culture than going on a tour of their most famous landmarks and staying at a 5 star hotel would. And don't get me wrong, I absolutely love 5 star hotels, in fact I wish I was in one sometimes.
But I am accomplishing exactly what I wanted when I set out to study abroad, something that I didn't get the opportunity to do the last half dozen countries I visited, but have since wondered about. I don't hunger to go to the most famous beaches or to have a tour guide talk so much that I can't focus on what he's saying anymore. I hunger to see what its like getting to know a local barista or getting lost in your own neighborhood. I hunger to meet and have long conversations with kind shopkeepers I encounter or eat at the same restaurant too many days in a row and then get embarrassed when they know your order.
I hunger to see what daily life is like somewhere else in the world, and that's exactly what I found.
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