Date: April 15th, 2014.
Location: Beijing, China.
I’m riding on the back of a rickshaw tour in the tepid humidity of Chinese spring. With my Vera Bradley bag in one hand and iPhone 5 in the other, I am hidden behind the lens and screen, snapping away at every grandiose building embellished with fancy-looking Chinese characters, and all the while embodying every stereotype that is expected of a White-Female-American-tourist visiting China. But something else happens that I couldn’t catch on camera.
I spot two men approaching the same corner from opposite directions. One is walking and the other is speeding along on a bicycle, so much so that he takes a sharp and rather inconsiderate turn around the corner. As expected, he collides with the walking man, who tumbles backwards to the ground. The man on the bike slows down, but does not stop to help the fallen. Instead, he gives a slight wave and a “dui bu qi” ("sorry") and the other stands up, dusts off his pants and dismisses the biker with an unfazed “hao” ("it’s okay").
I watch as they both head out in their intended directions and continue on with their days—unruffled. Yet, I rest flabbergasted. A kerfuffle such as that would not have blown over so breezily in my Long Island suburb, nor in its proximate urban dwelling, New York City. A fight would have aroused, surely. There would have been fists swinging, profanities shouted, and crowds eagerly watching. But here, in this small village that existed around the city wall in a crummy part of Beijing, life went on.
In her 1989 album, Taylor Swift is quoted as saying, “I wish you a lifetime of moments too beautiful to capture on film.” And while I think she’s a hypocrite for saying this—being that her Instagram is riddled with artsy photos that turn picturesque moments into blog posts—her words resonated with me.
Travel isn’t about the splendor sights or opulent accommodations. And while I have lavished in both of these during my travels abroad, they weren’t the life-changing parts of the trip. The greatest thing I got to do when I was in another country was to see how the other half lives, to engage in their lifestyle, and to thereby immerse myself into a new state of mind.
It changes you, travel. It’s not walking the Great Wall of China or leaning over the third story of the Eiffel Tower that does this (both being activities that require spending some serious bank). It’s eating at a sketchy McDonald’s at 10 p.m. in Xi’An, or accidentally putting on Chinese hand cream made out of sheep placenta (I wish I was lying about that one), or circumnavigating Paris and finding a street of sex shops all because the metro broke down, or completely butchering your French in a fancy Ladurée macaron shop on the Champs Élysées (sorry, Madame!). These are the stories you tell because those are the things that change you.
Don’t misinterpret what I said about the Great Wall and the Eiffel Tower—they were both amazing experiences that will forever dwell in my heart and my fondest memories. That being said, the point I’m trying to make is that you don’t have to fly off to an exotic country to have the aforementioned self-revealing experiences. Moreover, sometimes you can lose yourself just a few miles from home.
I recently made a day trip with a friend to Block Island, a small island right off the coast of Rhode Island and Long Island. And yet, even being only about 100 miles from home, I somehow found myself again, this time by cruising on a moped down the coast of this teeny island, inadvertently leading myself onto a path labeled, “No Mopeds Beyond This Point" (oops), and swallowing three flies (hey, it’s protein).
As I flew down the highway pushing 55 mph (again, oops), I couldn’t help but let my eyes flicker left and right and up and down (and of course, straight ahead!), trying to encapsulate every essence of the moment in my memory. And then, like any other millennial, the image of my phone popped up in my head. "Take a picture, it'll last longer," they say. But is that really the case? Sure, the picture would last forever, but the memory would not. So in that moment, for one of the first times in my life, I chose to not take a picture. I don’t have any video footage of that shoreline drive, but if I close my eyes, I can bring myself back into the moment. And for that short moment, I feel like I’m there, coasting my moped beside the sand with the ocean breeze tangling my hair. That’s what it means to lose and find yourself somewhere. All it took was a moped and an hour.
There’s this saying about travel that goes, “Not all who wander are lost,” but I’d like to challenge that. Because, isn’t the whole point of traveling to get lost? We travel to see the world and in doing so, we discover ourselves. After all, you can’t find something if it was never lost.
So lose yourselves, you wanderlust daydreamers. Whether it be on the back of a Chinese rickshaw or atop a baby-blue moped, I encourage you to seek yourself in your travels—both those near and far. And I hope you find you in the small, uncharted crevices of this world.
I sure have.
