Splash No. 230 - Tourist
Tourist
As I mentioned last time, I spent all of last week traveling! Over the course of 10ish days, I flew all the way from San Francisco to London, Paris, and Geneva. It was my first real trip since the before the pandemic started, and in all honesty, I wasn’t super excited to travel. I dreaded the concept of having to sit on a plane for countless hours, to get out of my comfortable way of life, and have to deal with all of the unknowns. I truly wondered if I was a person who needed to travel at all. I knew so many people who seemed to have an insatiable desire to see the world and failed to relate to them. Instead, I thought about how the art that I consumed (books, film, music, etc.) brought me such a depth and breadth of emotion. What else could I need if I had this media?
In retrospect, it was a one-dimensional view of the world, where all emotion was flat and undifferentiated regardless of the source. It’s reminiscent of this scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams’s character draws the line between experience and consumption through reading. In the movie, Will Hunting is a voracious reader with a photographic memory but has never left Boston and never intends to. After spending the greater part of the last 3 years at home, is it any wonder that I’d become the same way? In response to associating travel of all kinds with danger, doesn’t generalizing it as unnecessary feel like a vital coping mechanism?
As you’d expect, I enjoyed my trip and all that it brought. Traversing London for the third time was wondrous, as my memories were re-illuminated with the realities that I’d forgotten, and the inevitable changes that the time in between wrought. And even though I dreaded going to Paris, expecting to have some sort of Paris Syndrome, I instead went down the stereotypical route and fell in love with the energy of the city. Geneva, too, was beautiful in its own way, its enormous fountain and buildings framed by the Jura Mountains.
What was more was how different life felt. It seemed incomprehensible that I could go from being someone who had no energy after sleeping 8 hours a night and working in an office for 8 hours a day to being someone who was filled with energy after walking 10 miles a day on half as much sleep while jet-lagged and eating enough carbs to fuel a 747. The sheer novelty of being in a new place and seeing (and eating) new things seemed to be an extra source of hidden fuel. Time flowed differently as well, more slowly than usual, since everything was a little bit different than what I was used to. It was almost like having a different brain, one that had to take more care to understand how things worked, to look for new information, and, as a tourist, to find anything that could possibly be the subject of a photo.
While walking in Geneva, another set of tourists walked past me taking a picture of a cathedral and one of them said to the other, “it’s easy to tell who tourists are and who the locals are.” Was taking a picture all it took to look like a tourist? Did becoming a local mean that you stopped being in awe of the place that you lived, even if your daily run was past a gorgeous building built nearly a thousand years before?
As I try to reintegrate into normal life again, I can’t help but wonder how I could capture the feeling and energy that I felt while traveling. I can’t travel all the time, but I’d love to be able to exude the energy I felt, to find beauty and excitement all around me. I think I’d like to become more like a tourist in that way, even if that means getting more snide comments from strangers. I’ll take pictures of buildings, even the ones on my commute. I’ll try and see my everyday life with new eyes, and time will never feel the same.
Drops of the Week
PLAYLIST - nikhil's top songs 2022 - it's Spotify wrapped season, so here are my top 100 songs of the year!
ARTICLE - "Could I Survive the ‘Quietest Place on Earth’?" by Caity Weaver - interesting read about how our brain handles a lack of sensory input
POEM - "As Sweet" by Wendy Cope - I told the shrink. He gave our love A different name.
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Au revoir,
Nikhil