*****

Seven years ago, which seems more like a lifetime, I made my second trip ever across the ocean.  The first trip, nearly seven years prior to that (at 14 years old), had been to the UK, where I remember being surprised at the subtle differences between Brits and Americans, not necessarily visible on the surface but clear once a conversation started (I came back saying “petrol,” incidentally).  This trip though, as I’m sure I mentioned before, was to a much-farther-away place, a place which occupied nearly no space in my imagination – Senegal.  I remember my surprise – as the plane began its descent – at how many lights lit up the city below.  I guess in my naive 21-year-old brain the “dark continent” really was, well, dark.  (As it turns out, Dakar is still one of the dimmest cities I’ve visited, in terms of actual lighting.)

You see, these friends of mine – from Taiwan and Syria, Lebanon, Bolivia, Bahrain, the UK and the US – they have taught me so much.  About how we are the same and about how we are different, about how our lives can intertwine, weave in and out of one another’s, again and again.  I’ve always been fascinated by the more subtle differences in cultures – not the obvious ones, like architectural styles or traditional dress, but those that creep up slowly from beneath the surface.  The kind that you might face even when the person you’re looking at looks just like you.

*****

In the fall of 2005, I was living in Meknès, Morocco.  It feels a bit odd, in retrospect, that one year out of college I would just pick up and move my life to a city in another country where I knew no one, for a job I had never performed, but I guess that’s youth.

I’d been there for just a few months when, on a deadline to finish a writing project, I took a weekend and went alone to Chefchaouen, in the hopes of getting away from everything and being able to just sit down and write.  On my first night there, I was too excited by the beauty of the little mountain town, however, and decided to venture out to do some snacking and shopping.

My second stop crafts shop, where I was lured in by the young proprietor.  He was impressed that I spoke a little Arabic, and I was impressed at his lack of pressure for me to buy anything.  We ended up sitting together for some time, chatting about travel – he’d been to many more countries than I had, and I was riveted by his tales of places far away.  At some point in the conversation, he asked if I minded if he smoked, then pulled out a fresh pack.  He tapped the pack against his hand a few times, then peeled back the plastic wrapper, popping open the box and tearing the foil.  But before he could take one to smoke, he pulled out the middle cigarette, flipping it upside down.

The look on my face set him into a small fit of laughter.  “What, you’ve never seen anyone do that before?” he asked in the curious mix of Arabic, French, Spanish, and English we’d already established.  “No, no,” I responded, “I have.  Many times, actually.  I just wasn’t aware that people did that here.”

“People do that everywhere,” he told me, taking a drag from his cigarette.  “People everywhere do the same things, we just don’t realize it.”

*****

]]> http://jilliancyork.com/2009/10/30/699/feed/ 2 http://jilliancyork.com/2009/09/15/on-travel/ http://jilliancyork.com/2009/09/15/on-travel/#comments Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:24:59 +0000 Jillian http://jilliancyork.com/?p=619 I remember a time when the world felt big.  Where, as an angsty nineteen year old, I told a friend over cigarettes and copious amounts of coffee that the better alternative to suicide was to run away, lose yourself in a part of the world that you’d never even imagined.  I remembered that conversation three years later as I sat in a café on Varick Street, awaiting an appointment I’d prepared for judiciously. I interviewed for the Peace Corps and was told I could go to Central Asia.  In the end I declined on account of the demand that I remove my wisdom teeth.  In the end, I’m glad I did what I did.

I spent my late teens and early twenties absorbed in a deep depression.  I know I’m not unique in that.  During a particularly low period, both for my psyche and my weight, I remember sitting, curled up and dressed in black, on the couch of a college counselor, looking out the window at the rapidly turning October leaves and thinking I could run away to Prague.

Strangely, when I finally got there five years later, it just wasn’t the same.  Perhaps the world had changed.  I had definitely changed.  I’d been in Morocco for nearly five months at that point.  I’d figured out the basics of cooking for myself, had navigated the medina to buy a bed and a living room table, and had traveled to Marrakesh and back by myself, twice.  By the time I got to Prague, I was more excited by how western it felt than by its own place in the world.  Mind you, I didn’t miss out entirely.  Thanks to a nasty ATM in Plzen, I had only 200 euros for the whole week, so I checked into the cheapest of hostels and explored the city by tram (the only way to do it in the freezing January cold).  I traced my steps through the first few pages of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, drank beer for breakfast near I.P. Pavlova and memorized the voice on the metro: Ukončete prosím výstup a nástup, dveře se zavírají.

My eyes were still wide the next year when I spent Christmas in The Netherlands.  I blushed and laughed discovering my cab driver at the airport was Moroccan.  He wanted to speak English, but I tried to speak darija to him, only to discover that our vocabulary was a generation off.  Two years later I made it to Budapest, where the building of Parliament seemed somehow smaller than I’d imagined and capitalism had made its way just enough to disappoint me.

Perhaps my eyes should have been wider this past March as I landed in Damascus.  Preparing for the trip, it felt like perhaps the last frontier…not because of its foreign-ness, which I hardly felt, rather, because of Syria’s tenuous relationship to the United States.  Even applying for my visa felt like I was doing something wrong (the FedEx employee who helped me mail it raised his eyebrows, breaking character long enough to let me know he disapproved).  Traveling to Japan and Malaysia a few months later, I was hardly fazed.

Lest you think of me as jaded by the opportunities presented me (at least lately), rest assured I am not.  In fact, that might just be my greatest fear.  Some of my friends are travelers to envy, having seen half the world’s nations at least.  I, my friends, am not.  According to my passport, I’ve seen 18 countries out of 195.  While that might seem like a lot (even to me), placing them on a map reveals that I’ve seen hardly anything.

But let me not stray further from the point…I began writing this post because I remember the precise moment that I snapped out of at least one period of depression.  I’d spent the fall of 2001 in a fit of desperation over a breakup of a romance that I hardly remember now.  Like many young women, I was starving – for food, for attention, for excitement.  And I was hit by the latter shortly after the start of my fall semester.  I’d attended a study abroad fair in the university’s gym, wandering from table to table with little aim or intent, when I stumbled upon a table advertising a spring semester program culminating in a trip to Senegal.

Dear readers, in that fall of 2001, at 19 years old, I couldn’t point to Senegal on a map if you begged me.  Looking back, I’m not even sure I knew what continent it was on.  I’d been to Canada (for which, at the time, you didn’t even need a passport) and to England for ten days.  And yet, talking to the doctoral student leading the trip – Ms. Barrel Gueye – I suddenly felt a sense of excitement, perhaps even purpose.  I signed up for an interview (which I barely remember), and the next thing I knew, I was getting a call inviting me into the course and the trip.  I remember telling my parents, who were excited – and a little peeved, knowing they couldn’t afford it – and my friends (who thought I was crazy), but I barely recall the semester leading up to the trip itself.  When we finally flew into Dakar, I remember so clearly looking out the airplane window onto the city below and its bright lights.  I remember the sun setting as we drove from the airport to Université Cheikh Anta Diop, and I remember that first night as sleep came, relieving us of our sheer exhaustion.

The rest is fuzzy – I have photographs and vague memories, friends I’ve kept and friends whose names I’ve forgotten, but the biggest piece is how I changed.  At twenty-seven, looking back with clarity, I see that as the moment my life changed, the moment my world opened up.

But with a tinge of sadness and a certain amount of nostalgia, I look now toward a December trip to Beirut with the sense that the world will never seem that big again.  Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing?