Which is hard to answer.
The trip had a lot of great moments. Asia was wonderful and I cannot wait to go back and explore it some more.. that is after I go to Peru, India, Africa, Australia, Iceland.. I can't stop!
I was fine flying all by myself except for the flight back from Taiwan to Tokyo before heading to LAX. I always have a hard time going home, probably because I don't want to leave and I know it will be different once I return home.
It always is different.
Anyways, I took a valium and then drank a whole thing of sake. Needless to say I was feeling pretty amazing and after taking over the seat next to mine awoke covered in drool as we landed. I was going through my luggage and found this and vaguely remembered scribbling for a good ten minutes. I apparently wrote it in a drug induced stupor.
Enjoy.
__________________________
"I'm a penny in a diamond mine"
Going home is always the hardest.
Always.
Not everyone likes to travel. But once you've been bitten by the wanderlust bug it soon begin to breed inside you. A coffee stain on a paper towel. Invading your mind, it becomes difficult to resist the urge to see the world.
To me, there are very few guarantees in life. Unfortunately I'm often blind sided by these things. Those idle Tuesdays where you wake up and think today is going to be wonderful, then chuckle bitterly to yourself later. It's not something I try to dwell on, for what is life without a little drama to spice it up? One way I handle all of this uncertainty is to constantly find something new and exciting because life is now. I'd like to utilize what we have here on this strange planet and learn and grow and work hard to become an educated, experienced person. Regret and guilt don't sit well with me. That's why if you know you gave your all, your best, you never have to look back and wonder, what if? I'm learning this key information now and it sure is making a difference in me :)
When I was gone I did have a few thoughts, ideas to abandon it all and never ever come home. My room has felt less and less welcoming this past month. Learning to embrace the strange and unfamiliar. But now I'm glad to go home and get back to life, the people who surround me. I can't complain, with my friends there is always something strange afoot at the circle K.
Back to traveling and why I do it. For one thing, it's in my opinion, that many humans set their brains to settle, program to routine. They find a strange comfort in it and I can get this, we all depend on some of the same things to get us through the day. But eventually routine can bare down on you, trapped in a cycle, claustrophobia. Breaking free from this reminds me what life is. Spontaneous combustion. Think about it. All the great love stories of our time rarely end with "and they lived happily ever after." Those are called fairy tales. Most amazing things are a crazy mix of gun powder and fire, burn bright and then fade away leaving mere dust as a reminder of what occurred.
Traveling to new places teaches so much about the human psyche. Universal similarities, smiles, laughter, eating sleeping, loving, crying. The small changes, gestures, customs, languages, traditions, architecture, history. I should really get my masters in Anthropology, this stuff just makes my mind race. Widening your mind, opening it to other's way of life is the most rewarding thing ever. It reminds me how minute we are. A speck in the span of billions of years.
America is an infant. We have no sense of what lies beyond our golden gates. And to learn this, accept it, well it's something no amount of money or time spent on the internet can transcend.
It's like learning why Mona Lisa is smiling (which seeing her in person changes everything), like understanding the magnitude of Stonehenge, watching Venetians fight and Parisians love. It's eating something you'd never imagine would taste delicious, it's speaking a new language. Crossing lines of communication, laughing with someone you can only say one word to. It's a song you've never heard, a rain forest of trees with no building in sight for miles. It's falling in love for the first time. Riding bikes through a city and having no clue as to where the hell you are but at the same time not giving a shit. It's a cobblestone street you stumble through singing about a bar you'll never see again. It's culture, tradition. It's feeling complete completely alone. It's smells, it's sights, it's sounds. It's something you just wouldn't understand..
that is..
until you do.
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PS. A few top moments:
1- First night in Japan, I met Marc and Eamon and we decided to venture out and get dinner. I wasn't too hungry so I had a miso soup and the Japanese owner kept telling something to Eamon in Japanese and pointing at me and in very broken English saying how I was good and he liked me. I don't know why but he said it as we ordered and again as we left, all I could say was arigato. It wasn't like a creepy I like you, it was like you are a good person, which meant something to me, I dunno why it took me traveling across the globe to feel that way but it did.
2- Chinese New Years. Fireworks, AMAZING food, red envelopes. Yen's family kept asking me if I wanted a fork, apparently they didn't believe in my chop stick skills, but I proved them wrong by picking up a peanut with them.
3- Last night in Taipei, running around the city with Yen. We were on the subway and some lady totally SBDed us. We were joking about it and laughing our asses off. I was falling on the floor laughing. Then I decided to explain what crop dusting was to Yen. Then it was over. We were crying, all the while swinging from the metro poles getting weird looks.
nice Bill and Teds reference
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