Posts Tagged ‘life’
Between two continents and homes: doing the limbo in Istanbul
Friday, May 4th, 2012
I left Bangkok at the tail end of Songkran, the Thai new year. At some point, Songkran was mostly about various Buddhist rituals of cleansing and blessings. It’s since evolved.
For three days, the entire country erupts into a massive full-scale waterfight. It was impossible to walk to the nearest 7–11 (in Thailand, this is always only a minute walk away) without being soaked through and covered in chalk, which strangers smudge on your face and arms like warpaint. In Bangkok, a city that’s blazing hot year-round, I swear the temperature shot up ten degrees the first day of Songkran. It was fiery out. The water, ice-cold at times, felt pretty fucking great. The whole city feels like it’s on holiday. Everyone reverts to acting like a five-year-old. Everyone is laughing and playing and running about dumping water on one another. There’s no notable difference, at least in my neighbourhood, between the Thais and the farangs. Everyone’s fair game.
I’ll admit I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Bangkok, and Asia in a larger scope. A lot of messed-up things went down during my time there, and I often felt disarmingly out of place. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about Thailand, but I’m immensely glad I stayed the four extra days to catch Songkran. I’ve never seen anything quite so mad: it’s Thailand simultaneously at its best and at its worst. On the positive side, it’s delightful, childlike fun, and everyone forgets to be so guarded all the time. Of course, in Thailand, this means there are boatloads of fatalities from road accidents and insane drunken revelers. I read some pretty insane stories of people being stabbed when they didn’t want to play.
The only photo I got of Songkran, mostly because I quickly became very protective of my electronics and kept them hermetically sealed in super-resilient ziplock bags I’d bought for the Amazon. This is before things got really rowdy, so imagine the truckload of people spraying waterguns at the people on the street, who in turn are pitching buckets of water from those huge buckets at the passing vehicles. Also, make sure everyone’s covered in chalk.
Somehow this seems perfectly in line with my experience of Thailand and Southeast Asia. When I left Bangkok, I’d had three absolutely delightful days in which I finally stopped working. (And on a weekend, no less!) I relaxed, played, met new people, and generally fell in love with the country, really for the first time. There was some drama around my leaving that made it bittersweet. But then maybe that’s just how Thailand works: like their food needs to balance sweet and salty, sour and spicy, the experience never excludes the nastier aspects. Everything is balanced.
So I left with a bang, but ultimately made it out in one piece. I left for the airport, still soaked through and covered in chalk, with my giant suitcase and as many belongings as I could stuff into it. For me, this is “moving.”
I spend a lot of time thinking about the concept of home. It’s always been fluid, to some degree or another, but as I’ve become more and more a drifter, it’s become even more intangible. For me, all these places are home, even if they’re only temporary. Even if it’s only three months. Even if I have an end-date in mind. Even if I have an onward ticket (which I never do, because I’m a raging commitophobe).
These places are my homes because, in that temporary space of time, they’re where my life is. I develop routines, I work, I create my own space, I learn to salvage food from whatever I can find at the markets, I make friends, I form new habits. My life changes every time I move, because everything around me changes. But in that moment that’s who I am and that’s what my life is—there’s no sense that part of me is somewhere else, or that this specific moment is temporal and will pass.
And so every few months, I pack up and leave, and my whole life changes.
Turkish coffee in the Ottoman coffee house in top of a hill on the Anatolian side of the city: delicious sludge.
It took me ten days to get from Bangkok, one temporary home, to Barcelona, my new home-for-a-while. I ended up in limbo. I spent eight excruciatingly painful hours stuck in the Mumbai airport, a little over a week in Istanbul, and fifteen hours in Athens en-route. In every place, I felt truly and utterly adrift.
I suspect that my sense of “roots” is different from most. In the past year and a half, I’ve made my homes in five different countries on four different continents. Travel has become an integral part of who I am: when I say I’m a vagabond, I really do mean it. I haven’t stayed in one place much longer than a month.
But in all that time, I’ve always had a “home” that anchored me. Even when travelling, I’d have a home to return to. I often have a matryoshka doll system of keys, where one key opens a room that contains another set of keys, and so on. In Istanbul, I didn’t even have keys, only couches and people’s telephone numbers. I didn’t have a place that was mine, and nowhere felt like home.
It was a truly bizarre feeling.
Barcelona is gorgeous at all times, but I think it’s prettiest at night, in the rain. In El Raval, where I live now, there’s beautiful old buildings covered in gorgeous graffiti everywhere, and a million tiny winding side streets to explore everywhere.
A lot of people travel to explore themselves. This is especially true for people on a gap year, or people who’ve recently been fired, or people facing some kind of life-altering crisis. It’s a cliché to say that in exploring the world you’re exploring yourself, as mirrored in your own interactions with said changing world. But most cliches are true for good cause (and I believe that in itself is something of a cliché, and here we are with the infinitely looping mirrors and matryoshka dolls again). And it’s true: pushing your boundaries and exploring things outside your comfort zone teaches you more about yourself than it does about the world. It’s impossible to face so many external changes and not change, fundamentally, inside.
I’ve travelled 30,000km around the world from where I started out in October, leaving one home for a new uncharted one. (That’s just point-to-point, home-to-home, and doesn’t include all the offshoot trips I take from these homes. The map of my journey looks like a series of distracted loops blooming around fixed points.) I only have 6000 more kilometers to go before I reach my next home, months from now, and I don’t know who I’ll be when that happens.
But I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned my limits, and the things I need to stay (relatively) grounded. My original plan was to stay in Barcelona two months, then couchsurf my way around Spain/Morocco/Portugal/France/Iceland for the last month or so. But I’ve learned my limits, and I’ve learned how important it is to my mental well-being that I have a place, however small, however temporal, however tenuous, that is my own—that I can call home.
So as rootless as I thought I was, there are still anchors that hold me. I’d love to be a true vagabond woman, but I’m ready to admit that I’m not, really. I’m just forging my own strange path, as convoluted and seemingly random as it may be.
Things I lost in Cambodia: my purse, a phone charger, my mind.
Friday, March 9th, 2012
From Bangkok, I took a bus to the border, made my way through two brutal little border towns (the Wikitravel page for Poipet, on the Cambodian side, actually makes a point of rhyming the town with “toilet”), then continued along to Siem Reap. I spent a week there, swimming in my $8/night guesthouse’s pool, visiting Ankor Wat, and firing off machine guns at the rifle range on Valentine’s Day. (No cards needed!) I spent another week in the dusty, chaotic, and infinitely broken city of Phnom Penh—a city big enough to hold millions of people, but so broken it couldn’t sustain any form of public transportation. I then took a series of boats and buses into the Mekong Delta, and, after a few days, ended up in Viet Nam’s capital city, where I drank tar that masqueraded as coffee until I flew back to Bangkok, my newest adopted home.
All told, I spent just shy of a month travelling through Southeast Asia, and I’m not entirely sure I liked it. That’s new for me. I’ve visited dozens of countries and hundreds of different cities, and I’ve never really landed anywhere I just didn’t like. I think I may have liked Sai Gon, but it’s hard to tell, as I spent the vast majority of my time there working from waking to sleeping. Cambodia, though, where I spent vast leagues of time, I despised. I think I’m attracted to places that are chaotic because they’re so far from what I know—but Cambodia was another world altogether, and I just never felt that I really enjoyed it.
As with anything though, I learned things. And while I don’t think I’ll ever go back to Cambodia, and I don’t think I’d ever say I was happy while I was there, I don’t for a second regret doing it. Beyond anything else, it taught me an awful lot about myself, about how I work, and about parts of the world I’m not comfortable with.
Playing hide-and-go-seek in Angkor Wat. As much as I loathed it for being, well, basically a lot of falling-down buildings covered in tourists (I’m over ruins, alright?) it was pretty neat. I liked that you could jump around in and through the whole thing—except when they considered you to be inappropriately dressed, which I so frequently am.
1. I can cross any street.
I’m an enthusiastic pedestrian even in my hometown (wherever that may be). When I land in a new place, the first thing I do is walk for hours. I’ve done this my entire life, and it’s bar none the best way to get a feel for a place. I love getting lost in strange places. I love accidentally discovering interesting places I may not have come across were I driving. I love walking down a street and drinking in the environment surrounding me.
In Southeast Asia though, sometimes this is a trickier task than you’d assume. There are people everywhere. And the further you get into Viet Nam, the more bikes there are, which means that instead of two columns of traffic, you suddenly have to cope with twelve. In Cambodia, there’s usually four streams of traffic, all going in opposing directions: crossing is less “look both ways” and more “look everywhere constantly”. Viet Nam, in spite of having about a hundred bikes to every car, is far more organized, but the crossing-the-street situation is still so intense that, in the tourist districts of town, there are people there solely to help tourists get across the street. When I went to the grocery store in Ho Chi Minh, I walked along a “hem”—basically a series of tiny little criss-crossing alleyways-cum-streets. Most of the way, it was about wide enough for two people to walk abreast, and I was walking along, in the dark, next to two streams of motorbike traffic heading in alternate directions, desperately praying they’d stop for me when there was another bike passing at the same time.
I was actually quite terrified just walking down the street.
And I’ve adjusted to the strange cadences of street-crossings in all kinds of other cities. Cities where there’s no such thing as right-of-way, and marked crossings are clearly just decorative. I remember when Rome and NYC made my nerves spike as I crossed the streets. The rhythms of Southeast Asia, however, are wildly removed from anything I know. When I first landed in Bangkok, there were certain streets I had troubles crossing. I’d watch for a local waiting, and follow them across the road. Now, after Cambodia and Viet Nam, streets that once left me paralyzed seem calm and laid back in comparison. I no longer am thrown if I’m left standing in between lines of traffic, waiting for the next seam.
I’m pretty sure I can cross any goddamned street you could throw at me, at this point.
2. A traveller and a tourist are very different things.
The Mekong delta was gorgeous, and interesting, and I’m glad I went. But honestly, I would have rather explored it myself. I’ve had this trouble before, in a place with a similar feel (the Amazon) and a similar motive for me: I don’t think I’d have been able to explore either of these tropical, water-dwelling places without purchasing a tour, but I didn’t like it either time.
In the Mekong, they kept waking me up at 6am to go do something wretched, like see a fish factory. By the by, a fish factory is pretty much as disgusting as you’d expect: it reeks, there are some fish, and that’s pretty much it. Of course, I tend to go to sleep around 4am anyway, and in Asia, because I’m twelve to thirteen hours off from most of my clients, my night-owl tendencies have become infinitely worse, and I tend to go to sleep somewhere between sunup and 10am. So waking up at 6am for four mornings straight was basically my personal idea of hell.
Skulls at the Cambodian killing fields in Phnom Penh. The killing fields were actually ridiculously serene and beautiful, which made it seem all the more chilling. Honestly, given the massive genocide and fucked-up-edness that Cambodia/Kampuchea endured, and how recent its genocide was, it’s no surprise it’s rather on the destroyed side.
But that, I could have handled. What threw me was being, essentially, stripped of my independence. Sure, I had lots of time to go visit places and wander about on my own. But ultimately, I felt as though I was on someone else’s schedule, and that bothered me intensely. I spent much of that time feeling like a little kid being taken on a field trip. I know lots of people do this and have no problem with it. I, on the other hand, cannot handle it. I’d rather spend a week wandering about cafés in a city on my own, never seeing anything, than I would be led by the hand through a place.
I’m certain this ties into other things as well, like my reluctance to travel with other people, my inherent introvert nature, my gazelle-like desire for space that’s mine and empty of anyone else but me, and my tendency to avoid tourist traps, even if they might be tourist traps for good reason. My style of travelling is just different from most peoples’, even if I’m not working, which doesn’t happen more than once every ten years. It’s nice to try other people’s styles from time to time, but I can’t sustain it, and it’s best if I just admit as much and let myself absorb a place the way I want to.
3. Every now and then, take a goddamn break.
I’ve been working from the time I wake to the time I sleep—and then sleeping about four hours a night—for the past month. Maybe longer. It’s really grating on me, and I can feel myself getting horrifically burned out as a result. Last weekend, I took the whole thing (almost entirely) off–I think I only worked a few hours Saturday morning, and a few more Sunday evening. Having two days off was pretty fantastic, and I suspect I would have completely lost my shit had I not done so. As it is/was, the stress is/was biting into me so deeply I spend/spent some nights doing nothing but drinking, working, singing along to sad songs, and crying. I honestly don’t know what it is that’s setting me off: is it that I feel so displaced and lost? Is it just that I’m overworked and overdone and teetering on the brink of burnout? Either way, I think there’s a certain balance to be met. Yes, I need to work a lot, even if it isn’t healthy for me. I run a business, its rhythms are as unpredictable and wild as Ho Chi Minh City traffic, and I can’t always be in control of them. But if I’m determined about taking one day off, once a week, that may help me hang in there until the 18-hour days are over and I can finally go back to being human again.
This may not suffice. It’s entirely possible that I need real, live, actual time off. It’s been some time since I’ve felt so overwhelmed and burned out. But part of running a business means that’s not always possible, and I’m so freaked out about money that I’m motivated to keep working like a madwoman. Ideally, everything I’m doing—much of which is unbillable, investment-in-my-future type work—will pay out in the future. However, the longer I do this, the more aware I am of burnout. That awareness, I think, will be enough to drag myself out of it eventually.
Floating markets in the Mekong delta. I’ll admit, as much as I was annoyed, misanthropic, and depressed most of this trip, I got to see some really cool things I wouldn’t have otherwise. I think this boat was the one on which I accidentally met some older Canadian gentlemen when I loudly stated how I was planning to throw myself under a bus when I hit sixty. They were pretty fantastic, and I wish I’d told them when we parted that, if I turn out to be like them when I’m nearing sixty, I’ll change my stance.
Ultimately, I suppose I just took a trip and I didn’t like it so much. That’s the first time that’s ever happened to me, and so it’s a bit of a challenge for me to deal with. But I don’t, even for a single second, regret it in the least. I did learn a lot—mostly about myself, but also about the world around me. And really, that’s what I’m aiming for here. This whole crazy trip of mine is all about pushing my boundaries, learning new things, and making myself stronger.
Even if I spend a month or so going through hell, I’m coming out of it infinitely stronger, more adaptable, and more aware of the world around me. As miserable as I’ve been, that’s still a win as far as I’m concerned.
Breaking rules and busting heads
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011
In the past twelve hours, I’ve booked two flight itineraries for six different flights to be taken in the next three weeks. In December and January, I’ll have visited around eleven different cities (possibly more), in five different countries, on two different continents. In February, I’ll be adding even more countries and cities to my list. By the time I return to Canada in the summer, I’ll have lived in seven different countries in four continents.
I am, without question, a vagabond.
Booking a flight can make my heart race. The feeling of landing in a strange city, lost and confused, gives me great pleasure. I actually get a huge rush of endorphins, like a high, at the exact moment that I feel an airplane leave the ground. I am happiest, and most sure of myself, walking through a foreign place and watching everything around me. If I stay in one place for longer than a few weeks, I begin to get intense wanderlust.
It struck me the other day that what I’m doing is not exactly normal. Most people don’t take off from their homes for long stretches of time, and those who do most often travel in a way that’s markedly different from mine. When I meet new people, I often get thrown by their questions: yes, I’m travelling, sort of. But I’m still working. And I live in the countries I travel to. No, I probably haven’t seen that famous monument, and I quite likely don’t care much to, either.
This is actually the only photograph I have taken in San Francisco, and it’s technically in Mountain View. Still, I find it more interesting than a snapshot of a monument that’s already been photographed a million times over, by people exponentially more skilled than I (and likely wielding better cameras than the one in their phone).
I went to San Francisco last week, but I didn’t see Alcatraz or the Golden Gate Bridge. I went to México City prior to that, but didn’t bother with the pyramids. While I recognize that some things are tourist traps with good reason, the more I travel, the less interest I have in these things. Part of this is because they’re often crawling with tourists, especially in Europe, but another part of it is that visiting often feels empty. Sure, they’re beautiful or breathtaking or interesting, but I’ve invariably seen them already in movies and photographs. The crowd of tourists mindlessly snapping photographs of these much-photographed monuments, as though checking off items from a scavenger hunt, only exacerbates this emptiness.
I don’t want to see the world through a lens. I want to taste, smell, and feel it as well. That’s why I’m travelling instead of watching a documentary or zooming through Google Street View. I want to experience and interact with the world around me.
The true journey, as the interjection of an “outside” different from our normal one, implies a complete change of nutrition, a digesting of the visited country– its fauna and flora and its culture (not only the different culinary practices and condiments but the different implements used to grind the flour or stir the pot) — making it pass between the lips and down the esophagus. This is the only kind of travel that has a meaning nowadays, when everything visible you can see on television without rising from your easy chair.
The incomparable Italo Calvino, “Under the Jaguar Sun”
(About travels in Mexico! Must find prior to leaving.)
I’ve always been prone to making up my own rules. While I technically wrote something of a business plan (in about two hours, at four in the morning, off the top of my head), I didn’t do most of the things you’re supposed to do when running a business. Honestly, sometimes I wonder how I ever made it work, and how it continues to work for me. The more I think about it, the more I realize that I don’t really do much of anything in the traditional way—my work, my education, my relationships, my pastimes, and my travels are all plotted out according to a set of rules that exists solely in my own head.
Seriously, I live here. This is not always what comes to mind when people think “Mexico”. I like it for its dirty parts as much as for its pretty parts.
Somehow, though, it all works. I become more and more delighted with my life as I veer further and further from the orthodox.
I’ve noticed that sometimes people don’t understand this. I received a birthday card one year that said “Don’t worry, you’ll find your place and settle down eventually,” and it took me a while to stop being offended by the implication that I’m unhappy because I haven’t roped down a man, staked out my plot in the woods, and started producing children yet. While I know that many people are happy with this sort of prescribed life, I know I’m not one of them (or at least, I’m not yet, but I sincerely doubt I’ll ever be). It frustrates me that sometimes that means people will see me as a failure, because I’m choosing to do things in such an unusual manner. I absolutely love my life, and not everyone who “has it all” would say that. Some of the coolest, best-adjusted people I know are weirdos like me.
So buck with tradition. Drop out of school, live out of your car, take six different wives. Don’t break the rules solely for the sake of breaking them, but don’t allow them to fence you into a life you didn’t choose. The world is full of people who are stuck by circumstance, but as a citizen of an affluent country, you have such a myriad of options open to you. Don’t follow the status quo just because it’s what we’re trained to do.
I want a world full of free-spirits and vagabonds.
From a dentist’s window in Ensenada. I’m not sure if this is considered an unorthodox marketing tactic in Mexico or not, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll choose to believe that it is.
Five tricks for staying sane as a long-term nomad
Thursday, December 1st, 2011
A little more than a month into my Grand World Tour, and I’m still utterly thrilled by it. My sense of time is all skewed—it feels as though I’ve been away from my “home” and the people I love so much longer, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve been living in México for a month. I’ve been absorbing, learning, and changing so much, and I don’t think I have, for even a single moment, yet regretted my decision to undertake this grand venture.
It’s pretty intense what I’m doing, and I often find myself overly emotional—not in a negative or positive way really, but I think it’s my way of processing the general instability of this way of life. Everything around me is either constantly in flux or constantly unfamiliar, and it would be easy to become unbalanced by it.
One month in, here are my tricks for staying sane. Nine months (and two or three more continents) in, I’m checking back with this, to see how much of it stays the same.
1. Realize that sometimes a day will be a wash.
Some days, you’ll be sick. Some days, you’ll be tired and jetlagged. Some days, you’ll be melancholy and homesick. I struggled with this with my recent trip to México City—I was only there for eight days, and I wanted to absorb as much of the city as I possibly could. It’s fascinating, chaotic, and a challenge to comprehend, and I castigated myself for being asleep or working at ten am. I should have been out exploring! Then I realized that running myself down just doesn’t work long-term. I’m not on holiday for a week, I’m living my life in a foreign place. Not every day will be productive work-wise, and not every day will be revelatory travel-wise. Some days will be neither. That’s okay.
Some days, you get totally lost for hours, because all the streets in Mexico City go in circles and have six different names. But then you accidentally bump into beautiful old buildings covered in graffiti, and everything works out.
2. Stay in touch.
My biggest fear is loneliness. This is my first time travelling for more than five weeks by myself, and I know that I’ll miss the social structures, and the people I care about, more than anything. Luckily, the internet is a magical thing, and it affords me roughly a thousand different ways to keep in contact with people. So I use Facebook and Twitter more than I would normally. I send texts to my litttle sister via WhatsApp. I send emails and make phone calls. I had a Skype date with my roommate, in which we both drank wine, talked, and made faces at one another for two hours. I send stories written on the back of postcards. Keeping in touch with the people who made my “stable” life so rewarding (and in fact were pretty much the reason I stayed in Halifax as long as I did between trips) goes a long way to keeping me sane and bridging the old life with the new. When everything around you changes, you change immeasurably too. Keeping grips on your alternate self helps you realize the things that remain constant and true throughout, and help you to be more assured of who you are, even when sometimes it feels as though everything’s been torn out from under you.
3. Make new friends.
While it’s important to stay in touch, if I didn’t make new friends, I’d be horrifically lonely and homesick. This was the biggest mistake I made in Argentina, when I wasn’t travelling alone, and it contributed greatly to the deterioration of my relationship with my travel companion, as well as my own sense of self.
I didn’t make friends with a baby jaguar, but I really wish I had.
I tend towards being a hermit. I’m a bit of a misanthrope to begin with, and I work by myself all day, so it’s easy to spend a day in which I don’t talk to anyone. So I’ve actively been working against that, knowing that while yes, sometimes I just need time and space away from humans, but more often it’s healthy for me to meet new people and make new connections. I live with a roommate, I couchsurf a lot again, and I make it a rule to generally say “yes” when someone asks if I want to go out. As a result, I’ve met a ton of awesome, intelligent, varied people, and I’ve learned more about the culture and hidden undercurrents of this country than I ever would have if I’d isolated myself. Sure, sometimes I end up stuck at a party where everyone’s speaking Spanish and I feel lost and uncomfortable, but most of the time I find myself having a great time, making new friends, and learning new things. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a more valuable part of travel than seeing pyramids.
4. Focus on the little things.
I find, the more I travel, the less I care for typical touristy things. Sure, lots of these things are famous attractions for a reason, but I no longer beat myself up if I miss one or two (or sixteen, depending on the place). Usually, the guidebook attractions are swarming with people (this becomes especially true in Europe), and, while impressive, can feel like a one-hit-wonder. It’s nice to see, but then it’s over. I’ve seen so many tourists storm through an attraction, taking photos every two seconds, not stopping to consider anything or even look at the thing they’re photographing so enthusiastically. (Watch people in the Vatican if you don’t believe me.) It feels empty.
Really gorgeous graffiti in Colonia Roma. As much as I like museums and such, I think outdoor art installations (whether “legal” or not) are far more interesting. Art should be contextual and integrated into daily life. México City is full of great museums, but I liked the series of coffee cups installed outside the museum better.
I’m finding more value in taking a six-hour walk through a city, getting lost and finding interesting signs, buildings, or things happening. I’ve discovered that I love urban parks of all shapes and sizes and beautiful, multi-level bookstores (I’ve been to #4 and #6!). I really enjoy finding a perfect little café to work away my day in. Long-term travel isn’t so much about the awe-inspiring or the impressive as it is about the everyday.
5. Remain flexible.
This is, above all, my most important rule when travelling, living, or navigating relationships. Things will always fail in unexpected ways, especially when you’re in constant motion. You need to be super-flexible in order to make it work. Every time I embark on another long strange trip, I change the rules up, adjusting the formula until I hit on something that works.
If you want stability, stay home. If you want adventure, learn to adapt.
This doesn’t properly capture the chaos of Mexico City, but imagine that there are a few million people jammed into tiny streets overflowing with street vendors and old buildings. I’ve left the orderly world I lived in behind; there’s no room for rigidity here!
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
Thursday, November 10th, 2011
All the way to Mexico, that’s all people asked me. The US customs officer, before I’d even left Halifax, looked at me like I was insane when I said I wasn’t staying in San Diego, but was just planning to meander across the border. (Technically a lie, as I stayed in San Diego the first night, but I have such rotten luck with customs officers that I find it’s best to give them the simplest answer possible, and they’re often confused enough by my vagabond ways.) “You’re going to Mexico?” he asked. “Near the border? By yourself? Don’t you know how dangerous it is down there?”
San Diego, from my hostel bedroom window in Gaslamp. If you’re looking for a nice place to stay with surprisingly shoddy internet, the rooms at the HI hostel were actually rather lovely. I miss that bed.
I’ll admit I expected it from xenophobic Americans. (Sorry, America! You’re great! Travel more, okay?) What surprised me was that, as I got closer to the border and found myself the only white girl on a trolley crammed with Mexicans heading home, even they started asking me if I was in my right mind. I’ll point out here that they were busy being super friendly and helpful, helping me manœuvre my sixteen tonnes of luggage around. But for whatever reason, everyone seems surprised at my decision to live 100km from the notorious border for two months.
It sunk in. I tried as much as possible to remind myself that a lot of travel alerts are xenophobic hooey, and that millions of people live out their lives in northern Baja with no troubles whatsoever. I’ve done a lot of travelling, some of it to places many would consider “dangerous”, and often these places were my favourites. (Sarajevo, with its two million exploded landmines and its gorgeous wounded beauty, is a notable example.) In all my travels, I’ve only twice had anything really bad or dangerous happen to me, one of which was a mere pick-pocketing that lost me an iPhone. Ultimately, far more horrible things have happened to me in the city I call home than have in foreign countries.
Sixty miles south, Ensenada looks like a different world. Seriously, I can’t wear heels unless I’ve got a ride. (I just wear my “practical” walking shoes, which are wedges.) What is becoming of me? Also, I like to pretend this taco stand is called “Sarah” even though it isn’t quite. It’s one of my landmarks so I know what street is mine, since it’s not signposted at this intersection.
I’ve always believed it’s a matter of awareness, and that’s something I try to cultivate as I explore new places. Ideally, a foreign environment forces you into a state of heightened awareness. I pay more attention to what’s happening around me when I’m travelling, often because I’m usually a visible minority. There aren’t a whole lot of extremely white redheads in little dresses in Mexico, and I stand out. I’m also generally carrying about $2300 worth of electronics on me at any given time, and I’m aware that the combination makes me an easy target.
There was this day last week when I was walking along the sidewalk, and ahead of me were a group of men casually swinging baseball bats. Logically, I knew they were probably just waiting to go play baseball, but my brain wired itself up into paranoia mode. I suppose the “safe” thing to do would have been to cross to the other side of the street, but I don’t believe in giving in to fear when it’s irrational. Instead, I gritted my teeth, turned off my music, and walked through them, all with stomach-turning visions of a bat cracking into my skull dancing through my head.
This little girl is the most dangerous person I’ve come across so far in Mexico. I’m not quite sure why she’s so pleased with her knife, or why the butterflies aren’t running away from her manic bellbottom-wearing weapon-yielding ways, or why the hell she’s on the side of this building, but I really like her. The type is pretty great, too.
Of course, nothing came of it, and as I’ve acclimatized to Ensenada, I’ve become less paranoid, without losing a sense of vigilance. I’ve also come to realize that—much as I’d expected—the reports of these parts of Mexico being so dangerous are largely unfounded. Sure, it’s different. There’s a military man standing outside the government building, right next to the hospital, with an AK-47. I saw a truck pulled over on the highway, its entire front assembly lifted up to look for drugs hidden within the engine block—apparently they’ve cracked down on drug barons in Tijuana, so many of them have begun to migrate south. And much of the city looks dangerous when you’re used to the sterility of Canada or the States—the sidewalks are broken and haphazard, houses are unkempt, and things are generally in a lesser state of repair. Most houses are gated-in, and many have bars across their first-floor windows. The bathroom of a café I frequent looks a little like a gulag, especially at night when the light is so dim I can’t see myself in the mirror. At first glance, it’s easy to mistake a lower standard of living for danger, but that correlation isn’t in all cases true.
Ultimately, part of what I like about Mexico is its rough-around-the-edges quality. I love that it isn’t perfect. I love that you can see where its weathered, and that things are a little bit more chaotic and haphazard than I’m used to. And in spite of wandering around late at night down empty streets, in spite of getting drunker than I ought on too many tequila shots, in spite of being such a blazingly obvious gringa, I haven’t had any problems whatsoever. In fact, people here have been exceptionally nice to me—much nicer than they were in the airport in Chicago or the pub in San Diego.
While Ensenada isn’t as picturesque as other (generally more Spanish-colonial) cities in Latin America, it has its charms amid the dust and rubble.
I’d hate to think that I miss out on learning new things due to unfounded fears, and I’m glad that I didn’t listen to everyone who basically told me going to Mexico was a death sentence. I’ve yet to be kidnapped by roving gang—instead spend my days eating delicious food, basking in actual sunshine, and discovering new things! In a new place, even the tiniest everyday acts are adventures. I’m here to explore.
Getting scared: on becoming a nomad
Tuesday, October 25th, 2011
Okay, I’ll admit it. Sometimes, I get terrified. Tomorrow morning, I hop on a plane bound for San Diego. From there, I’ll walk across the border and take a bus from Tijuana to Ensenada, where I’ll be living for the next couple of months (assuming I find somewhere to live). After that, I’ll head up to LA, and fly over to Hong Kong for New Years’. I’ll spend a few months flitting around Southeast Asia, living mostly in Thailand and Vietnam, depending on how the visas all play out. Come spring, I’ll hop over to Spain, and finally get to tour around—ideally visiting Morocco, Portugal, and France while I’m there. By September, I’ll be heading back home, with a brief stopover in Iceland to hang out in the lagoon.
I’m really, really, really excited—but I’m also utterly terrified.
Apparently Google Maps can’t calculate the directions between Halifax, NS and Halifax NS if you take the insane route.
I’ve been planning this for a while, but of course I’m nowhere near to ready. I haven’t even so much as looked at my suitcase yet, in spite of best intentions, and I leave in around fourteen hours. I have a couple of leads on apartments in Ensenada, but nothing concrete. Everyone and their dog wants to see me or send me emails, so I’m running about like a headless chicken and prioritizing based on fleeting feelings. I probably won’t sleep at all tonight, and I’m guessing I’ll be hung over on my plane.
And of course my brain is just going crazy. What if it doesn’t work? What if I’m miserable? What if my phone is stolen and I spill scotch on my computer again? What if I can’t find anywhere to live? What if I get sick? What if all my clients abandon me for being a wild vagabond? It’s hard to turn off the paranoid questions once they get started, and sometimes the uncertainty of it all is enough to drive me batty.
And of course I just realized that in all the excitement of learning more language-bits and plotting out maps, I’ve forgotten to tell most everyone I’m going across the world for nine or so months. Whoops! My five-month tour of South America last year went by so smoothly (well, mostly) that it doesn’t seem all that important anymore—my clients know now, that even if I’m in a different continent I’m available and working. Most of them only communicate with me via email anyway. I did just get an email from a client asking me if I could meet up on Thursday, which obviously won’t be happening unless they meant “in Mexico”, but I’m hoping that everyone realizes I’m just as reliable, if not more so, when I’m working from a café in Croatia than I am when working from my couch in Canada.
What I’m most scared of is not having a business anymore when I finally get back.
But ultimately, I think if I’m not scared, I’m doing something wrong. I’ve always made it a rule to do all the things that scare me—sometimes because they scare me—and as a result I get to be stronger and have a life that’s full of crazy adventures. I make my own rules and determine how I want to experience the world, rather than following a preordained set of steps. A few years ago, I decided I wanted to travel the world, and I’ve been testing the waters with trips that get progressively longer and more involved.
And now, I will literally be going across the world. Sometimes I forget how wildly lucky I am, but today, on the cusp of a new adventure, absolutely petrified, I remember.
How a motorcycle made me a better businessperson
Thursday, September 15th, 2011
Last weekend was my birthday. (I won’t tell you how old I turned, but I am now officially starting to feel old. If you’re really interested, I’m sure a quick Google search will turn up something that’s not yet a lie.) As a present, a friend took me on what can best be described as a “whirlwind trip”: we rode his motorcycle 3000 kilometers to New York City, and back, in four days.
It wasn’t until we’d hit Bangor, Maine on the second day that I realized just how insane of an idea that was.
For starters, when I say “motorcycle”, I don’t mean a cushy touring bike with backrests, stereo speakers, massive windshields, luggage racks, and padded seats. This was a beast of a superbike, with a tiny little triangular seat on the back that looks like a miniature rocket. I jammed all of our vital belongings–two computers, several pairs of shoes (Excessive maybe, but it can’t come as a surprise), my flat-iron, three books, clothing–into my giant orange backpack and strapped it to my back. The effect was as though I’d gained a 30lb hunchback, and my balance was thrown so out of whack that climbing up on the bike was roughly akin to mounting a nine-foot tall horse with a broken leg. After an hour, my ass ached like I’d never felt before, and my feet would keep going numb. By the end of the trip, I had friction burns on my thighs and back pain that lasted for days, along with a giant smile on my face.
It was most assuredly one of the most insane, intense, incredible things I’d ever done.
Yep. This thing. I may as well have ridden a rocketship. It was also hot as hell, so every time we stopped I’d strip off the moment I clambered down and fling my things all over the place, as evidenced here.
Things I think I can’t do
When the constant pain wasn’t distracting me, I was busy being terrified. Three deer standing at the edge of the road waiting to jump out and kill me. Taking turns at 100 and leaning 45 degrees with the bike. Flying into my driver during an emergency stop coming into the city. Foggy night riding while a thunderstorm lit up the sky around us. Lane-splitting between trucks. Construction coming out of nowhere. Other cars cutting and swerving in. I’m a nervous passenger. There were so many times when all I wanted to do was say, “Listen. I cannot do this anymore. Drop me off at the nearest exit, and I will hitchhike my way home. Thanks for the ride!” By day four, when we needed to make good time, and the riding was getting intense, and the wind blast was so crazy I was convinced I was going to be pushed off that tiny little seat, I was verging on downright miserable. The only thing that got me through was sheer determination.
That determination—less charitable people would call it “bull-headedness”—has gotten me through so much. Earlier this summer, I went to Cape Breton with a friend. We found this charming place where you walk through the woods, clamber down a cliff using a system of ropes, cross through a rumbly river, and swim in ice-cold saltwater through a cavern until you reach this lagoon amid the rocks. Above it, there’s a cave in the side of the cliff, and more ropes. The boys who had gone the day prior told us we’d need lots of upper-body strength to pull ourselves up. One of them had even needed to be pushed up.
Of course, I figured I wouldn’t be able to make it. Possessing an extra x chromosome already predisposes me to be rather lacking in the upper-body department, and my twice-broken wrists of last year put me at something of a disadvantage. I remember perching atop one of the rocks, about to jump into the icy lagoon, looking up at the cave in the cliff and being convinced I’d never make it.
Then I gritted my teeth, pulled everything in my body together, and I made it! I’m certain it was that stubbornness, not any hidden reserves of strength, that fuelled my success. I’m also pretty sure that’s how I’ve structured the entirety of my life.
Things that scare me
Breaking both my wrists last year made me pretty skittish about my vulnerability. Being in a couple of car crashes in quick succession when I was eighteen made me an extremely nervous passenger. As a general rule, I very much dislike things that are beyond my control.
Obviously, riding pillion on a motorcycle is sort of a double-whammy for me. But I’m quite certain that forcing yourself to face things you fear makes you a stronger person. As a result, anytime I think “Oh, gracious. That sounds scary.” or “That sounds hard. I wonder if I’m capable of doing it?”, I take it as a sign that I must do it. Learning to ride a motorcycle (I have a license now!)? Moving to South America for five months? Going ziplining? Life modelling? Bring it on.
And of course, running a business is one of these things. I’m amazed that I’ve been doing this for so long and I’m still terrified of it and convinced I can’t do it at all. What if I mess things up and ruin my reputation? What if I get jerked around and can’t pay my bills anymore? What if the stress drives me totally insane and I end up wandering about aimlessly, muttering about em-heights and kerning?
Running a business is one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, and it never stops being terrifying.
Being a brave little toaster
Facing fears in other areas of your life forces you to become stronger and more self-assured. That sense of determination—the “I don’t know if I can do this, but I’m damn well going to try as hard as I possibly can”—is enough to push you to do everything you can in order to make it happen. I think, ultimately, I would have killed my business had I not started pushing myself to confront fears in other aspects of my life.
I’m a big fan, however, of pushing boundaries incrementally. If you suddenly dive into something terrifying, it’s easy to become paralyzed by fear, and no longer retain the ability to respond in an agile way when things change, as they invariably do. It’s important to push through things you’re afraid of, and things you don’t believe you’re capable of doing, but you can’t allow yourself to become locked up by them if you take on too much at once. It’s a fine balance.
It’s for this reason that I keep ramping up my adventures. I’m deep in planning mode (by which I mean “vaguely thinking about from time to time”) for my next crazy adventure, which is shaping up to involve a few different continents. By pushing things a little further every time I do them, my brain starts learning that it can handle whatever challenges I can throw at it. I stop being apprehensive when something crops up and I think I can’t manage it, because consistent experience tells me that I can.
This is the classy way to relax. (Don’t worry, I’m in Connecticut. The gas stations are spotless.) I was performing some variant of this sprawl, often with the backpack still strapped on, at every gas station down the eastern seaboard (when I wasn’t busy doing cartwheels to stretch out.) Coincidentally, this is also how I look when I’ve had the week from hell and have been working nonstop putting out fires, scrambling to get things done, and generally going crazy. Like this one! Good times.
And hey, if I hadn’t pushed myself to make it through this trip, I may not have learned how to smoke a cigarette while riding a motorcycle in New York City. You’re welcome, lovely clients. I do crazy things to make you happy.
Saying goodbye to South America
Thursday, May 26th, 2011
Three months in South America turned into five months, and I was still sad when it came time to come home. Somewhere in the JFK airport, exhausted from my eleven-hour flight and an hour and a half of standing in line, waiting for US customs to harass me for flying through a country I had no time to step outside in, I started to get horribly depressed. It was cold and grey. Everyone around me was speaking English again. Everything looked so familiar, too perfect and sterile.
Luckily, by the time I got to Halifax (and another long wait at customs while they inspected every single item in my giant suitcases), I returned to the most enthusiastic homecoming, otherwise I might well have turned around and gone back home.
When both the destination and the origin are “home”
The concept of home has always been strange for me. When I moved to Canada as a little kid, I felt always felt weird singing the national anthem, which my teachers insisted I do loudly and proudly. This cold foreign country wasn’t my “home and native land”, it was just the place I happened to be at the time. Years later, I do consider parts of Canada home, but it still feels like an adopted home—somewhere I’ve spent most of my life, but I never entirely feel like I fit. For this reason, I think, it’s easy for me to adopt new places that feel like home. After the time I spent there, Buenos Aires also feels like home.
Photos like this make me homesick.
Traveling long-term is so different from traveling short-term. When I spent five weeks circling through central Europe, I changed and grew so quickly, but no place ever felt like home, as I was constantly in transit. In Argentina, where I eventually settled into something resembling a routine, change was so subtle that I’ve only now started to notice it.
Be stronger. Less scared.
Given how much of last year I spent hanging out in the hospital with broken wrists, it’s not surprising that I ended up a little on the paranoid side. I felt weak and breakable. When I first got to Argentina, I’d been out of my second cast for nine days. I couldn’t do a single pushup or open a bottle of wine. Worse still, I was so aware of my own vincibility that certain things scared me that never used to—riding downhill on a bicycle, slipping down a stair.
I picked up an exercise habit in Argentina (probably the first time I’ve picked up a good habit!) and it changed me so fundamentally that I’m insistent on carrying the change over. Yoga, especially, turned out to be pretty miraculous for my poor wrists. I’m slowly getting stronger, and I can do all sorts of things I couldn’t before—pushups, yes, but I can also balance on my hands for short periods of time, hold myself up in a bridge, and open a bottle of wine with nothing but the most primitive of corkscrews.
I had a few moments in South America that utterly terrified me. There was that incident in the Amazon rainforest where I cut off my fingertip with a machete. Driving in cabs, and oftentimes just crossing the streets in Buenos Aires, where the bus drivers stop for nothing, held some surprisingly frightful moments. I drove around some pretty insane roads winding around the cliffs of Chile’s coast, in some cases nearly running into other vehicles when there was only room for one. The final, and most innocuous moment was the smallest—running down the stairs in my building, my foot slipped. I caught myself, but for a brief moment, my mind was paralyzed with fear (the second time I broke my wrist was due to a slip on a single stair). I just kept thinking how much people would laugh if I came home in yet another cast.
But I survived everything. When a friend took me out for a scooter ride upon my return, I realized something—I wasn’t scared anymore. We’d gone for a ride the night before I left as well, and I remember closing my eyes on some of the turns, holding on for dear life, my logical brain certain I’d be fine, but my heart still in my mouth. After five months of traveling through South America, I’m finally feeling stronger.
Work less. Worry less.
North Americans are workaholics. We have less holiday time than pretty much everyone else on the planet. Oftentimes, being a workaholic is considered a badge of honour. Small business people, especially, are prone to a form of boasting/complaining about working sixteen hour days as though it’s proof of their fortitude and commitment.
I used to be one of these people, but I’ve been slowly coming out of it. It’s surprising how much of life you can miss out on when all you do is work, and how easily you get burned out. I’m not entirely sure how I managed the first few years of my business.
The nice thing about traveling is that I simply couldn’t allow myself to be that much of a crazy workaholic, or I’d never have an opportunity to see anything at all. (Admittedly, I did spend way too much time working in Chile, but that was mostly because I was on a roll with a project.) I actually took days off. Some days I wouldn’t work a full eight hours.
Argentina was a great influence in this respect, because… well, I’m not sure how to put it delicately. They aren’t workaholics, let’s say. There were public holidays every other day, and some days when it wasn’t a holiday, everyone would just take to the streets for a good political protest. I got the impression that while a great many of the participants were truly involved in the affair—lighting off gunpowder and cheering and such—a large percentage would be hanging about, lazily chatting with one another. This attitude pervades throughout much of the city—service in bars and restaurants tends to be notoriously slow, and there’s a general sort of unhurried pace. This gets infuriating when you’re waiting in line for hours, but it did help me learn a bit of patience.
Me, leaning out over one of the balconies in my apartment in Buenos Aires. I spent a lot of time in this spot, watching the street below.
…what next?
This whole slow-traveling of the world thing is something I’ve wanted to do for at least a couple of years now, and my time in Argentina was a litmus test. It didn’t turn out perfectly—I didn’t travel nearly as much as I’d wanted to, and I ran into all kinds of electronics-related issues that made things quite difficult. But I had such an amazing time there. I camped on the beach by the cliffs along Chile’s northern coast. I drove all the way around the coast of Uruguay and nearly ran over an armadillo. I crossed the Andes in a giant double-decker bus. I kayaked for three hours through the rivers of a sprawling delta. I learned how to set up a minimalistic camp in the middle of the Amazon jungle. I learned how to make jokes in Spanish that people would laugh at. I wandered through beautiful cities old and new, I explored, and I saw so many things I thought my head might explode. I fell in love with a chaotic city that I hated at first, and I even made new friends. At times, it was frustrating, infuriating, and I just wanted to go home. But I wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything.
I’m already plotting my next adventure.
The f-word
Friday, April 8th, 2011
I was supposed to be home by now. Instead, I changed my ticket and delayed my return home by two months. Even then, five months just isn’t enough time. It’s surprising how much I haven’t got around to doing. Last week, we finally went to Chile—that trip was supposed to happen in December, when we first got here! I’d like to make it down (further) south to explore Patagonia a little; I’m dying to visit Bolivia’s salt flats and Peru’s high-altitude Incan cities; and I still haven’t made it to Rio, although I think I’m glad I skipped Carnaval. I haven’t taken a tango lesson yet, and while I feel like my Spanish has improved a great deal, that’s sort of like saying my suntan has developed—that is, I’m now “slightly ecru-ish” instead of “ghostly white”.
But, to be quite blithe: whatever. I’ve felt this way my whole life—like I’m not achieving enough—and I’ll probably forever feel like this. No matter what I manage to achieve, I will always feel that I’m failing on some other front. As long as I can remember, I’ve always felt overwhelmed, and I’ve always been spurred by a fear of Failure. In the past, what this has meant is that I work like a demon at something, letting other things slide, until the whole thing manifests itself into a giant mental breakdown, and I disappear for two days until I recover from it all.
I’ve finally changed this behaviour. Instead of focusing on my failures, I’m trying to turn that energy into positive direction. In theory, if I focus my energies instead on a positive direction, at least I’m making efforts against the almighty Failure, no?
More on Feelings of Failure and a rant about body image in Argentina
Sarah’s Excellent Adventure
Thursday, November 18th, 2010
It’s official: in a little under a month, I’ll have my things all packed away in storage, and I’ll be on my way to gorgeous Buenos Aires, nearly 9000 km from home, and quite literally the other side of the world. I’ll be staying for three months, which officially makes it my longest trip ever.
I’ve had my tickets booked for some time, which is about as close as I come to long-term commitments these days, and I’ve been slowly preparing for the trip—by which I basically mean “talking along to my Spanish tapes as I walk down the street” (no, that crazy girl isn’t talking to herself!) and “contemplating how many shoes I can fit into a jumbo-size suitcase” (the answer, by the by, is “nowhere nearly enough”).
These dog days are for the birds!
Friday, July 23rd, 2010
Well, apparently my business should be slowing down right about now as everyone runs off on summer holidays, but it’s emulating a steamship more than anything else. (Which is nice, except that my house looks like it’s been hit by a hurricane.) I’ve been insanely busy but have been trying to keep balanced (relatively speaking): I’m still (sort of) taking Saturdays off, I bought a pretty vintage bicycle that I’m riding around town, and I’ve learned how to go swimming with a cast (held over my head, of course), and I ran off a few weeks ago and glistened (ladies don’t sweat, of course) my way through the epic heatwave/monsoons that hit Ottawa and Montréal. It doesn’t really count as traveling, which will need to happen in the near future, but I was able to catch up with all sorts of wonderful people I haven’t seen in ages, which is just as good—if not better—for the soul.
I’m glad I’ve finally figured out how to keep things balanced, at least a little—I remember one summer when I was on an internship, and I was so deep in workaholicism I didn’t go out at all. Summers here are so brief, it’s nice to be able to enjoy them! I actually have a suntan (although very few people believe it—basically I’m just “less glow-in-the-dark white) and have been running around doing summery things in spite of having spent nearly the last three months with my arm in a fibreglass cage. (It comes off in six days! I am keeping a countdown, written in Sharpies, on the cast itself.)
(more…)
Think before you ink: a treatise on decision-making
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
I get asked questions about my tattoos a lot. It sometimes strikes me as strange—I have seven of them, which I suppose is quite a few, but they’re all really tiny black symbols—so it’s hardly as though they’re at all surprising.
A few years ago, before I quit my job to launch a business, I had my logo tattooed to my shoulder blade. (And actually, I haven’t been tattooed since—I’ve run out of strategic body space!) People thought I was insane. “What happens if your business tanks?” was the popular question.
Of all the tattoos I’ve had done, I’m furthest from regretting this one. Admittedly, my business didn’t tank, but I don’t think it would have made much difference if it had. It’s impossible to start a business without having it become a major event in your life—to me, tattooing my logo to my shoulder was no crazier than the people who tattoo their kids’ names to themselves. (And it’s certainly less crazy than those who tattoo their lovers’ names on themselves. As far as I can tell, my business will never leave me for a younger woman or run away with all my money. I hope.)
