“Just toss a coin”

Alison and I took a charter bus from Paris to London.  At this point early on in the trip, we had not planned anything after London because we were a little exhausted and just wanted some down time at Alison’s brother’s flat.

At passport control everybody went through, and we were last in line.  We filled out the customs form—with no sure date that we were leaving.  That was the first thing that caught the inspectors’ eyes.  The next was that we were staying at Alison’s brother’s.  I guess they thought we could have been trying to live off his benefits or something.

The inspector then asked me, “Are you fleeing from Trump?”  A “HAHhahah… No!” came out of my mouth because I could see this was becoming an issue with these inspectors.  I mean, Alison and I both quit our jobs and left the country.  There was some whispering going on behind the counters.

The next thing I heard one of them say was, “I don’t know. Just toss a coin.”  My eyes went wide, and inside I was shaking my head yelling, “NO NO PLZ DON’T DO THAT!”  We would have had to turn around and somehow make our way back to Paris or some city nearby and beg for a place to crash or who knows what!

Luckily for us, they let us pass.  They said, “Just for future reference, always have a leaving date.  We want you to come visit, but we don’t want you to stay.” Lesson learned.

Corners of The Earth

We have been backpacking for almost five and a half months—tomorrow when we return will mark 160 days.  It is bizzare thinking only half a year ago, I was wondering what kind of disast–adventures we would be getting ourselves into and if I was going to change as much as the first time I was abroad for a long period of time.  If you don’t remember or met me recently, I studied in Paris for a year in 2010-2011.  Long story short, that was probably the experience that changed me the most so far (okay, other than the whole kidney surgeries thing), as cheesy and cliche it seemed.

This time around, you may or may not have noticed that I haven’t really been posting updates so frequently.  Maybe I would let you know through Instagram that I’ve reached a destination to let you know I’m safe, but I’ve been leaving out so many details.  It’s not that I’m getting my nose dirty, as my aunt likes to call it.  Rather, I’ve been trying to tell myself to focus on the present and the people who are currently around me.  It surely helped not having mobile internet all the time, ha!

But really, isn’t it nice when the people or person you’re with direct all their attention toward you and aren’t constantly thinking about how to make themselves look good on social media?!  Okay, I may be being harsh a bit, but real talk—the best things to happen are sometimes the things you cannot capture, and sometimes trying hard to show the world how awesome something is could make you miss it!  Besides, let’s be even more real now, we know that traveling is already awesome and a complete privilege.  I’m not going to boast that in your face every day.  We are all already guilty of showing the highlights of our lives and sweeping the dirt under the rug anyway.  Okay, rant over.  You’ve heard this shit already.

To why I’m really writing now… I’ve written and talked about this before.  I even made it the main focus of my architecture thesis.  Exposure, unfamiliarity, and being comfortable with the uncomfortable.

In my thesis my intention was to propose a structure to build bonds between differing people and create positive first impressions instead of judging people for their differences. I still deeply stand by that, and I somehow was able to bring out the extrovert in me again and I fell in love with the action of talking to everyone I could talk to—from the elderly couple from former Yugoslavia that I sat next to on the train to the compassionate and humanitarian French doctor Alison and I met while eating breakfast in a Paris hostel.  I know I have been a bit of a hermit recently, but seriously, now if you hang out with me one on one, you’ll make me love humanity even more.  Okay, climb with me and we’ll be best fraaands.  Woo hoo!

After about halfway through traveling, I wanted to mostly visit places where I knew somebody.  I utilized my new and old connections to do this.  It’s one thing to visit a beautiful place and experience a different culture, but it’s so much better when you get to experience it with the locals and live like they do.  I guess what I’m trying to say is when we place ourselves into the lives of others—see how their daily lives are, where they like to get coffee or beer—we break down the wall that separates us from each other and realize we’re so much more similar than we think, even when our cultures are so different.  Exposing ourselves to people who are not like us deconstructs the judgmental impulses we may have learned from… everything around us.

When we go back to our homes and what’s comfortable to us, we realize that you don’t even have to leave your own city to see that there are so many unique characters to get to know better.  Not only strangers, but our own friends and family members.  I can’t explain why, but at least for me, meeting so many fascinating people in the world is making me appreciate the already awesome people I already have in my life. 

One phrase that I’ve been hearing myself say over and over again is, “eh, plans change.”  The best example is how Alison and I were supposed to travel for three months in Europe and then three months in Asia.  We didn’t even get to Asia!  And you know what?  That’s okay.  Shit happens.  We can’t live our lives being anxious, nervous, and upset over things we can’t control.  In some cases it’s because of money or missing your train.  In other cases it’s about a show running out of tickets, having an accident, or maybe having your heart broken a little.  When things don’t go your way, know that it’s just a little obstacle to get around, and things will be fine in the end.  I still have to remind myself of this very often.  I mean, it’s not like I don’t get stressed at all—I let myself go through the anxiety a little bit, but I accept this completely normal feeling and then move on.  Always learn to let go.

There is still so much on my mind, but everything is really jumbled as it is my last night on this extended vacation.  I am overwhelmed by gratitude of how lucky I am to be asked by Alison to join her on this trip.  Who the hell has a friend that gets you to leave everything behind to get into a whole bunch of little adventures with them?!  I’m not trying to make anyone jealous, and I’m not trying to force people to go travel and find themselves and shit.  I accept my privilege, and I know that so many people will never experience even a fraction of what I’ve seen.  I just hope that I can somehow get one person to not wait for their life to fly by before regretting not doing what they’ve always wanted to do.  And I hope that no matter what we decide to do in life, we try to do it with open minds, acceptance, tolerance, and understanding of others’ choices in their own lives.  Since the person you spend the most time with is yourself, you might as well give yourself good reason to live it well and to the max.  I might be motivating myself at this point, but I know I want to do everything with intensity and meaning.

I apologize for the unorganized stream of consciousness.  But I’m excited for my future.  The bittersweet feeling of ending this short chapter of falling in love with the world again makes me awestruck.

I take things like astrology signs, personality types, and fortune telling with a grain of salt.  But I’ll leave with my Turkish coffee story from Serbia:

After Lovefest, I ended up in Kraljevo so I could catch a bus to another bus out of the country.  I had the chance to get my fortune read via Turkish coffee by my friend’s friend.  The process was interesting: I drank the coffee until I hit the sludge at the bottom, I then put the small plate that served the coffee on top of the cup, flipped it upside down outward, and waited for it to cool.  A lot of the things she said were interesting, maybe a little generic here and there, but not far off.  She told me things about relationships, family, and good news because she saw a bird!  There was even an image of a little foot, which could possibly mean travel *wink wink* :).  Then she seemed to go out of character.  She shifted her gaze and looked a little deeper into my eyes saying, “you’re really lucky—did you know that?”  I was in concurrence.  I had been thinking that for quite a while already.  I told her I knew, and she went back into character and continued reading my fortune.

So many things have happened in the past few months that exemplify how lucky I am.  It really could be a matter of perspective, though, but I choose to see a lot of these things as luck.  Alison says it depends on how you see the world, and I completely agree.  The more I love the world, humanity, blah blah, the better it seems to treat me back.

Goodnight, and I’ll see a lot of you when I get home.  For the friends on this side of the world, you’ll see me sooner than later.  I’m still trying to figure out how I can move back to France 🙂 I can’t wait another six years until I come back, that’s for sure.

Thanks for getting through this long post.  The following posts are going to be short stories.

Au revoir, duder pooters.