I think about coming home to that one peculiar question, “How was your trip?”
God, what a trip it’s been.
I don’t feel like this is a gap year at all. This is not the type of life experience that prepares me for college, this is the type of life experience that pushes me into a new way of thinking and a dangerous place of being. A life experience that will let me rest easy when all is said and done, because now I’m awake in the world, and a tiny ripple moving across the Atlantic.
In the first few minutes of my solo-backpacker adventure, I wandered around JFK with a oh-shit-what-I-done feeling.
I shrunk in my shoes. The airport inflated with each breath. My backpack became unbearably heavy.
As I waited in line to get my boarding pass a man in front of me passively mumbled “Allez-y”
I ignored it, staring down at the carpet and then up to the impossibly high ceiling.
“Allez-y!” he said again, with his hands pointed towards the empty space in front of him. I jumped a bit, then quickly pushed past before he could change his mind.
After seven hours of stiff legs and and good conversation with my very first travel buddy: Mike, I finally saw France as a wide stretch of green. It was too big to imagine what was in it.
Two minutes later the country vanished under the same cloud bank that I had been staring at ever since I decided to go– too thick to see under.
Once in the airport, Mike and I teamed up against customs and the menacing Public Transport. We took down kiosks information desks and maps. If sitting next to one of the only other Americans on the flight (who also happens to share my passion for Andy Shauf- The Party) was not enough of a coincidence, Mike also took both the same train and the same metro line as me until we went our separate ways.
Before my trip I had only a few expectations: homesickness, discomfort, anxiety, embarrassment. All of which happened, all at once, in the very minute I left my mom at the terminal.
Now the bad comes in intervals: a daily dose of embarrassment, a weekly visit of anxiety, a case of homesickness, a bit of discomfort here and there.
It’s all incomparable to the satisfaction and joy I feel everyday. It’s a very specific type: It’s when you know what you want and you keep it lodge in your heart and you step out into a world of strong winds, holding on to yourself as you hurtle in the right direction.
On The Road – Cross-Country Roadtrip
“What is he aching to do? What are we all aching to do? What do we want? She didn’t know. She yawned. She was sleepy. It was too much. Nobody could tell. It was all over. She was eighteen, most lovely, and lost.”
I read this book in my last few months of high school when I was still deciding whether or not to take a gap year. Going to college seemed really “doable” while the idea of traveling the world left me with a void at the end of the thought. Where would I go? What would I do? What do I want to do? Traveling was a dream, and I had no idea whether dreams could fit into real life.
On the Road taught me that they do. Kerouac and his gang of deadbeats rocket from state to state with the jetfuel of pure excitement. He bravely curbs the norm of settling down and starting a family for a life spent racing from dream to dream.
Into The Wild – Misadventure in Alaska
Krakauer’s journalistic writing paints the story of Christopher McCandless with honest reflection. McCandless’s intuition, curiosity, and unquenchable thirst for life are endlessly inspiring, yet they also served as a pitfall for his untimely death.
If you’re like me and broke the cardinal rule of reading the book before watching the movie, my advice would be to read the book anyways. The book will give you a better sense of who McCandless was, and Krakauer supplements the story with other tales that are equally intriguing.
For the good folks who plan on reading the book first: check out the movie’s soundtrack. It’s entirely composed by the lead singer of Pearl Jam, Eddie Vedder.
A Room With A View – Love in Florence
Picture someone you love. Are they in a room, or are they outside?
Does it really matter? E. M. Forster would say that it most definitely does.
Like Kerouac and McCandless, Lucy Honeychurch yearns for adventure. Yet Lucy is different in the way that she struggles to free herself from society. Some people are able to combat other’s expectations by deciding simply not to care. I’m not one of those people. Neither is Lucy. Her transition from living a subdued lifestyle to a one of adventure is slow and delicate.
The Poisonwood Bible – An American Family’s Development in Africa
When I imagine Barbara Kingsolver writing a novel, I imagine her leaning over a cauldron, tossing in characters, settings and themes. All she does is stir the pot, and a book is born.
The Poisonwood Bible follows the childhood of four sisters from the U.S. as they grow up in the Congo in the 1960’s. Their father is a preacher bent on spreading Christianity. In this piece of historical fiction, Kingsolver explores the morality of foreign aide, and she teaches a lesson that is difficult to learn: there is danger of good intentions.
The Life of Pi – A journey of spirituality.
Disclaimer: I haven’t finished reading this one. I’m forty pages in and I know three things about Pi Patel: He is devoutly religious, he grew up in a zoo in the southern India, and he was named after a swimming pool. I’m hooked.