The first 100 days

It's taken me a little while to be able to process the complex intensity of my trip around the world (figuratively speaking) since I got home. I've been back in the U.S. for two weeks now, earlier than I had originally planned, a return consequent of a lower-than-expected tax refund and a mild, growing and grating frustration and exhaustion from traveling alone. And it's taken being back in the country I love, where the entire world is at your fingertips without going further than your front door, where there is a Starbucks every two blocks and free wifi everywhere, where everything makes sense and just fits together as nature intended, to work out how I feel about the experience of being in so many foreign places in such a short (and yet so long) period of time, processing everything in a weird sort of solitary confinement.

I have long been a proponent that two people should not get married unless they have traveled together; truly, I think you never really know someone until you've seen how they behave under the stress of being in a foreign country, a land where you don't speak the language and can't understand directions, don't like the food and never know what you're ordering, and for the life of you can't find the simplest of over-the-counter medications at local pharmacies. There is nothing like travel to help you get to know somebody, their annoying idiosyncracies, their ability to rise to occasions, their resourcefulness, their irritability, their emotional reactions and overreactions to unexpected situations. And I also believe that no matter who you spend your time with, there is always an upper limit of how long you can be in their company before they start to make you crazy. For some people, that upper limit is about five minutes; for others, it could be months on end. But you will always reach that limit eventually. All of this is just as true when you are by yourself. Traveling solo is the most concentrated and intense way to get to know your own self, to understand and observe, in a virtual social vacuum, how you feel, how you behave, how you change, how you react, how you sleep, how you move from place to place, how you have fun, how you grieve, how you digest, how you roll with the punches, how you deal with disappointment, how you teach yourself to just freaking settle down and relax. It taught me amazing things about my body, how much stress I could take from physically strenuous travel, from nights on end of sleeplessness, from eating foods whose names and ingredients were utterly unpronouncable, from being away from everything familiar to me for over a hundred days. I have never felt more in tune with my body than while I was traveling, I think because, outside of your real life, there are few of the distractions and "lurking variables" of corporal understanding. If I started to feel sick while I was traveling, I knew it was from the last thing I ate. If I was tired, I knew it was because I wasn't sleeping. If I was restless, I knew it was because my travel plans were making me anxious. No distractions, no confusion, just one goal at all times: to keep going. Traveling taught me surprsing things about my emotional well-being as well, about my threshold for social isolation (three days), my concrete limit for alcohol consumption (six Guinesses, or four glasses of white wine), my daily emotional rhythms (mornings are always rough and full of anxiety), and the way I process difficult situations and stress (a tangled mess of confusing, conflicting, emotionally-charged thoughts until I finally sit down to talk to someone and untangle all the knots). None of these characteristics were as clear to me in my previous life, when the way I was feeling at any particular time could be a result of any combination of caffeine consumption, work deadlines, relationship stresses, eating habits, financial strain, physical activity (or lack thereof), career anxiety, household chores, and, of course, lack of sleep. (NB: Okay, I hear you scoffing, so to be clear: yes, household chores do stress me out. That's why I don't do them.) But in the travel scenario, the only stresses are travel related. Remove from the above equation work, friends, boyfriends, family, chores and errands, and there's not much left except eating and sleeping. So if something goes wrong, you pretty much know where it's coming from. To me it was the most fascinating part of self-discovery, living without the distractions of daily life and putting yourself into completely foreign and unpredictable situations, pretty much not knowing how your body and mind are going to react. Startlingly, I tended to find that I was much more capable, much more responsible, much more reasonable and competent than I thought I was before the trip. As I read back through some of the blog posts that were simultaneously the most entertaining and the most crazy, I feel a little bit shocked that I managed to get through those situations unscathed. It sounds so much crazier now, looking back, but I guess at the time I had a mechanical determination to keep my head up, walk tall and with a purpose, and assume that everything would turn out for the best. And, it always did.

I will say now that one of the most valuable lessons I learned as I traveled through Europe and the Middle East was in response to a question that I, and probably six billion of my contemporaries at some point in their lives, have wondered a lot: are human beings fundamentally good, generous and selfless, or are they inherently self-interested, sinful, and bad? Given the chance to do so, would everybody rob, loot, and destroy the lives of others? Or, given the chance, would everybody choose to help, comfort or save someone else? This question gets into some much deeper philosophical concepts, those of law enforcement and mutual accountability, religion and biology, social psychology and and cultural anthropology. But over the course of fourteen weeks, traveling by myself as a vulnerable young woman, through nine different countries and a million different worlds, I could only reach one conclusion: that ninety-nine percent of human beings are good, selfless, and incredibly generous people. From Fatima in Rome to Sayed in Cairo, Gabor in Hungary and Elizabeth in Ireland, two Turkish students in a supermarket and an old Greek woman on her way to church, I can say without hesitation that the vast majority of people in this world, or at least the ones I have come in contact with, have a genuine desire to help other people. Given the chance, these people, who had no obligation to me, no relationship to me, except the common bonds of humanity, went out of their way to comfort me, feed me, guide me, talk to me, help me and advise me. It gives me a comfort I can't express to be returning home from seeing so much (and yet, shockingly, so little) of the world, with a renewed faith in humanity and the universal good of people. It's naive, of course, to feel this way in a world that is rocked with violence, indecency and injustice. I'm not blind to those things, and seeing some of these cruelties of life firsthand on my trip makes me even more upset and discouraged by them. But I am more hopeful than ever that the underlying generosity, kindness and selflessness of human beings will prevail over the evilness and madness of that last one percent. And that confidence was worth everything.

To the second point, when you are traveling alone, as if you were with anyone else in your life, spending time exclusively with yourself for long, long stretches eventually comes to a point when you get really effing sick and tired of her. You spend so much time in your own head, with no real release valve, and you only get to experience things through your own eyes, without ever having the joy of seeing anyone else's reaction or enjoyment of the same set of experiences (the latter is perhaps the most depressing part). You spend a lot of time talking to yourself, giving yourself pep talks to keep your spirits up, making lists and keeping running tallies on your budget and expenditures, people you've met and things you've done, or planning for your future, which sometimes means figuring out where you're going to sleep that night and sometimes means wondering what city you'll be living in ten years from now.

Now generally, none of this would bother me. As it turns out, I really like myself. Probably more than is reasonable, because, while common sense would tell me there are likely things about me that are flawed or annoying, I don't really see them. I am my favorite person to hang out with. Basically, I have long felt that I'm just awesome, and was never really able to shake that view for long. (Thanks a lot, Dad.) And in recent years it became very obvious that I am also a really introverted person, in the purest sense of the word: I derive energy by being by myself. Certainly I really enjoy being with other people, and I think I'm pretty social and outgoing, but those things drain energy from me, whereas lying in bed in a dark room with nothing but my thoughts is the most energizing, entertaining and enjoyable thing I can do. (What can I say... I'm just awesome). Which is why, I think, I was able to make it over three months with pretty much just my thoughts to keep me company. But even I have my limits, and after three months I was sick of the running commentary, sick of the bad mental jokes, sick of the internal monologue and the incredibly predictable yet totally irritating responses to situations, and sick of not having anyone else's voice in the conversation. It was a surprising revelation to me to discover that the difficulty in traveling alone is the same as the difficulty in traveling with a partner: over time, you just get tired of the company.

I spent my last week of the trip in Sharm-el-Sheikh, an entirely tourist-based resort town in the Red Sea Riviera. I stayed for six days, and never once left the hotel compound. I was staying in one of those huge, all-inclusive resorts, which was filled to capacity with Russian couples on their honeymoon. When I went out to the beach to sunbathe, the entire coast was packed with beach chairs, lined up in pairs as though they were about to march onto some patio-furniture-version of Noah's Ark, each set occupied by some beautiful, sunburned blonde couple holding hands and drinking pina coladas. At dinner at the hotel restaurant, I would take a seat by myself and be surrounded by these same couples, gazing into each other's eyes over lit candles and practically eating off the same fork. I was, by no stretch of the imagination, the only solo traveler there. And I didn't really mind this. My week on the Red Sea felt exactly like I was taking a long, romantic honeymoon -- by myself.

That in itself was a really interesting experience: the relaxing, romantic, beach vacation, where you're pampered and luxuriously accomodated in every way, but have no one else to account for. I had no responsibilities at all, no need to repack my bags every night or memorize train schedules, no worry about where my next meal would come from (well, actually, I broke into all-out war with the room service staff by day three, so there were occasional concerns), and no worry about whether I would have to share a room with some horrible, snoring beast. All there was to think about was how this resort, this vacation, this experience compared to my idealized fantasy of my true honeymoon, and how it compared to all of the preceding chaos and madness of my three months in transit.

God help me if my real honeymoon involves a snoring beast.

No, wait. God help him.

This really was the perfect place to decompress and try to start processing all of the overwhelming experiences and emotions of the trip. I knew at this point that I would be heading home after Egypt, having reached a point of emotional and financial exhaustion that I didn't think would make for a particularly fun African safari. With difficult choices like lying on the beach or swimming in the infinity pool, pina colada or mango martini, Swedish massage or Balinese seaweed wrap, I had the perfect atmosphere for thinking, relaxing, and slowly working through all of the complex emotional hangovers of such an overpowering trip. And by Saturday, when entrenchment had created a stalled war of attrition with room service that I knew would have no easy armistice, I was completely ready to head home. Home... America. What a crazy concept.

I knew there would be a moment, some undefined, infintesimal point in time when I would know, spiritually and emotionally, that I was back in the United States. I had no idea what it would be. Getting into an American taxi? Walking into my apartment in Boston? Seeing the Citgo sign? That moment came, unexpectedly, when I stepped off the plane after a twelve hour flight from Cairo to JFK. Taking my first full breath of non-recirculated Delta plane air, I smelled America: the sweet, rich, intoxicating smell of Cinnabon. I was home.

There were two things I wanted to do immediately when I got back to the U.S.: sit and talk with someone I know, and eat fluffy buttermilk pancakes at a greasy spoon diner (not crepes... pancakes.) I had to wait until the morning after I arrived, but I got exactly that. And from that point on, I realized that I was working with some incredible momentum from my trip, a momentum that inspired me to be social, active, and high-energy all the time. To meet new people, and make plans with old friends, and try new things and be busy and productive all the time. Not wanting to lose this momentum, I capitalized on it by making plans to hang out with friends in Boston every single night of the week, something I never used to do, and hosting wine and cheese parties and dinner parties and girls' night parties at my apartment. I packed my schedule with classes and events and social functions, and found that I was living in Boston with the same "tourist" mentality that I had lived with for the whole trip, seeing it in a different light and experiencing a dozen different sides that I never knew where there, and had just taken for granted.

In a lot of ways, it feels like my trip hasn't ended at all. (After all, I'm not back to work yet, so everything is still a vacation at this point.) I'm out doing things every day, new and different things, trying new restaurants and seing shows or sports games, or just walking around and stopping impulsively at little locally-owned fashion boutiques I never even noticed before. But mostly I'm spending a lot of time with people, friends that I know and love, people who add a new but wonderfully familiar voice to the conversation that was for so long completely one-sided. And this is why it took me so long to sit down and write a blog post about my transitional re-entry into life in America. The blog, afterall, was just an extension of my imprisonment in my own head for so long, and having reached the point of total exasperation with myself, I desperately needed some weeks of not thinking about me, not talking about me, and not writing about me. All I wanted to do was talk about someone else for a change, about PowerPoint presentations and ordering Chinese takeout -- to go out and be American, to drink Bud Light in noisy sports bars and go to cheap restaurants where I'm offered six different varieties of sugar, and to relish the fact that nothing ever looks as good as America when you've spent a long time anywhere else.

And the trip is by no means over. My African safari wasn't officially cancelled, just postponed, so I look forward to heading back to the Dark continent for that upcoming adventure in October. One of the amazing things about international travel is that is really makes you feel that the world is so much smaller, and so much more accessible, than you might have thought before. True, it was a twelve hour flight from Cairo to New York, and that's a long damn time to be on a single plane. But it used to take me seventeen hours to get from Anchorage to Dartmouth, a trip I made dozens of times throughout my four years in college. Really, how far away is Africa anyway? Why couldn't I just pack up and go? And Australia? In less than a day I could be on Sydney's sunny shores. Why wouldn't I go? I will keep updating this blog as I slowly tranistion and unwind from my trip, prepare for the changes of life going forward, and, of course, make new travel plans.

I feel not at all hindered in my wanderlust, my travel bug is still alive and well, so I will be taking every possible opportunity to travel anywhere and everywhere I can up until I start work again (and maybe after that!). But now, at least for a little while, I don't think I'll go traveling alone.