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Travel in London: A Collection of Moments

Anyone who has traveled knows that it’s hard to predict how you’ll feel about a place until you’re there. You can swoon over photos and vlogs, savoring the feelings conjured by golden-hour cobblestone streets or mysterious neon-lit night cities or lush green forests, but those feelings belong to photos and vlogs alone. Once you arrive at your destination, it will be different — and you’ll realize it’s not something you could ever preview, or capture.

It’s equally hard to predict the feeling of revisiting a place you’ve been. Every time I visit Dublin, the foreign city in which I have spent the most time, it feels different than I think it will. For it is changing and I am changing, always. And the subtleties of these changes are only felt through the process of exploring the city anew. When returning, I often flash back to my first impressions of Dublin as a study abroad student. In these memories, the city is upside-down and backwards, a blur of second-rate pubs and shoe stores and cold-rainy gray-ness, the places I was thrust into when I had no understanding of its geography, people, and culture. Through the changes I encounter with each visit, those earlier versions are always still with me.

Which brings me to travel in London, a city I wrote about on this blog years ago. When my husband received a grant to conduct research there this summer, I was happy but not sure how I would spend my time. I’d been to London a few times in the past, so I felt not quite like a tourist. But the city was still somewhat upside-down and backwards to me, like Dublin in those early days, and I wasn’t sure if I would take to it.

But because these things never turn out as one expects, of course I was wrong. My travel in London ended up being immensely enjoyable in a way I almost can’t put my finger on. It was a rather nebulous idyll, made up of potent moments. I spent a lot of time out and about not doing much of anything, and therefore was able to soak up the charm of the London scene and its people (When did they become so friendly? I frequently wondered). A town I’d dipped in and out of in the past became, over the course of ten June days, a city of friends and kindred spirits.

It wasn’t the kind of experience one can capture in a travelogue or typical list of highlights, so instead I’ve written up a series of moments which, linked together, have come to summarize my understanding of this city, one which seems to glow with greater warmth (both literally and figuratively) each time I visit.

Fragments of a City

Out in the World

First, I immerse in the leafy stillness of Highgate Cemetery. The dark cool of the vaults. Two inquisitive ladies in linen, a gentle guide with a David Brent accent and boat shoes. He likes the grave of Michael Faraday best. Implies others, which go unnamed, are overrated.

Travel in London: Highgate Cemetery. — Highgate Cemetery.

George Michael is buried here. People didn’t know that until recently, in part because his grave is labeled appropriately with his real name, Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou. Everyone takes pictures while our guide holds in a sigh. I’m not sure why we take photos of graves.

Travel in London: Walking across the Millennium Bridge. — Walking across the Millennium Bridge.

On a Sunday, walking across Millennium Bridge with jangly playlist pumping into headphones, I feel the cool wind off the Thames and take in the splendor (and constant construction) of monumental London. As a teen, this was the kind of thing I always envisioned doing as an adult. And it’s the rare thing that’s just the way you envisioned it, every time. Am I uncool for loving this? I wonder, surrounded by strollers and selfie-takers and souvenir-buyers. The Thames whispers back: Maybe.

Toulouse-Lautrec painting from the National Gallery, London. — Toulouse-Lautrec, *Woman Seated in a Garden*

I walk though the National Gallery in a half-daze on my first day in London; some of it is deja vu and some of it isn’t. Turner’s Rain, Steam and Speed strikes me while his paintings of ships leave me cold. Toulouse-Lautrec’s Woman Seated in a Garden is so refreshing — his dance-hall portraits get all the hype. Plus his portrait of Emile Bernard never goes unnoticed. Young Emile was really my type — he was also quite well-adjusted considering the company he kept.

Later, I visit British Museum, nestled in Bloomsbury, one of my favorite London neighborhoods. The thing is: I can’t enjoy the British Museum. I’ve tried twice and failed. Colonialism looms; the Empire is unappealing to me. The collection is amazing, but it’s like Epcot Center — a showcase of conquered cultures. I creep upstairs to the nearly empty drawing and prints gallery (most of the others are downstairs with the mummies) and have a nice time looking at drawings by “emerging British artists” and some inscrutable Czech prints.

Pubs and Clubs

The Dog & Duck pub in Soho. — The Dog & Duck.

We watch the drunken hordes in Saturday Soho, sunburned and in woozy search of a toilet at the Dog & Duck pub. We stare at a misspelled homage to George Orwell on the wall. Someone has tried (and failed) to scrub out an extra “l” in “allegorical.”

We find a pub, The Betsey Trotwood, that proves to be “our place.” It is plunked down in the middle of the road on a strange jutting median. They are dead polite and have chips and a stereo softly playing Brinsley Schwartz.

The Betsey Trotwood advertises a music night called Oh Trotwood, Up Yours!! Featuring the music of X-Ray Specs, Wire, Patti Smith, Television Personalities and more. We go to the basement and found a small cluster of people in their fifties (with one clump of younger men, possibly someone’s nephews). No way out now, we pay our 10 pounds for raffle tickets. “Number 14 for you,” announces a gent in a bowler hat brandishing a paper number, “which appears to be your age, my dear.” I am well at home in the company of aged hipsters. We win the raffle, of course we do. The prize is a mirror bearing the likenesses of Laurel and Hardy.

Betsey Trotwood pub in Clerkenwell. — Our Xanadu.

The DJ, who might be over 60, is prickly when I make requests. They always are. But he asked me to pose with his Patti Smith LP for a toothy photo that’s now in the universe, somewhere.

On our last night in town we go to a Jon Spencer show in Hackney. Before the band even plays, the fashion show of aging rockabilly couples, mods, and people who wear sunglasses at night indoors is well worth the price of admission. The opening band is a trio of college lads dressed in frightening costumes who fiddle with their instruments and produce squeaky, pseudo-experimental noise. The crowd applauds politely, and it reminds me of a band in an amazing book I’m reading called This is Memorial Device that positions mannequins onstage while tape plays behind a curtain.

Home Base

We stay in King’s Cross, a distinctly unglamorous crossroads of international travelers, and possibly the noisiest place in the world. There is trash and sweat and urine and there are charming cafes and perfect Vietnamese food and converted old churches and fashionably dressed youth. In a clammy Mailboxes Etc., fully expecting to be treated harshly, I am helped by a lovely man and sent out into the street with a cheerful exhortation to “enjoy the beautiful weather!”

St. Pancras train station at night, London. — King’s Cross/St. Pancras at night.

The English breakfast is so satisfying with its hash browns fried into neat triangles and beans poured into a round, orderly crock. I order a vegetarian version with a fried halloumi that is nothing short of amazing. Halloumi is undervalued in the states. We prefer gooey cheese that stretches out everywhere and soaks greasily through bread.

Vegetarian English breakfast with halloumi.

Sometimes you put a load of towels in a British washing machine and select “economy,” which has a leaf next to it implying environment considerations. And then there’s nothing to do but wait four hours for it to finish.

McGlynn's pub near King's Cross, London. — McGlynn’s pub near King’s Cross.

Just streets away from our incredibly loud accommodations on King’s Cross Road is a startlingly peaceful neighborhood. It seems its rows of soft brick buildings somehow block out all the motorcycles and trucks and ambient shouting. We gather on a golden evening in front of McGlynn’s pub and feel like we’ve done something right, on accident.

Books and Records

Travel in London: Gay's the Word bookstore in Bloomsbury. — Gay’s the Word in Bloomsbury.

I had a daydream of going to Gay’s the Word bookstore in Bloomsbury and buying volume one of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper comic and immediately reading the whole thing on a bench in Russell Square. This dream came true. I also bought the uncensored version of The Picture of Dorian Gray and a tiny Pocket Penguin containing Truman Capote’s profile of Marlon Brando and the clerk could not have been more charming.

Ad for a dance night at the Phoenix. — *How does it feel to be loved?*

I spend a day trailing after Robert to record stores. We’re both aware that buying records and getting them home is nearly impossible and yet we do it anyway. I find a Creation Compilation from 1984 and Cherry Red one from 1987 with daisies all over the cover. They both feature the softest, most raggedy dreamy northern indie pop a person could stand. Pale youths with fluffy hair and oversized blazers gaze out of fields in the liner notes.

While we’re in Sounds of the Universe I spot a flyer advertising a indie-pop dance night featuring a leaf-framed photo of the young members of Orange Juice in mod attire. I’ve never wanted to be part of something more, but alas it’s held on the third Saturday. We leave on the third Friday.

Traveling Italy…on the Edge of a Pandemic

I haven’t written for this blog since 2019. And there’s no mystery as to why—a global pandemic has a way of both bringing us all together and keeping us all apart. I’ve been one of the lucky ones in a number of ways, healthy and vaccinated and ready to travel beginning in June. For the past month, I’ve been traveling in Italy, a country just emerging from the throes of the pandemic, where my husband is teaching a study abroad program that we somehow managed to eke out despite restrictions.

And yet I sit here in front of my laptop, looking out the widow onto a cluster of medieval buildings, and I try to think of what to write. How to explain what it feels like to travel at time when I’ve just been reminded exactly what a privilege it is? At a time when hallmarks of climate change are cropping up everywhere, and the damage done by travel is present in each 100+-degree day, in the tall grass turned brown and crispy, in the omnipresent No Grandi Navi (no cruise ships) graffiti on alley walls in Venice? At a time when we’re just been knocked flat and grounded by a pandemic more widespread and serious than anyone living had ever seen?

Like most people, I’ve spent the past year sticking closer to home than ever—working at my little desk overlooking the backyard bird feeder, puttering around in the front yard, watching TV with my husband and listening to records and cooking and spending most nights in the same 1100 square feet of house. There were no restaurants, bars, films or concerts. There were limited gatherings with friends, outside even in the cold, wrapped up in layers and six feet apart. And there were walks—most evenings, I took to walking a two-mile loop around my neighborhood, a routine that now leads me to be recognized around town, like some local eccentric: Haven’t I seen you walking?

How to explain what it feels like to travel now, so far from home, when it seemed like we’d never leave again?

The Pantheon in Rome, Italy with post-pandemic crowds, summer 2021 — The Pantheon in Rome, with a smaller-than-usual crowd outside.

A Little Surprised to Be Face to Face with a World So Alive

This unwieldy heading is one of my favorite lyrics from my favorite song by the band Television, and while in context it’s about drugs and friendship, it also applies nicely to the experience of emerging from one’s COVID cocoon and into a world that feels like new. Everywhere, my home city included, things feel brighter, more exciting, vibrating with months of pent-up emotion and energy, ready to be released (for better or worse, considering the Delta variant).

The great thing about Italy is that to me, as a repeat visitor, it always feels this way—that whole la dolce vita thing, with the nightly passeggiata (evening stroll through the town to see and be seen), the gathering in piazzas for aperitivo (happy hour), the people in storefronts chatting at all times of day, reveling in their community even while tourists like us arrive to gawk at it. What I’ve hoped, as people have continued to get vaccinated and the U.S. has “opened back up,” is that we can become a little bit more like Italy, with more outdoor dining and events, more emphasis on community and the social aspects of daily life. (It remains to be seen whether late capitalism will allow it.)

This Italy study abroad trip was a new experience for us: while we’ve led programs before, this summer’s was the most comprehensive, with an action-packed first week-and-a-half hitting Rome, Pompeii, Sorrento/Capri, and Venice, before settling in to our university’s home base of Arezzo, situated in the hills of Tuscany near Florence. With a 0-60 start, our trip was exhilarating if a bit destabilizing after all those months at home, but as I write this, we’ve settled into a lovely, languid pace as we ride out the final days in Arezzo.

So has the pandemic changed Italy, at least in the eyes of a tourist? I’m happy to report that it hasn’t—not in the important ways. It still maintains that sense of public life, of community, of slow, relaxed living that is somehow also loud and boisterous. Due to lingering travel restrictions, the number of worldwide tourists is mercifully fewer, but that fact is only noticeable at the big attractions—Venice’s Rialto Bridge, Rome’s Vatican City and Forum, Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. Italians and European tourists have more than filled any kind of void with palatable energy, brimming over from packed outdoor cafes and public parks. It’s the same Italy, but I’m not the same in it—after a year and a half of pandemic, I’m a little bewildered, and perhaps more observant and grateful.

A canal in a quieter Venice, Italy post-pandemic, 2021 — A canal in a quieter Venice post-pandemic, 2021

Post-Pandemic Travel Pressure

I was thinking recently about how the experience of travel changes when you become responsible for yourself. On our study abroad trip, much of what the students do is planned out and pre-arranged, and they spend many days on guided tours and in the classroom, learning about what they’re seeing. In some ways, this is an incredible opportunity to really learn about the art and culture they’re soaking up, but they are missing a bit of what it means to travel as an adult—when the responsibility of communicating and navigating and connecting rests entirely on you.

I think back now to when I first fell in love with traveling, as a teenager going places with my parents, and how enjoyable it was to just go along with whatever they had planned. As the wife of an instructor on a study abroad program, I could do that again. But it doesn’t hold the same appeal it used to, especially as the pandemic and climate change have made leisure travel feel endangered. Now I’ve got a voice inside, telling me to seize the opportunity, to get all I can out of this, to appreciate it while I can. It’s a bit aggressive, this voice, and so much of this trip has been a mental balance for me—I take the voice’s point, but I also want to indulge in some of that slow living I mentioned. Floating along is not mere laziness; it also invites spontaneity.

Lively Piazza Grande in Arezzo, Italy, 2021

Seizing the Day in Italy

For better or worse, then, I’ve approached this summer’s travel with a rather serious mentality. We’ve all been anxious the past year, thinking about things like isolation and connection and community more than ever, and I’ve brought this baggage with me to Italy. I want to connect this time, I thought to myself, pouring over my pitiful Mango language lessons prior to departure. I’ve tried to be less shy and self-conscious, to use my minimal Italian and hold my own on the streets, to not become dejected when the inevitable confusion ensues. The thing about really making an effort as a traveler, though, is that it can be harder. If you take responsibility for yourself, it’s more frustrating, with benefits that are not often recognizable until much later (perhaps the next time you travel, when you will find yourself feeling more comfortable for reasons you can’t put your finger on).

But this time around, I have tried to revel in small the small moments of confidence and ease—for example, when my broken Italian has been rewarded head-nods of understanding, even the occasional beaming Certo! Or the time I bonded with the bartender in a tiny cocktail lounge in Rome by complimenting the music he was playing, an overture that was met with great enthusiasm. Or when I attended an Italian indie rock concert with local friends and felt like a real part of life in Arezzo (even when an uptight superfan “shushed” me, the loud American, between songs).

One thing that has always felt especially frustrating to me is grocery shopping in a foreign country; grocery stores all seem very much alike, and yet there are hidden rules that will embarrass you if you’re not careful. The Italian supermarket Conad has struck fear into my heart since the day two years ago when I was castigated for standing in a closing checkout line (a light was blinking, apparently). But this year I encountered a kinder, gentler Conad—and not just because I’d already learned the rules. It was there in the supermarket, putting on my plastic gloves to weigh the produce, that I realized the pandemic itself has actually had, in a small way, a positive impact on how we relate to each other in public life.

The streets of Sorrento, Italy, just reopening after the pandemic, 2021

COVID Confusion: The Great Equalizer

This realization came following challenges in Sorrento, which had just reopened the week before we visited. Everyone was hungry for business while also taking precautions to the extreme. I decided to do some shopping one afternoon before a group dinner with our students, and with my mask secured over my face, I thought I knew how to approach the situation. But upon entering a linen shop, a saleswoman began following me around as though I might shoplift, pulling out clothes and showing them to me until I left hastily in confusion. What had I done wrong? I wondered. Were they that desperate for business, or did I look like I was about to make off with an overpriced tunic?

The answer didn’t occur to me until we had our hotel breakfast the next morning. The breakfast was on a buffet table, but instead of helping ourselves as we had in the past, we were required to line up and tell the beleaguered young employees each thing we wanted heaped onto our plates. The system was strange and slow, but illuminating: I realized with embarrassment that what I had seen as an overzealous saleswoman was actually someone, confused as I was, trying to follow a tangled web of COVID protocols. We could not touch buffet food and we could not touch merchandise. As I thought about it more, I realized it was sad—those shop owners so excited to finally reopen, only to be told they could not allow customers to browse.

Confusing? Hell yes. But these experiences made me realize that travel in pandemic, in some ways, has made daily interactions LESS scary. Before, you see, I thought I was the only one who didn’t know the rules—that is how we tourists typically operate, concerned about looking like a fool with one false move. But now, with increasing complex pandemic restrictions, no one knows the rules. We’re all fools, and we’re all trying our best (well, most of us—I’m deliberately ignoring the belligerent anti-masking folks here). There’s a graciousness that wasn’t there before, a bit of understanding from both sides that this world is not so easy to navigate, and never has been.

Mid-afternoon shadows on a medieval building, Arezzo, 2021

Bringing It All Back Home

To try to summarize these stray thoughts, I have to say that for me, travel in the age of the pandemic includes perhaps a bit too much overthinking, but also a sense of awareness and generosity—I’m more aware of my own privilege and others’ generosity, and in turn more generous in my interactions and reactions.

I’ll admit that when we finished the first leg of our rapid-fire tour through guidebook-Italy and settled at our apartment in Arezzo, I was at a bit of a loss. I felt like I’d seen it all before but also like I was a tourist for the first time. What did we just do? I asked myself. Who am I in this context, trailing after a group of students, pinging around from St. Peter’s Basilica to Capri’s blue grotto to the Peggy Guggenheim to the Uffizi? Who am I now, leisurely reading by day in a Tuscan garden and congregating over deliciously sour white wine at night in a piazza beneath an astounding old church?

I’m lucky. I’m guilty. I’m an interloper. I’m a visitor. I’m a participant in life, here, in this place.

A participant—as a traveler, that’s really all any of us want to be, isn’t it? And when I’m sitting in my room next to an open French window and I hear the clinking dishes from the apartment next door, the voices in the courtyard, the church bells from the duomo which looms over it all, I have to remind myself that this is it. You’re here, and that’s all you need to be. It applies to traveling of course, especially when that aggressive voice pipes up, imploring you to make the most of the experience, see everything, do everything. But it also applies to our lives back home.

It reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s famous “This is Water” speech, something I’ve assigned to students for its uniquely incisive take on a modern dilemma: we ignore the good things that are right in front of us, and this leads to a lack of compassion. Something many have learned during COVID, I think, is that participating, being here is not just what happens when we’re on vacation. It happens any time we think to notice it. I’m here. This is the world. Isn’t it glorious.

On Losing Yourself: Preparing for a Trip Abroad

After a long hiatus, I’m excited to resume my writing about travel! As much as I enjoy writing about travel all times of the year, I’ve gotten out of practice due to work, other creative projects and various life events (including having to unexpectedly move), not to mention the fact that I haven’t done much Traveling with a capital “T.” But my husband is teaching a study abroad course in Italy this summer and attending a conference in Dublin beforehand, with me along for the ride. (He noted that he did not even tell me he applied to such a conference until he received his acceptance because, apparently, I tend to get unduly excited about such prospects.) So I currently find myself, for the first time since my spring semester abroad 15 years ago (yes, I am now OLD), preparing to spend a substantial amount of time (two months) abroad. It’s pretty cool, and I feel incredibly lucky that we (barely) have the money and the flexibility to pull it off. But I do have one small worry: that my anticipation, high expectations and tendency to over-plan juuuuust might be my downfall.

Born to Itinerary

The thing is, I am a great planner. I love planning a trip, something I didn’t realize until I planned my first, our honeymoon to Dublin (where we met) in 2016. I was drunk on the freedom of deciding where we would go and what we would do, thrilled by the ability to put together pieces on how we could get to each place and move smoothly from one thing to the next. The truth is, I was probably born to be a travel agent (but not really, because the idea of dealing regularly with airlines makes my palms sweat). But this tendency doesn’t necessary help one enjoy travel; in fact, it can have the opposite effect. While I strive to take a slower pace and avoid the marathon sightseeing of the stereotypical tourist, I have to admit that the kind of planning I do – writing down in a notebook everything I’d like to do, reading restaurant and coffeeshop reviews and the best hive-mind recommendations – is not exactly a recipe for the more romantic and immersive aspects of travel I claim to love.

The Beauty of Being a Know-Nothing

When I think about the experiences that solidified my love of travel, after all, they were not those that I had written beforehand in a mini-notebook or booked through Trip Advisor. During my semester abroad in Dublin, for example, I pretty much knew nothing about anything, bouncing around to whatever bars and clubs that I heard about from my peers (quite a few of them trendy hell-holes), wandering the streets not knowing where or what the historical, cultural or other tourist attraction were, but rather learning as I came across them. (My brother loves to tell the story about visiting me a few weeks into my study abroad experience and having to point out the Spire of Dublin to me, which I had never noticed despite standing right next to it.)

When I returned to Dublin (and I will again this summer), it was with a mind of correcting that behavior a bit, learning more history and culture and trying to go to “good,” “authentic” and “historical” places. Did I see interesting things and eat good food? Yes, of course. But was it more impactful and enriching than the first experience? Absolutely not. Sometimes to really immerse in a culture, you have to try losing yourself, ignoring that pesky controlling voice within. Sometimes, I suppose, you’ve just got to go to some trendy hell-holes to see the light.

Yet with our two-month European adventure – to Ireland, England, The Netherlands and Italy – just a few days away, I’ve already written way too much in my little notebook (and the impulse remains to write more). The travel agent in my head wonders if it isn’t a good idea to look up a few more London restaurant recommendations, to pour over my Dublin map and find out what route I might take on a meander (yes, I’d still prefer to call it that) through the city. You really should review a map of Venice, it says, despite the fact that I’m not even going there until July, and I’ll have my laptop and phone with me the entire trip.

Thus, I’m attempting to push that little travel agent within aside. Instead of building my anticipation and sheer delight at the thought of the summer ahead (and that delight is a big reason travel planning is such an addiction), I’ve decided to turn my attention to why I really enjoy travel. I’ve written in the past about things I like to do when traveling, the places I love, and why travel is important, but in my cloud of precision-planning, I don’t want to lose my own reasons for travel, its mental and emotional impact.

Focusing on the Why

So, why is it that I like to travel? This may seem like a strange question, as generally in our society long-distance travel, even for work, is something about which we’re expected to be excited. When I happen to share the news that I’m embarking upon a two-month trip to Europe, the standard responses include “That’s so exciting!” “You must be so excited!” “I’m jealous!” etc., etc. I’m sure that, in part, this has to do with my tone and countenance; if I sighed heavily and explained that I *had* to travel all summer because my husband was dragging me all sorts of places, perhaps they’d react differently. (Though they’d probably think I was at best odd and at worst a potentially miserable person.) But what is it about going somewhere with a different culture (even one that’s only slightly different in the grand scheme of things) that feels so thrilling?

Lost and Found

There are many schools of thought on travel, and it’s honestly a subject that’s been written to death by backpacker types on every blog and website imaginable (insert photo here of girl in anorak standing on edge of mountain). Two perspectives seem to come up again and again: 1) that travel helps you find yourself and 2) that it helps you lose yourself. I’ve personally vacillated between these. I think of the times, when I was a kind simple traveling to my grandparents’ house in eastern Pennsylvania from Illinois, how I felt blissful at the opportunity to be away from home, and how it stoked my imagination with dreams of being somebody different. I think of the delight I feel still in being anonymous on a foreign city street, in a market, on a bus or train, willing myself to fall into a new city’s complex choreography. These sensations fit pretty snugly in category two.

But I also think of the more enriching moments of travel, the negotiations and interactions, the attempts to explain myself and to find out about others. I think of the things I’ve seen and the things I’ve learned, and how I must wedge them into my formed conception of the world, how I’ve turned them over in my mind and processed them through my experiences. I think of the experience of a semester abroad, and how what at first felt disappointing and disorienting became a time of personal evolution, of coming of age and developing a sense of myself.

It’s this last thing that really gets to the heart of it. The fact is, travel can be about both losing yourself and finding yourself. If I really dig deep to suss out the appeal of travel, to me, is the way it combines a feeling of hyperawareness of oneself with a sort of forced reset. Thrust yourself into a foreign country, with all its attendant communication issues and challenges, and you’re forced to confront the person you truly are: how you relate to others, how you respond to challenges, what aspects of culture you are drawn to, which ones you misunderstand or fear. You are removed from the familiar surroundings that sometimes obscure these aspects of your identity, and thus they come into sharp relief.

But you lose yourself in some ways, too. Trying to forge relationships with those from other cultures can be challenging; because you lack a cultural shorthand and perhaps also have a language barrier, it can be difficult to show them who you really are. It can be frustrating to compare these encounters to those with friends at home, and wish the people you met abroad could know you in that same way. But isn’t it thrilling to be someone ever-so-slightly different, to figure out how to present yourself in a new context? To navigate new situations like this can make us feel foolish and uninteresting (in Italian my conversation is basically limited to asking a person how they are, and then naming different types of food, clothing and animals) but it also shakes you out of complacency, and forces you to answer for your beliefs and attitude in ways you never have before.

Coping Mechanisms for Losing Yourself

When I’ve led study abroad classes in the past, I’ve at times had to check my frustration when students become absorbed in Instagram during sightseeing expeditions, meals or meetings, or when they ignore the tour guide’s insights in favor of discussions about the minutiae of life back home. Think about where you are! I want to remind them. You may not be here again! And yet, I also realize that these behaviors are not a sign of apathy or disinterest per se: they are in fact a natural response to the unmooring sensation of travel. The students are out of their cultural context – many for the first time – and it can feel alien and dangerous; not only in the sense of physical, walking-down-an-unfamiliar-street-at-night danger, but in the sense of losing the context within which we feel defined and unique. Some of us turn to social media and to banal discussions of fraternity parties to continue to grasp a firm identity, to make sure we still understand ourselves.

And some of us, we plan.

It’s a natural reaction and, whether or not you give in, travel will change you.

I know that this summer will not be as life-changing as a first trip abroad, but I also know that if I let go a little, these two months will have something to teach me. Here’s hoping I can stay committed to write a bit about the amazing places I will visit. Stay tuned!