live to inspire

“Are 80 % of travellers on the run? I say 100% are. They are on the run towards life, not away from anything. Sure, they may have skeletons in their closets, as does everyone, but they are leaving them behind not running from them.”

…a checklist for things I want to accomplish for the rest of my 20s (in no particular order):

• Get comfortable conversing in French. Ideas for achieving this include a French Immersion Program in Montreal, self language study through books, reading-writing, and watch cool French films, getting a conversation buddy (and/or penpal).
• Visit or even stay in France for a long duration to fully immerse myself in the language. Have a job as an au pair there like my friend has or go WWOOFing there as a volunteer. 
• Go to fucking Turkey. And sail between the Greek islands.
• Backpack through a South American country for an extended adventure (at least a month). Pick up some Spanish. Volunteer. Friends in Chile, Colombia, Brazil, and possibly Bolivia. :)
• Set foot further down the African continent. Senegal (aunt lives there and great for my French), Tanzania (friends there), and Uganda (self-interest) are all places I would like to visit.
• Get myself to Mumbai in India. I have a growing interest in slum-related issues and would like to see Dharavi with my own eyes. Also Kerala & Goa sound lovely.
• Have a road-trip with some friends somewhere… like down to Cali (OR MEXICO) or something.
• Learn more about (and gain skills) in farming and urban agriculture. I want to get my hands dirty. UBC Farm volunteering locally and WWOOFing globally are great options.
• Run a fucking marathon (without walking). 
• Write (and finish) a story that means a lot to me.
• Apply (and get into) Grad School for a more specialized skill set. Right now, I want to integrate development, urban agriculture, food security, urban planning, and holistic public health into a specialization of urban health through food security (via atm, urban agriculture, community kitchens, etc.).
• LIVE.

There’s probably (definitely) a lot more to this list, but this is good for now. It’s good to outline what I want to do in the long-run (once in a while). I’m laughing because more than half of what’s on there is travelling. Can’t relieve itchy feet, haha. How the hell am I going to afford all of this and when do I put in real job stuff?

Well, I did tell Mom that I probably won’t be living super comfortably or stably (is that a word?) for a while. And if you really look at it (aside from the pure travel/adventure bits), I’m aiming to develop hands-on skills through volunteering/interning and language + farming skills. I’m best with hands-on learning after all.

Let’s see where the winds take me. Now to figure out an order…

• I want to wait for my flight to my next destination at an airport, ticket and passport in hand.
• I want to get lost in a city that I do not know.
• I want to immerse myself in the sounds of a foreign language.
• I want to not worry about what I’m going to wear each day by living simply out of a backpack.
• I want to lose myself to a great expanse of natural beauty, breathing in its serenity.
• I want to meet more interesting travelers and have spontaneous adventures with them.
• I want to move.

laughingsquid:

2012 in 366 seconds, A Photographer Documents His Year in Daily One Second Increments

(Source: jamesbernal)

Really. I didn’t have a pinch of it in me during the entire time I’ve been back home. I just didn’t see the need to feel so festive at a certain time of year - if we really wanted to make each day of our year count, wouldn’t we take more effort to show how much we care for our loved ones any time of year? That’s the thought that kept crossing my mind. Call me a Scrooge. But to me, Christmas Eve was like any other day.

I guess I could count it into the fact that Christmas holidays coincided with the weeks of me transitioning back into Canadian society after being abroad for nearly a year. To me, I would have seen all of my friends and family anyway. Christmas just happened to be a coincidence. 

But as I kept myself entertained this evening on Facebook, I switched my profile photo to one of me and my friend N from Norway. It made me smile. So I messaged her. This made me think of my roommate from India. So I wished her a Merry Christmas on her wall. Then it was my Indian translator/friend who I knew would be totally psyched when I wished him a happy xmas. My American friend wished me happy holidays and we had a nice conversation. He was home in DC for Christmas but was on his way back to Beirut and was trying to convince my Japanese roomie to come meet him in Turkey. I messaged my Norwegian penpal who has been doing field research in Bolivia and my lovely Croatian friend whom I also keep in touch with. Now, I’m emailing my Chilean friend who I have been missing dearly. 

Reminiscing all the memories I have with all friends I’ve made abroad has warmed my heart though. Although thinking of them makes my feet itch to travel once more, it also has put me in a more Christmas-y mood. To show them that I still think of them and miss them. To tell them that we haven’t bid each other adieu.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Make sense of things. Document my experiences this last year. Somehow I was so absorbed in it all that I failed to jot things down as they happened. 

It’s not being stuck in the past. It’s reflecting on them as my memory sees fit now in the present. It’s bringing new meaning into experiences I’ve had. As stories. Because I am a storyteller at heart. 

So here we go. Sixteen countries. Sixteen chapters for each. A story within each nation. Whether they will be completely truthful accounts of what I experienced there will be up to my fingers as I write. Maybe I will remember things differently. Maybe I will be inspired to add some fictional details. The point is, it is completely up to me. That’s the beauty of fiction.

First chapter to work on (and it’s a whopper to reminisce about): Norway.

So it has been just over 3 weeks since I have returned back home to Vancouver. I still wake up each morning in a sort of daze, as if I’m still not sure where I am this time around.  It’s as if I got up and was whisked away down the rabbit hole to Wonderland, and in true Alice-fashion, I woke up from dreaming. Except it’s not. The last 10 months really did happen. All I have to do is stare at the tattoo on my left foot and up at all the photos of my adventures abroad pasted on my bedroom wall to confirm it. Wonderland was a real place.

But as all adventures go, coming back home is the most difficult part of the journey. It certainly was for me. It took me a while to stop walking around the streets I knew well in a sort of strange awe; I half-expected someone to greet me in Norwegian or an Indian cow to pass me on the sidewalk. My bed felt like a nostalgic yet foreign marshmallow to sleep compared to the dorm and hostel beds I was now used to. It’s a sort of paradox, really: everything feels familiar but it’s not.

But reverse culture shock aside, it was seeing old faces that caused me the most distress. I didn’t know what to say when they asked me where I had been.

“So where have you been all this time?”

Sixteen countries. “…A lot of places.”

“Oh wow, which was your favourite place?”

In what way? “I don’t really know right now.”

“Are you happy that you’re back?”

Yes and no. “I’m not sure.”

Really, I didn’t know what to say. How could I talk about my trip without seeming like I was bragging? How could I talk about the stories I had – of which I could talk about for hours – to people at work where small talk was more appropriate? There was only so much I could say before the polite nodding would make me understand that there was no real way to bridge a gap between someone who just had not been there with me. Who weren’t completely interested because they had their own busy lives to live. There would always be things left unsaid.

For a long time, I struggled with that. I began to jokingly think that maybe I had just dreamed the whole thing. It’s a bit better now – my family and a few friends are quite understanding. But there’s only so much we can talk about my year. More often than not, the conversation always drifts back to the present and future.

The last 3 weeks for me have been a period of transition. I left Canada in January 2012 in order to step outside the small bubble called my life. Now that I’ve returned, I find myself in inside the thin membrane between these two worlds: my old life at home and the world outside.

But if I’ve realized anything this year, it’s that I can’t go back inside the bubble. I have to pop it. Travelling abroad – studying in Norway, backpacking Europe, and working in India – this has been my life for the past year. The extent of impact these experiences have had on me as a person are not crystal clear yet, but I do know that I have been shaped by them. I can’t discount them because I have trouble talking about these experiences with others. 2013 is fast approaching and with it comes my final semester at UBC. It’s the next chapter in this journey I call my life. And that’s what I’m choosing to see it as: a journey. Another destination. Another adventure.

See Vancouver is not in a bubble for me any more. The places I’ve been have shown me how to explore and Vancouver is no different. It is local but ultimately part of the global that I’ve only grazed the surface on. I want to see this city of mine with the eyes of a traveller. To marvel at all of the exquisite qualities it has to offer me. This semester, I’m discovering Vancouver.

Somehow, by still identifying myself as a traveller, my anxieties have been eased. The magic of the Wonderland I’ve discovered are waiting to be found here in this new place.

Down the rabbit hole I go again.

I’m leaving in 4 days. I don’t know how I feel about that. Happy. Excited. Maybe I’ve missed home all this time. I really won’t know if I’m a hopeless wanderer until I go back and see how I feel readjusting back into my old life.

Old life. Does that mean the last 10 months have just an extravagant escapist fantasy? Never really attached to anything. Always on the move. Even when making friends, there’s always that creeping thought at the back of your mind saying, “You’ll be saying goodbye to them anyway so why bother?”

This is the world I’ve been so desperate to see. And I’ve barely scratched the surface. But often I wonder if it’s even possible to do that. Always the outsider. The foreigner. The observer. Somehow, I can never call the places I’ve been home.

Perhaps I’m aching for some attachment. Or perhaps when I find myself finding attachment, I will fleetingly wander off again, like a hummingbird that never perches still.

Maybe that’s just who I am.

sarahhhh-:

go lovely go 

Go - Avalanche City

Fell in love with this song - it really resonates with me and my wanderlust spirit.

It hit me just now: the realization that I live in two different worlds.

First is the world I currently live in. Here, my current home is in India. In this country, I wear Ali Baba pants, hop on and off auto rickshaws daily, and brave places that cannot even be called ‘toilets’.  I haggle for everything and bobble my head.  I walk the crowded streets of Jaipur, with a cow passing me every so often so nonchalantly. This is my day-to-day life at present, but in this surreal world, I’m never still. India is only my current stop. This is a world where I’m travelling constantly to new and wondrous places. Meeting new people from all over the world. Experiencing new languages and cultures. This is life I currently live.

Second is the world I left behind. The world as I knew it back in Vancouver, Canada. Where I grew up. Went to school. Had friends, family, and a job that I loved. Sometimes, I close my eyes and try to remember a regular day for me in that world: I slam the snooze on my alarm and groggily shoo my dog out of my bed as I get ready for school. Here I wear jeans, a nice scarf and pea coat, paired off with a pair of black boots. Standard UBC fashion. I race other transiting students out of the skytrain, down the escalator to get first in line to the direct bus to my school campus every morning and hit a couple z’s on the bus ride there. I hurry to my classes, maybe see a friend during break. On weekends I drive to work. I have a permanent layer of chlorine on my skin. Sometimes I walk. Go for a run in the rain. Tumblr. Cram for midterms.

You know, after reminiscing a normal day for me in my world from a year ago, I’m not so sure which one is more surreal – the one then or this current world of mine. There are a lot of spaces in that old world of mine where I have a ton of time I just spent… procrastinating. Daydreaming about this world now. Even though I have a lot more free time abroad (that’s with my fair share of lazy days too), it feels… fuller. That old world is just a flash of events that don’t seem to interlink – as if I was really dreaming that old life and flashing through the mundane bits. There are definitely parts about it that I miss. But more so than that, there is so much more that I want to bring into that old world of mine from this current one. Every day I spend in India is so full of colour (quite literally – the women here wear the brightest scarves and saris) and when I think back to Canada, everything I remember is in hues of grey and blue. Did I really spend all that time cooped in my room? Why didn’t I go out more? Make use of my time? Get to know my own city?

I often think about the day I return to Canada. November 28^th. I wonder how I will feel. How I will see the city. My job. My school. My home. There’s a part of me that’s afraid to go back to that old world – afraid that all of the colour I’ve soaked in this year will fade away with the Vancouver rain. I’m afraid that I will find everything the same as I left it.

I don’t want to see it that way. I feel right now, these are two different worlds that belong to me, but they are very much detached from each other. No one in Canada can really know the people I’ve met or the things I’ve experienced out here just like my friends here haven’t a clue about my life back at home. I’m afraid that when I go back, I’ll feel so detached from that world after experiencing this one.

If that old world is in a protective bubble, I stepped out into this new world eight months ago. I don’t want to just go back inside. I want to pop the bubble. I want the colours of this world to seep into my old one. I want my worlds to merge.   

So I hope that when I fly back to Canada, I will see everything with new eyes – as Vancouver is only the latest destination in my travels. A new colour in my life.