Before I flew off to college in August, I promised myself that I would take every chance from the next four years to #doacrazythingincollege, before having a job and paying taxes and having to appear *shudder* respectable intervened in the great practice of making a good story. With that in mind, I am now sitting in Vevey, Switzerland (I have no idea where Vevey is, except that it is in Switzerland and on the way from Milan to Paris) after having had 11 hours added to my flying time, a lost luggage bag, a phone that was thought lost but actually sitting in someone’s bag, airbnb mishaps, no accommodation booked for when I travel to Barcelona, and travel companions who didn’t want to eat Italian food in Italy. If “crazy things” also involve #badtraveldecisions, then I have (slightly unfortunately) done a great many crazy things in a very short time. But #badtraveldecisions also lead to #goodtravellessons, so here is my attempt to talk about #travel and #college and how they intersect (and hopefully make it entertaining as well); let’s start with booking my flight to leave Boston...way before my final papers were due.
The nice thing about taking different classes is that they all “finish” at different times, not all of them have finals that require you to physically be present on campus, so on and so forth; this means that sometimes you luck out and have a really, really extended winter break. Sometimes you also believe (#probablymistakenly) that you would be able to finish all your final papers way before the deadlines, and thus get an even longer winter break. And then you end up in an airbnb apartment in Rome, trying to battle jetlag and figure out lost luggage while furiously typing your essays, wondering why you ever thought this would be a good idea. Now, this was probably a #badtraveldecision, and I probably (always) could have had better time managment, but I like to think about it this way: we (I) always procrastinate anyway, so would you rather procrastinate by heading down to an increasingly empty dining hall, or walk to the Pantheon? (Walk to the Pantheon #5eva)
In general though, #badtraveldecisions are probably due to #badplanning...not always just by you. Sometimes your airline schedules connecting flights really close together, meaning you’re going to arrive in Naples 11 hours after you were supposed to because of an unexpected delay, and manages to leave your luggage behind in Paris, and has really bad communication channels about what is happening to said luggage. Sometimes the people you’re travelling with didn’t realise that, #surprise, there is mostly Italian food in Italy. Sometimes you just have really bad communication with your airbnb host and no idea how to checkout...5 minutes before you absolutely need to leave the apartment (#notfun). Life happens, #badtravel happens, and at some point you’re probably sitting somewhere in Milan wondering why you got on the plane in the first place. But:
You’re going to walk up to a baggage counter for the first time as your own person, not someone’s child, and have someone address you with full respect. You’re going to have to figure out, on your own, how to deal with losing a key, and not freak out or break down while relying on someone else to solve it for you. You’re going to order wine, order something that you’d like to drink, and the waiter’s going to ask you, not your parents, to taste the wine, before pouring it for the rest of the table. Traveling after starting college, without your parents, is like becoming a fuller version of yourself; the years pass, you know you grow older, but you never truly feel the weight of that age till there’s no one else around you asking for your parents, till you’re alone in a foreign place with no safety call.
And it is after starting college, after solidly living in another place other than “home” (though, this is probably felt a lot stronger by international students), that you begin to appreciate places for their own sake. At least for me, I no longer compare places and sights to Singapore in my head; Italy is not more or less chaotic than Singapore, Italy just is Italy, for everything that it offers. Knowing the sense of my self more, the wet cobblestones gleaming in Rome take their own significance; they’re not poetic because I cannot find them at home, they’re poetic because of the way light attaches itself like a second skin, an almost-mirror of the world around. And for all the mishaps of #badplanning in #badtraveldecisions, there is the beauty of stumbling; of discovering the painted walls of Sant’Ambrogio, where columns seem to melt into a world beyond the surface of ours, or seeing the sun set in Switzerland, understanding why people used to fear that the sun would never return, half of the world lit, and half in shadow.
Make a #badtraveldecision. Be with bad travellers; be a bad traveller. Learn while stepping onto airplanes, while running for trains, while fumbling with complicated swiss locks; you will learn so much more about what it means to be a person, moving through the world, what you have decided about places, rather than what people have said. Leave the dorms early, even though it feels like leaving home again; even though, and I know you won’t think this now but it will happen, your campus, your dorm, maybe even just your tiny room, will be home and leaving will feel every much as if you were leaving the house you live in right now, for somewhere strange and fantastic. Make the bad decisions, because stumbling is part of learning to walk; and isn’t college all about learning to walk through the world, as our own person?
P.S. If you were wondering about the #slightlyexcessive use of #hastags in this blog post, #shoutout to Price Figurelli-Reid who said that we “need to talk about appropriate use of hashtags”, to which I reply: #pffffttt.