Hi. It’s me.
I’ve been away, but okay.
I’m sorry, but in May I didn’t have the energy to write anymore after work (which was usually late o’clock anyway), nor the desire to look at a computer during my free time.
I also went to Barcelona.
At the risk of this sounding like this is becoming a travel blog, let me just say: there is no risk of this becoming a travel blog. For one thing, I basically believe that no one sincerely likes hearing about someone else’s trip. Second, I don’t travel that much. I was fortunate to get to go on this trip and went for a design conference that I had been interested in for a while.
On the first day, exactly 12 hours after I had made my late landing into Spain, I met up with a former classmate who happen to be in the city for that one day and someone I from couchsurfing that I agreed to meet up with. We spent the day together, seeing some of the touristy sites like Montjuïc and the Arc de Triomf, dotted with lots of side trips for ice cream.
But the kind of moments I like best is when you stumble across something and just go with it. Actually, there doesn’t even have to be a thing, just the willingness to go along. Slightly lost on our way by to the city, we stumbled across this swing in the park. You sat on the disc with the chain between your legs and had to try to propel yourself on the zipline across.
Or stopping the promenade to all play with our cameras, which neither I nor Winston knew how to use.
Wenni dancing through the rollerblader’s obstacle course.
Which is to say, my favorite part of being somewhere is creating moments to look back on. Sometimes I’m guilty of robotically snapping pictures of things I see that are just different from my normal life, but are not necessarily things that have captured my attention. Example: seeing a highly-decorated building in Barcelona that looks totally different from it’s surroundings. I could just take the picture and assume it’s famous, but I sometimes stop myself because I’m like “When I go through my pictures later I’m not going to want to look back on this house.” (This does not apply to the Sagrada Família, of course. Which I was absolutely stunned by and wanted to spend all day in).
I guess the story I want to tell is…the story is never in the pictures (I’m hoping most people stopped reading by now). Or rather, my stories are never in the pictures. I remember thinking as the week progressed how, it must look like I have an exciting and fun life. Pfft. When the conference started and I saw mostly groups of friends dressed to kill, and my deeply socially awkward core shriveled at the sight. I realized how exhausted I was at the thought of meeting new people. I’ve spent the last 10 months in the painful process of meeting new people and trying to re-create something that feels like home—and yet it still feels like just a place I sleep.
Put another way, I think what people find refreshing about traveling is being able to break away from where they’re from, to be unknown, and to be untethered to their old identity. But since I don’t feel that close to anyone right now anyway, I was like “oh, no, more of this?” and retreated. Don’t get me wrong, I was amicable: I would talk to the person I sat next to, on two separate occasions I invited another attendees to share a meal with me. Plus, you saw that I made a new friend that I spent 2.5 days with.
But for the most part, I doodled.
I guess what the trip told me is that, I think I’m ready to travel with people now and to have a home that I travel away from.
I’m also non-stop introspective. I don’t need to travel for that. Right, Iggz?