Naked Without My Passport

Usually when I get on a plane, I'm going to Europe. I have to show my passport at three or four airports before I make it to my destination. When I finally get to my hotel, I have to show my passport there, too – most European hotels won't let you check in without one. Even walking around a European city, I need my passport. Internet cafes always require one, and sometimes just sending a fax means showing a passport. If I realize I left my hotel without my passport, my first reaction is I panic.

Which is why I now feel naked without my passport. I keep reminding myself that, as a US citizen, I can travel domestically with just my driver's license, but it doesn't help. Every few seconds I catch my breath and think “Oh my god! I forgot my passport!” Then I have to breathe deeply and remind myself that I did not forget my passport, I left it at home on purpose because I don't need it.

Even now as I sit at my gate - well past security and check in – I periodically feel that something is amiss. I think for a second, trying to figure out what's causing my feeling of unease, and then it hits me – I'm still concerned about that stupid passport.

What really worries me, though, is the following scenario: I accidentally leave my carry-on with its precious cargo of shoes under the bench at my gate. I walk onto the plane with just my tote bag over my shoulder and my trench coat over my arm. I put my trench in the overhead bin and my tote under the seat in front of me. Suddenly, I think: aren't I supposed to have something else?

Of course not. This flight is domestic. For the last time – I don't need my passport!

Copyright 2010 Sara Harding

Back On The Wagon

Detail of a work of art in Square Roland Dorgeles, Paris

Good grief! (And thanks, Mr. Brown, for the use of your catchphrase.) I confess I was better at this blogging thing back when I received a per-post wage. Clearly I am not ready to quit my day job and become a full-time writer. I had a decent excuse for not posting up until September 17, when AT&T finally got around to connecting my internet (over a week later than they promised), but beginning September 18 the fault became totally my own.

But enough with the self-flagellation and on with the show!

I want to pick back up by suggesting that everyone read Robert Pippin's excellent post in yesterday's New York Times Opinionator, "In Defense of Naive Reading." Why am I directing readers of a travel blog to an opinion piece about literary criticism? Because of this statement: "Literature and the arts.... invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language."

Right on, Mr. Pippin.

That statement pretty much sums up both what is amazing about travel and why it is so hard to write about. Travel is an aesthetic experiences. Like literature and art, travel is transformative. A good "naive reader" of the travel experience takes in details at a level that precedes worded thought. We walk through our new surroundings the way we read a great novel or see a great work of art. We are impressed by things we don't realize we noticed. We feel connections and relationships that we can't articulate. A new place is so rich, so complex, that it may take a long time and a lot of processing before we can put together an explanation of why it changed us, but change us we know it did.

The tree with the anonymous installation

How many of us have been frustrated by questions like "what was France like?" Reducing my trip to Paris to a formula of what makes France French isn't just impossible, it's ridiculous. Travel is resistant to "generalizing language." We try to pin down what was so amazing so our families and friends can share in our experience, but in the end we are often reduced to a bewildered "you had to be there."

So in order to translate the art of travel into a blog post, the blog post must become art. And maybe that's why I've been avoiding my writerly duty for a full two weeks. I can write a certain number of posts about budget airlines and good hostels, but there will come a point when I have to reduce a new place to its barest shapes and colors, and I worry that I'm no Matisse.

Copyright 2010 Sara Harding

Bittersweet Return

Already missing the streets of Europe

Nostalgia, that bittersweet feeling of missing the past, comes from the Greek word nostos meaning "a return home." Appropriate, I think. Homecoming is something we all long for, yet I'm not sure many of us ever achieve it. I'm not sure it's even possible to achieve. Home is a mental construction more than a place or even a set of people. Going home is the illusion of perfect belonging, and it always proves false once we arrive.

At least, that's how it is for me. At 8pm on August 30, I stepped off an airplane onto American soil (well, onto American carpeting at least). I was thrilled to be "home." After a long stay abroad, I was ready for barbecue and drip coffee and shops that open promptly at 8am and stay open until 10pm, even during lunch time. I had a new apartment to look forward to with new furniture and a walk-in closet where I could hang - actually hang! - far more clothes than could ever fit in a suitcase. I could go months at a time without worrying about catching a plane to anywhere. It was good to be back.

Ten days later it's still good to be back. I'm struggling every day to get more of my life together: reactivate my American cell phone, get internet service in my apartment, assemble my new furniture. I'm eating the foods I missed and buying Three Buck Chuck (a relief after dropping $25 on that Chateauneuf-du-Pape). But the real question is, did I come home? Did my nostalgia go away?

And the answer is of course not. I'm just nostalgic for my other homes now. Every day I think of something I miss: the wide, empty spaces of the Sardinian landscape, the gorgeous views along the Amalfi coast, the urban nightlife of Florence, or Paris's cafes. If I scratch below the surface of my most recent trip, I find I continue to miss places I lived many years ago. I miss the friendly pubs and fabulous whiskeys of Ireland. I miss the civilized urbanity of bike transport in the Netherlands. I miss the cool Troodos Mountains in Cyprus and I even miss - and I never thought I'd say this - the wonderful, polluted chaos that is Athens, Greece.

So even though I'm back in the land of my citizenship, I'll never quite settle in. There will always be that bit of nostalgia for the way things are back home.

Copyright 2010 Sara Harding

The Voyage Begins

I lost my job.

I was a travel writer for Students In Europe, a great backpacking and study-abroad oriented travel blog that - sadly - didn't make it. C'est la vie, I guess.

I found my job with Students In Europe by accident. Late one night I was sitting on my couch with a friend who was practically falling asleep on my shoulder. I wasn't sleepy, though - instead I was ranting. I was ranting because here I was, a reasonably interesting person with, you know, skills, and I couldn't, you know - and here I nudged my friend to get his sleepy approval - find a job using those skills and, you know, shouldn't there be something out there for a person like me?

My friend made a sort of "mrapp" sound that I interpreted as agreement.

A short Google search later and I was sending off an application to be a travel writer. Writing and travel are two things I love and two of my - I'd like to believe - skills. So I thought: why not? The worst this could be is a hoax. Besides, it was well after midnight. Nothing seemed like a bad idea at the time.

And it wasn't a hoax, either. Students In Europe hired me and I spent seven months with the best job ever: writing about what I love to do. I genuinely loved this job, and now I find myself missing - more than the money - the opportunity to share my love of travel and my experiences abroad with other people who think that travel is more than ticking off a list in a guidebook, it's an opportunity to expand who we are.

It's well after midnight again and I have other things I should be doing (sleeping, above all), but I can't get my desire to keep writing out of my head. Why not share my experiences on my own, I keep asking myself. And so I will. The voyage begins.

Copyright 2010 Sara Harding