Going back home

“There are some who have crossed deserts, floated on ice caps and cut their way through jungles but whose souls we would search in vain for evidence of what they have witnessed. Dressed in pink-and blue pyjamas, satisfied within the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.” *Having crossed deserts, floated on an ice cap, and traversed through a jungle this semester I was particularly struck by this paragraph. (see my my entries entitled “Traveling Around” and “Sifting through back and front”) Even though I’ve had quite the adventure here, the past month I have been anticipating more than anything else my journey back home. Though I have more than enjoyed my stay here in Argentina, I am ready to go back home to the comforts of my family and native culture. This part of the chapter made me think about all the things that I have taken for granted or may re-experience upon arrival in Los Angeles and then New York. I think that having been away for so long will immediately bring my attention to things I haven’t noticed before. The weather seems an obvious element. How will I judge the wind, rain, snow, and general winter season of North America after coming from summertime? Will driving, the presence of mountains, English speaking communities, force me to see what I had been missing and will this all be because I know have a new reference point from which to stand? Before I had American culture with which to see the world, now I have some other kind of perspective that distorts my previous one with the porteno cultura. For spring break I traveled to Savannah with my sister and I convinced her that we should buy some drawing materials and draw a building or the flowers, something by which we could more closely perceive the place we had visited. I received this idea from De Botton’s book and I think that an interesting thing to do would be to paint scenes from Buenos Aires and my new home, Brooklyn. The act of drawing or painting something, instead of just taking pictures forces you to capture more details of a place and also the final product can say something about how you individually saw the place, object, or scene. I think that upon returning home, if I follow through with my experiment of drawing New York, I will not only notice things that I did not see before but also notice the coherence and difference between similar places here in Argentina. How are the windows in my room different? Will my encasement in the metric system affect me somehow? I think that my travels and my subsequent stay-cations will be a nice complement to understanding more about myself, my home, and my travels. The return from the journey cannot mean much if we don’t evaluate how it has changed home in our minds.

*De Botton, Alain. Art of Travel.Westminster, MD, USA: Knopf Publishing Group, 2004. p 249.http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:6305/lib/nyulibrary/Doc?id=10057455&ppg=261