1. Travel Story

Shopping! For a teeny-bopping tween nothing could be more appealing, especially if that preteen was me: an only child dragged halfway across the world to India. Sure some would react fanatically to my trip in the same manner as my over-zealous social studies teacher, believing it to be a ‘wonderful’, ‘character-building’ experience, considering me to be ‘unbelievably lucky’ to have the ‘life-changing opportunity’ to travel to this ‘jewel’ of the East. But I didn’t feel all that ‘fortunate’. As far as I was concerned, I was dragged into a significantly different time zone, full of staring family members, honking horns, and strange holes-in-the-ground which they wanted me to believe were toilets.

I toured around Israel for two straight months, but it wasn’t until my last month in the country that I actually got to be a traveler. After spending endless days as an American tourist, boarding busses and listening to lectures in front of old monuments and important museums, the bus driver finally pulled up to one location and told us to collect all of our belongings, because he wouldn’t see us for a very long time. I stood at the gates of the kibbutz, eyeing the dust and thick heat around me, and feared that this would be one more place where I felt like I didn’t belong. Little did I know then, as the bus pulled away, so did the label I had been carrying with me. This was one place where being American didn’t matter, and instead of being forced to witness what was in front of me, I could actually experience all that was around.

Bored? Hop on a tractor & take a tour.

This is how I remember Peru.

A nephew of our host mother picks us up at the airport. When I see his car, I start laughing and can’t stop. We ride through the city for the first time in the Peruvian equivalent of a rusty VW van, with a peace sign on the gear shift and mystical keychains dangling from the rear-view mirror. He’s chattering in Spanish which I half-understand, catching glimmers of understanding like fireflies about his being some kind of mystical tour guide, but I’m only half there: I’m staring out the window, trying to look in every direction at once, images rushing into my head in stop-motion. We spin through neighborhoods of tile-roofed houses that rise up into the mountains, through chaotic rotaries and wrinkled faces and angry taxis, past a giant rainbow playground, street vendors, statues of local heroes, intoxicating glimpses of Cusco the ancient Incan city of ghosts.

The delirium is almost dizzying when I realize, Here I am. This is not a National Geographic article. I still haven’t stopped laughing.

My family and I were in Rome at a time when all I cared about was watching Tom and Jerry. My brother and father would drag me around from museum to museum to view seemingly endless rooms filled with paintings or busts of old emperors. I could not have cared less at the time. On one of these voyages there were lush gardens surrounding the museum so I went to go play in them, thinking it would be a very good idea to jump over the hedges. Turns out, it was not exactly a good idea and in one of my "hedge-jumps" i landed into a ditch and broke my right ankle. While i was in a lot of pain, I knew this would get me out of walking around all day through museums. This made it, not worth it, but slightly more bearable.

I was in a train one afternoon, chugging along the Pugliese coastline to stay with ex-pat family friends in white cone houses that were still under construction. The windows were murky and inside there were lights running below the stowed overhead luggage that beamed inside the compartments with pale fluorescence. The passengers with legs crossed and adjusted sideways, or arms crossed against their chest, frowning into their elbows, jostled in their sleep. Smudges of passing green crowded the window and raced in my eyeballs. My hair was caught in the Velcro exposed by the missing piece of head cloth as I was trying to lean forward to glimpse the river that was shredding the roots along the bank with its choppy glass waters. I peered into the window at the opposite, dislocated bodies riding in the spectral train alongside, in the bold train that exploded alongside when the car was sucked into the gallery. Out of the corner of my eye this seated man’s mouth was blurred as he read his pink newspaper and I thought he was smiling, and in the window I saw that he wasn’t.

The beauty of travel is the complete anonymity one is able to maintain throughout the journey. Yes, there are those who explore loudly and make themselves known, but if you wish, you can completely immerse yourself in a foreign place by remaining a wallflower. This is what I love to do: find a strange little back alley café in any foreign city and watch the way that people live. I feel like I get an impression of what life really is like instead of waiting hours in a line to take a photo. Maybe this is a cynical or snobbish approach to the whole situation, but it’s also because I love to wander.

When I was 16, I went to Italy for the first time. Before I set out, the trip did not seem like it would be much of an idyllic experience; it took place over my spring break with a dozen middle schoolers and my younger sister, who I was expected to watch out for.

The Road to CuernavacaI spent July of 2007 in a private heaven: Mexico. Allow me to clarify; I spent July of 2007 in Cuernavaca, Mexico – not Acapulco or Cozumel or Playa del Carmen, or any of the other popular coastal towns one would usually associate with a heaven on earth. Still, despite the lack of sand and sea, Cuernavaca made me swoon.
The city itself was nestled in an impossibly green valley, surrounded on all sides by mountains impressive in their own right. The roads were charmingly hilly and often hazardous, the buildings drenched in the sort of colorful you rarely see in the Stat

Pushkar India
I arrived for a day trip in Pushkar “the second holiest city in India” (after Varanasi for Hindu) with 11 other kids from my school and a few faculty members. As a bunch of westerners piling out of a bus it wasn’t difficult to pinpoint us as tourists, but just for total clarification the word “TOURIST” had literally been printed on the windshield in bright yellow block letters. As usual, this attracted sales men, women and children (and a few goats and cows) selling an array of jewelry, trinkets, statues and snacks and as usual we politely refused as they bid down their own prices. With this experience under our belts we entered the city feeling pretty comfortable and confident in our 10-days-worn-in-indian street smarts.
After a barefoot tour of the local temple we met a Brahma who took us to the stairs leading to the lake in the center of the city. He told us the story of how the small island was placed in the middle by a god and lead us through a puja ceremony to become one with divinity. This included a chant, placing flower petals in the lake, and giving each of us a string bracelet and a bindi. He proceeded to ask each of us, “how many people in your family?” “Give them good karma and prosperity. One hundred rupees each.” Caught off guard, and without the advice of the faculty members (who had been taken by another Brahma) we gave in. Before we knew what we had paid for the Brahma was completely out of sight. Luckily one hundred rupees is only about two dollars, and our teacher reimbursed us all for our rookie mistake. After that experience getting back into the TOURIST bus was like wearing the largest and most public dunce cap in all of India, but this time we deserved it.

French Foot Cleaner For two weeks over the summer of my freshman year, I got my first chance to experience a truly foreign culture firsthand. While I had previously been to both Canada and Maine, my mom took some time off of work in order to take my two younger brothers and me on a trip to Nice, in the south of France. Once there, it didn’t take very long for me to notice differences between their typical life and mine. For two weeks we had delicious, fresh bread with every meal, drove in tiny diesel cars past wind turbine and nuclear power plants, and played “futbol” with the other kids living around us. While I had expected discrepancies in cuisine and infrastructure, I was surprised to find that trips to the bathroom in France are much different than trips to the bathroom in America. For one, shiny chrome tubing calls out to be touched, only to burn you for giving in to temptation (turns out they have heated towel racks).