As human beings we constantly search for our identities as individuals. Some of us do so by finding groups to belong to, while some of us prefer to privately seek out ourselves. I have never had the need to belong to a group and often played by myself when I was a child. Because I knew no one could really live into the make believe stories and adventures I could. As I grew older I had opportunities to travel because of Taekwon do, and no matter where the tournament took me, I fell in love. A trip I took at the age of 15 to Connecticut for a Taekwon do tournament was a trip of many firsts for me. It was the first plane ride I could remember, it was the first time I met my cousins in New Jersey, and it was the first time that I knew I did not belong in Fairbanks, Alaska. I knew that in order to fully come into my own identity I could never belong in just one place.
That trip was the first of many that I took for the soul purpose of coming home with a medal and a black eye. But with each trip, I became more and more attached to the feeling of being able to jump on a plane and leave a world behind, entering a completely new and romantic one. In the essay “Going Native” by Francine Prose, the subject of adopting another culture as a means of self-discovery is explored. Prose gave examples of how different people with many different backgrounds could seek out another culture to belong to because the one they were born into never felt right.
I made up pretend mountains to climb over fences with rope as a child, pretending I was climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. I used to line up my stuffed animals on my bed while I performed to them from Madison Square Garden. Since I was young, I dreamed of more than a small town life with a 9-5 job. I wanted to meet people who I had to struggle to communicate with as I had to find a route to a small village in a foreign country. I craved adventure and weaved in that great adventure I wanted to meet interesting and different people. I wanted to have experiences that I knew I could not have living in one place for too long.
My greatest travel experience to date has been a trip to the World Championship in Benidorm, Spain. It was my first trip outside of the U.S. and is still my most fond. We spent most of the time training, warming up, and competing. I found time to introduce myself to the athletes from different countries, even practicing what little German I knew with team from Germany. We didn’t get any time to do the touristy things like sight-seeing or laying on the beach all day, but I was never interested in any of those activities. What most interested me were the different kinds of people and their culture. Once we took a taxi to down town to get some mid-tournament lunch, the taxi driver told us the difference between Americans and Spaniards, “you run around with your watches, get tan lines from your watches.” The taxi driver had never worn a watch his entire life.
I’m going to travel the world to my heart’s content one day. I will not be wearing a watch as I sit at a small café on the side of a small cobble stone road as I watch people walk by and have their conversation and laughs. I won’t spend my mornings planning my sight-seeing, exhausting day ahead of me. I am going to wake up, have some coffee and live the day as a native of the land.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete