Travelday

I have by now traveled through much of Western Europe, but I have seen comparatively very little of the US. I was born and raised in New York, and I’ve seen a lot of the Eastern seaboard. I went to high school in New England, and I lived for one year in San Francisco, but I haven’t seen a lot of Middle America… I don’t really know where everyone else lives.

When I lived in Canada, I had a friend who liked to do random things, which was lucky, because I like to do random things too. One day, we decided we were going to go on a road trip with no destination, and so at five o’clock in the morning, I picked him up, and we drove. We drove from Toronto to New York State, and then we decided that we wanted to cross another state boarder. After consulting our map, we decided to go to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

We took the entire trip on back roads, driving past houses and tiny towns made up of no more than a gas station. We drove on winding, hilly tarmac, often the only car rushing past the landscapes of rural Pennsylvania.

We stopped on the shoulder every so often to take pictures: I had never concentrated so much on where I was instead of where I was going. We didn’t actually reach Lancaster County until the following morning, but it didn’t seem to matter.

I drove for ten hours, and though my sanity was temporarily threatened, in retrospect, I loved that trip. I loved everything about the all-American vibe we got from every town we stopped in. I loved taking pictures of little things I never would have seen otherwise.

I loved the quaint diner we stopped in when we arrived in Lancaster County in the morning, and I loved the severely cheap breakfast that we were served there (and the unlimited coffee).

Being in Europe makes me appreciate the pure Americana of a trip like that. America is just so big compared to Europe: they don’t have landscapes like that over here. There are rural areas, make no mistake, but everything about them seems to be quaint… a little bit false. There’s something so comforting to me about knowing that places like Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania exist somewhere in the world.

At Christmastime, I went to Mexico for the first time with my family. My uncle loves to go on golfing vacations, so he booked our two families (eight cousins) at the Isla Navidad resort.

After all of my solo-traveling, it was nice to stay with my family again. I am so used to budget travel, hostels, sleeping in a bed that’s too small (and I’m 5′3), that being in a place with a swim-up bar was pretty sweet. For awhile.

OK, so I’ve been spoiled by my own mode of travel. But what’s a girl to do? After a few days of lazing by the pool and reading American fashion magazines, I got bored.

I got ten pesos (a dollar) and set out on the boat that would take me from the island resort to the Barra right across the water. The differences between the resort and the town were drastically different: I’m sure that some of the jewelery stands in Barra had to do with the fact that the resort was right across the way, but the town didn’t seem any better off than any other small Mexican town in the country. The people went right on living their lives, oblivious (perhaps happily) of the almost all-American resort that was right across the bay.

I wandered around the town, happy to hear the rapid-fire rhythm of Spanish surrounding me, pulsating in the tiny town. I saw the Church, the life-sized nativity scene still posed for the Christmas season, even though the humidity made it feel more like summertime than December. I sampled some typical street food: eighty-cent chicken tacos that dripped as I walked, perfectly spicy and tasty. I watched whole families set up for work: children helped their parents set up the restaurant for the day or threaded tiny beads on string to sell as necklaces to the tourists.

I’m so used to Europe; I feel as though I am a part of it. No matter where I go, I always find some little niche that feels like home to me. Even if I can’t understand the language or I am not familiar with the particular culture of a place, I can at least find some semblance of a pub or brasserie and sit down with the draught beer or tiny coffee that every country in Western Europe offers. Mexico was completely foreign to me: much closer to my native America than to my newly adopted Europe, and as America had been becoming a more and more distant dream for me the longer I stayed away, it was hard to find anything in Mexico that grounded me, that could become a safe haven from which I could watch the rest of the world and try to understand it.

As I headed back towards the boat which would bring me to the resort, I stopped outside a dingy-looking building that advertised itself as a bar called “Piper Lover.” I peered in, and then I committed, carefully climbing the rickety stairs to see what I would find.

A group of American ex-pats sat, as I imagine they do everywhere in the world, over a table full of pint glasses and beer bottles, smoking and laughing and talking as rock music played just a little bit too loudly in the background.

I smiled and turned away, back towards the boat. It wasn’t for me, that American living. That self-proclamation: “Here I am! I’m in your country, but I’m different!” But I found comfort in the fact that there were Americans living here, trying, perhaps, to know Mexico as well as I now know France.

One of the main… well… really the ONLY tourist attraction in my old city of Toronto is the CN Tower. It’s the tallest free-standing structure in the world… which means it’s pretty tall. There’s a restaurant up at the top, where my residence hall took us to eat after orientation first year of university. It was good, but I think the most fun part is to go to the Skypod observation deck. You can see all of the city… and some of Rochester, New York across the lake on a clear day.

The only problem is the lines: you usually have to wait behind scores of tourists to get up. The wait is worth it though, and if you show up early in the morning in the middle of the week, you can sometimes beat the crowds. If not, you can always hang out with the moose in the gift shop until it’s your turn to go up…