On New Lands
The thing about new places, is that they’re old to someone else. What is spectacularly new is wildly next door to the Irishmen in the countryside. When 40,000 citizens leave Ireland every year for greater economic opportunity elsewhere, thousands of foreigners enter the country looking for leprechaun lore and the Guinness Factory.
We found a yellow bicycle propped up along a stone wall in Stari Grad, Hvar. It looked like what is now the proliferation of hundreds of charming European country and beach scenes that populate the Internet. It was slightly idyllic to us. Pathetic to the bicycle owner who wanted better wheels.
The purpose of travel is to understand multiple perspectives on the same image. To know that they exist, even when they mean something entirely different to you than to do to the other. Considering some people would donate an organ to live in Paris, and some people would never return, its a state of mind.
Travel, for me, means exchanging experiences with someone who grew up in a completely different world than my own. Whose textbooks shared few of the same lessons. Because its generally in where we differ, that we find the most potential for awareness and perspective. Some of my favorite friends grew up in other countries. Its not the exoticism of difference that is so appealing, as much as the vastness we have to teach one another.
To us, this image is an ivy covered dilapidated castle along the sea. To the neighbors next door, cropped from every postcard, its presence creates traffic in their backyard. Germans think America is so festive during the holidays, and Americans think there is nothing more charming and perfect than a German Christmas market.
Nothing is as its ever seems.
