"Something really happened to me in Vietnam. I think I instinctively knew it, and I think a lot of people around me knew it, but Asia ruined me for going back. Vietnam in particular ruined my whole life. My expectations for what I see when I open my eyes in the morning, or even little things like the condiments on the table when I sit down. That bar just went so high and so different that there was no going back.
There’s a passage in the Salman Rushdie book The Ground Beneath Her Feet that talks about people who don’t belong to any one place and have to keep moving, and reading it was like feeling, oh, I’m not the only one.
It was a sad moment. It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life, but it was also a sad one. It was a selfish moment. I’ve talked elsewhere about there are times in your life… I’ll use the example of you’re standing alone in the desert, and you see the most incredible sunset you’ve ever seen and your first instinct is to turn to your left or right and say, “Wow, do you see that?” Okay, there’s no one there, what do you do? Next, where’s the camera? Look through the viewfinder and you realize you know, what you see through that little box is not what you’re experiencing. There comes this terrible moment when you realize well, this is for me. There is no sharing this."
I find it almost painful to go back over the photos from Japan, Thailand, and Shanghai. Not so for previous adventures. That Japan time was so amazing and fragile. My first real trip abroad was to Europe when I was 20. I backpacked around for endless months, half of the time by myself. And I learned everything about my character. How far I'm willing to take chances, how long I can walk before tiring, how many artifacts I can suck up into memory (hint: a damn lot. Keep me away from museums if you want to hang out).
So I guess what I'm feeling lately is a yearning to find somewhere I really want to live forever, or for a good long time. But I'll sample the urban buffet first.
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