In no particular order, memories of Honduras:
- hordes of children straggling around the streets carrying musical instruments...drums, xylophones, you name it.
- finally seeing the horizon again after a long time without it
- really bad karaoke in Spanish, we think, heard floating on the breeze one humid night
- late-night barbecue and shoeless walking
- diving hand signals
I have a short-term span of attention for falling in love with places; that is, I fall in love fast and hard and find myself writing poetry and getting all moony-eyed, when the place has already moved on without me. Unrequited love blows. I like being transient, but having so many places to go back to is a bit disconcerting: it means I'll spend half my life "returning to" instead of moving onwards.
Still, the sheer act of having the places to love is what keeps me going. I *love* to be somewhere else. I love to wake up in the morning to hear people speaking a completely different language, and I love to be one of those people who has to point at the neverending stream of backpacks emerging from the cargo hold ("No, that one. The one with the dirty sneakers. No, the OTHER one with the dirty sneakers.") and I love meeting people at random and having them re-intersect with my life. I hate meeting awesome people and then losing track of them; it's probably one of my biggest pet peeves. I don't cling much to personal possessions or material belongings, but I do GRAB ON to people and want to know how they are and what they're doing and the various banal details of their lives that make them interesting.
If there's one thing I love, it's looking in people's windows, and traveling gives me a whole new international culture of windows to look into. Stop pulling your curtains down, people! Lose all sense of privacy! Go on Facebook! :)
1 comment:
Looking in windows ... I so get that. Riding on the truck, it is looking down into cars. I love that my feet are above the four-wheeler heads!
Riding the train to Tokyo, I'd check out who had what on their apartment balconies, see who was airing bedding, clothes hung out to dry, the bonsai and bikes. Very utilitarian, Japanese balconies. If a Westerner lived in any of the complexes, you could tell by the deck chairs and fairy lights.
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