First of all, I hate this prompt.
Okay, that's a bit extreme. But what I'm trying to get at is that I can never think of a response to questions like this when people ask me, because I'd be willing to go anywhere I've never been (...outside the USA...) at the drop of a hat, and I'd be equally as excited at the opportunity to go to Jakarta as Kigali. When I did a 30 day drawing challenge and had to draw a place I wanted to go, I was at such a loss on what to answer that I used random.org to pick a random page number from Lonely Planet's Travel Book (an amazing coffee table book with profiles of 196 different countries), turned to that page, and took whatever country I landed on as the place I wanted to go to. (It was Iceland!)
However, my methodology will be slightly different here. I will pick five places that I've been thinking about recently for whatever reason. The only condition is I have to never have been to either of them. So in no particular order, the five are:
• Socotra Island, Yemen
I heard of this place when my anthropology professor brought it up in class, since he went there once while doing research in Yemen. He talked about the bizarre plant species you could find on it because the island evolved isolated from mainland. Overall it also just looks like a really surreal place to visit.
• Mumbai, India
This doesn't really need explaining.
• Cairo, Egypt
When I was little, I was a huge Egyptian mythology (and a ton of other things) nerd. Learning about Egypt fascinated me, and I knew I would have to go someday. In one of my classes freshman year of high school, we had to fill out one of those beginning of the year things that we hand to the teacher. There was a question that went along the lines of, "What do you hope to have done after five years?" and I distinctly remember my answer as "Go to Egypt." I'm the kind of person who remembers these things, but obviously I wasn't able to make it to Egypt in the time I had allotted for myself (considering only a few months later in January 2011 the country erupted in revolution). However, I made a good friend from Cairo on my program to Poland who has invited me to visit her and offered to show me around, which is a sweet deal. I know I'll see her there at some point!
• Tristan da Cunha
I'm pretty sure a Pinterest article about isolated places led me to find this place. It's a random little island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between South America and Africa. Places like this intrigue me, and I would definitely love to check it out for a certain amount of time just to get to know its people and their livelihoods.
• Iceland
For consistency reasons, and to keep going along the island theme.
Besides the "Where do you want to go next?" questions that I am loathe to answer, I also get, "Where are you going next?" I wish I had an answer, but it's really I have no idea and I like not having an idea. It's more fun that way, really. Maybe Harvard is ironically making me lax in my thinking, but I feel like as long as I genuinely enjoy how I'm spending my time here and feel like I'm producing meaningful work, then surprises and adventures will keep coming my way like they have been. So I am in just as much suspense as you, reader/asker-of-annoying-questions, as to where I'll be whisked away to next.
Okay, that's a bit extreme. But what I'm trying to get at is that I can never think of a response to questions like this when people ask me, because I'd be willing to go anywhere I've never been (...outside the USA...) at the drop of a hat, and I'd be equally as excited at the opportunity to go to Jakarta as Kigali. When I did a 30 day drawing challenge and had to draw a place I wanted to go, I was at such a loss on what to answer that I used random.org to pick a random page number from Lonely Planet's Travel Book (an amazing coffee table book with profiles of 196 different countries), turned to that page, and took whatever country I landed on as the place I wanted to go to. (It was Iceland!)
However, my methodology will be slightly different here. I will pick five places that I've been thinking about recently for whatever reason. The only condition is I have to never have been to either of them. So in no particular order, the five are:
• Socotra Island, Yemen
I heard of this place when my anthropology professor brought it up in class, since he went there once while doing research in Yemen. He talked about the bizarre plant species you could find on it because the island evolved isolated from mainland. Overall it also just looks like a really surreal place to visit.
• Mumbai, India
This doesn't really need explaining.
• Cairo, Egypt
When I was little, I was a huge Egyptian mythology (and a ton of other things) nerd. Learning about Egypt fascinated me, and I knew I would have to go someday. In one of my classes freshman year of high school, we had to fill out one of those beginning of the year things that we hand to the teacher. There was a question that went along the lines of, "What do you hope to have done after five years?" and I distinctly remember my answer as "Go to Egypt." I'm the kind of person who remembers these things, but obviously I wasn't able to make it to Egypt in the time I had allotted for myself (considering only a few months later in January 2011 the country erupted in revolution). However, I made a good friend from Cairo on my program to Poland who has invited me to visit her and offered to show me around, which is a sweet deal. I know I'll see her there at some point!
• Tristan da Cunha
I'm pretty sure a Pinterest article about isolated places led me to find this place. It's a random little island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between South America and Africa. Places like this intrigue me, and I would definitely love to check it out for a certain amount of time just to get to know its people and their livelihoods.
• Iceland
For consistency reasons, and to keep going along the island theme.
Besides the "Where do you want to go next?" questions that I am loathe to answer, I also get, "Where are you going next?" I wish I had an answer, but it's really I have no idea and I like not having an idea. It's more fun that way, really. Maybe Harvard is ironically making me lax in my thinking, but I feel like as long as I genuinely enjoy how I'm spending my time here and feel like I'm producing meaningful work, then surprises and adventures will keep coming my way like they have been. So I am in just as much suspense as you, reader/asker-of-annoying-questions, as to where I'll be whisked away to next.
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