When I asked James to help me come up with a question for Week 6, the week I couldn't come up with a question in time, this is the question he came up with. It feels more philosophical than my other questions, so I decided to save it for Week 7 after spending ten days in Valparaíso.
I don't think this question has a real, numerical answer. Whatever answer I have has a lot to do with the stage of life I am in. While James didn't provide much guidance on the question itself, I think he asked it as a way of looking out for me, gently telling me I needed to slow down. Somewhere around the mid point of this trip, I got sick, exhausted from the nonstop activity. I half-joked that maybe this was my body's way of telling me to stop, settle down in one place, and have a baby because it would force me to stay put. (The baby thing was on my mind because "Do you want to have kids?" is a question that came up a lot when conversing with people on this trip. Sign of my age, I guess. My default response is now "Once I've visited fifty countries I'll make a decision." For the curious, I am visiting my fortieth country later this year.)
While planning for this trip, I didn't realize that working during the week and going on excursions or flying on the weekends would actually take it out of me. I thought that because I was working from home and on a computer, I wasn't really exerting myself. I learned, however, that this was still time I spent needing to be accountable to others and accomplishing things; just because I wasn't physically moving a lot, didn't mean that I was resting. I realized that in the two months I had in South America, I only had two weekends where I stayed in the same place: the first weekend after arriving in São Paulo, and last weekend in Valparaíso.
Even thinking about it is making me tired. I have even more travels planned this fall and in 2024, and it took me overwhelming myself this trip to realize that some plans might be too ambitious. A big one that James and I wanted to do was go to Poland while I studied for the bar exam next summer, but he told me that he thought it best we postpone our trip to Europe. I was annoyed at first, but he lovingly reminded me that I shouldn't keep trying to do everything. That it was okay not to try and do everything as soon as possible; there was no urgency. We have the rest of our lives to travel and see the world, and our friends, together.
I had to let that sit with me.
The idea of being ok with not doing everything came up again while hate-watching Emily in Paris with a friend this last week, a show that this article fittingly calls "American imperialism rebranded as endearing." It was easy to scream at Emily for trying to two-time her former employer and her new French boss, but then her new boss commented that "trying to have it all is so American," and I realized that might apply to me too. It made me wonder where this desire to have it all, at least travel-wise, came from. I admit that it is the American in me, but it is also the immigrant in me. People always talk about America as the land of opportunity and you should take advantage of it blablabla, and to me, the opportunity just came in the form of travel funding and having a powerful passport. I've had wonderful runs and seen so much of the world, but James and I have been longing to settle down and have a new home base for a while, one where we can host friends and return to from our travels. Now that I am no longer a high school exchange student and globetrotting anthropology major, "opportunity" comes in the form of establishing a community in a home base alongside my partner.
As a final reflection on travel, one of my best friends from college once told me, "I think you travel to feel like home." I thought it was one of the most astute things anyone had ever said about why I like to gallivant around the world, making friends from different countries, and learning other languages in the first place. Back then, trying to feel like home in a new place was a fun way of trying out different ways of being and experiencing different selves. Now, I think it goes a little deeper. I dream of a world where all of humanity can experience the world we live in, learning about the diversity of human cultures and participating in enriching exchanges, without barriers imposed by geopolitics, oppression, and exploitation. To me, forming meaningful relationships with other people in their home countries is a way of realizing fragments of this dream on an individual level.
Have I answered this week's question? I don't know. But let me tell you more about this last week in Valparaíso, a city I am pleased to announce is officially one of my favorites in the world.
This last week, I slowed down a lot and made sure to take the time to enjoy living in Valparaíso. I mostly worked from my apartment and took the time to get up and stare out at the sea. I also walked around a lot, getting exercise from climbing up stairs and hills. On Tuesday, I went to a restaurant with a view of the port. I was the only one there for some reason, maybe because they had just opened. I ordered something called "pastel de jaiba," which literally translated to "crab pie." I was not expecting what they brought out, but it ended up being delicious.
At one point, the restaurant owner approached me and started chatting with me. I did not completely understand what he was saying (Chilean Spanish 😅) but I got that he wanted to do a promotional video of the restaurant and include me in it. I said sure. I have no idea where or if this video is posted but he sent it to me later on WhatsApp, and I am sharing it with you here.
Last Friday, I took what was probably the best mid-day mental health walk of my life. After having an emotional breakdown over the phone with James over some inconveniences that had piled up, I left the apartment and walked along the coast for two hours. I made plenty of stops along the way, until I eventually reached the lighthouse viewpoint.
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| I obsessed over the different shades of blue I saw in the water. |
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| If you look far in the distance by zooming in, you can see the white peaks of the Andes Mountains! |
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| I even got to dip my feet in a beach, where other people were hanging out enjoying the beautiful day. The water was cold and refreshing. |
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| This was the view from the lighthouse viewpoint. Loved seeing the open ocean! |
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| I couldn't resist taking another picture with the Andes, this time from a street in my neighborhood on my way back home to finish up work for the week. |
Later that Friday, after nearly a week of living on my own, my friend Caroline came by to sleep over in one of the apartment's extra rooms. We met studying anthropology at Harvard–she did archaeology, while I did social anthropology. She's in Chile doing a fellowship at UNESCO's Santiago office. I hadn't seen her since graduation (besides for two seconds at our five-year reunion this year), so it was lovely to reconnect and have some company! That evening, we got dinner and drinks in the city then watched When Harry Met Sally back home. Then we spent all of yesterday exploring the city. Taking her around Valparaíso, the city I had only been getting to know the past week, made me love it even more.
We started the day at the fish market, where we greeted the filleteros, shopkeepers, pelicans, and sea lions. We stopped for ceviche then took the train to the center so we could look at the street art in Cerro Concepción. The day was basically one long photo shoot, a requirement for such a photogenic city. We had tons of fun being each other's model and photographer, and I'll share some of my faves here! All these photos were taken on Caroline's phone.
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| Caroline also plays the piano, and I loved her idea for this pose so much I had to do it too. |
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| Me with an iced Waddington latte in Cafe Waddington, the cafe very close to my apartment. I loved going there to sit down and do work and will miss it so much! |
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| I adore port cities. But can we also appreciate having the port, the water, the city, and the Andes all in the same pic? And me, of course. |
Finally, the last thing we did before taking a bus back to Santiago was to go on a boat tour of the harbor. James had told me that tours were offered, and he really wanted to go, but we didn't have time in the three days he was here. I was glad he reminded me of it while trying to figure out what else to do; seeing the city from the water and the port up close was breathtaking.
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Not taken from the boat, but I loved seeing this huge new union logo being painted onto a union building. Yay dockworkers!! Also I loooove the IDC logo.
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| The tiny specks of orange are workers on the ship. I tried to wave at them from way down below, and one of them actually waved back! I wondered if any of them were Filipino, considering how many Filipinos work on ships. One of the boat tour company people, upon hearing I was Filipino, said "Kumusta, mabuti!" I was very happy to hear him say those words and asked where he learned. He said he's met a lot of Filipinos, since many work on the boats and come to the city. |
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| It's amazing how massive these container ships are. This one is Buenaventura Express, and apparently it was only constructed this year. You can track it here–after docking in Valpo for a day, it's now on its way to Coronel, Chile. |
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| This and the rest of the photos in this entry were all taken by Caroline. Thank you!! |
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| Check out the sea lion on the tire! |
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| Check out the sea lion on the yellow floaty thing! |
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| Caroline and me, pleased with the day's adventures. (Photo creds to our guide.) |
So how long can I travel? I already know that I'm not made for living and traveling on my own at great lengths of time. I also know I'm not made for the permanent digital nomad lifestyle, even if I have James with me. We love having our own stable physical home too much. Pondering this question some more, I think of how in the past, I used to have separate "travel journals" for my daily journal entries whenever I went on trips. I've been keeping a daily journal since December 2008, but at one point around 2014 decided to continuously use the same journal, whether I was "traveling" or not. Maybe there's commentary to be made here about how travel is a part of me, not necessarily something so out of the ordinary it deserves special treatment. Maybe life is just one long voyage through time, a voyage which for me happens to include passing through a lot of places around the world. Whatever this means and whatever the answer to this question really is, one thing is for sure. No matter how long I remain in a single place, I carry in my heart all the places I've been and the places I have yet to go.
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