Here for your reading pleasure is the fourth of many entries from my Asia journal. It's nice and short!
Going into this trip, I was trying
very hard not to have expectations for what it was going to look like and what
the experience was going to be for me. I have traveled a fair bit in my
lifetime and I find it very difficult not to draw conclusions from those
experiences as to what my future expeditions will look like. While my past of
traveling has prepared me well for the physical strains, the stress and the
emotional roller coaster that comes with traveling to foreign countries, what it
has also done is left me with some preconceived notions of what each trip
should be like. I have found that traveling without expectations is the best
way to travel because then I am not disappointed when it is completely
different and I can enjoy the trip to the fullest extent, which I believe is
very important.
I think that I have managed this
goal not too badly – the trip was very unlike any of my other travel
experiences, but was still a very positive one. It was with a very different
group of people, there were many very different cultures and I was completely
out of my comfort zone. I take that as a smashing success.
And with the end to that Journal entry, I would like to leave you with a quote I happened across while surfing the internet. It is less directed to experience than to people, and yet I find it entirely relevant:
“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the
stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's
mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we
find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes
forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their
lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in
Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular
character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed
in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or
that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X
will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the
second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit
murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all
arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person,
the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our
notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we
have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We
could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog
stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book
of poetry his age has seen.”
-- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Peace & Love,
K.
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