Travel Truths

Monday, August 1

There are a handful of travel truths I’ve learned along the way.

While most of them are only self-truths, and I can’t vouch for them across the board, I still feel they’re worth recording.

#1 - It is possible to wake up without an alarm clock. I have survived now for 34 days without an alarm to wake me up. I was late one time. Weirdly, I consider it one of the greatest triumphs of this trip for myself that I’ve managed to make this work. Each day, I just let the sun and the noise wake me up, I check my iPod to figure out the time, and I adjust accordingly. It’s been an adjustment but never bad.

#2 - The greatest feeling in the world is clean feet. While it’s not something I would’ve expected, the loveliness of clean feet is hard to describe. After coming home from the beach or from exploring Oviedo or Madrid, the one thing that’s guaranteed to make me feel right with the world is stepping onto a clean rug after a shower or a rinse and knowing the grime is gone from my feet. After about the age of 8, your feet are really the only thing that makes contact with the earth anymore. You can’t just go play in the sand or in a park, but your feet take you everywhere, and often that shows. Of course, cleaning my feet also exposes how callused and blistered they’ve been, but so it goes.

#3 - Travel Reading is the best. I’ve blogged about this before, but really reading has been an essential part of this trip for me. It’s been a way to explore new cafes and parks; it’s been a relaxing adventure instead of the sometimes-stressful excursions and nights out and hikes to Jesus and the rest; and it’s been a solitary way to unwind and relax.

#4 - The only real knowledge is experience. If there’s any lasting truth I will take from this trip, it’s this idea. You can’t really know and understand something until you’ve experienced it. I studied Spanish for 6 years, and yet I’ve learned so much more in the last 5 weeks than I imagined I still had to learn. I can tell my Spanish has improved immensely. I can speak with the hostel front desk and the cleaning lady in just Spanish, I can ask questions at the grocery store, I asked a man today for directions. And while I might have known some of the vocabulary and could’ve probably written these things down before, this month has gotten rid of my shyness about Spanish. I know it’s hard to imagine me being shy while I ramble on about life, but I promise that I am with Spanish, or rather was. I hope I never learn this newfound confidence.

If nothing else, I have a wealth of knowledge and experiences that I will continue to draw on for the rest of my life. I can only hope the future will bring more opportunities to experience culture and language first-hand.