The Extraordinary Nature of Ordinary Things

I drink my coffee black. I have done since college. For a short time in high school, I drank mochas. I was trying to learn how to drink coffee, because at that time, hanging out in coffee shops was what we did. After that it was lattes with vanilla, and later, without the flavoring. When I went to university, I taught myself to drink it black because it was cheaper, so I could drink more of it. I lived on 25 cent refills, occasionally also springing for a pastry from one of the local coffee shops. Those refills got me through early morning classes, late night papers, and working 30 hours a week while taking 20 credits. 

Even with the fuel of caffeine, it took me five years to graduate, because half way through my third year, my sister asked me to go on a trip with her. She'd been an exchange student in New Zealand when she was 16, and she wanted to visit her host families and friends. Thinking about the green, green, poster of Ireland in my childhood home, I agreed. Anywhere foreign sounded fine to me. Every time we talked, she added a new destination. 'As long as we're going to New Zealand, let's go to Australia. As long as we're going to Australia, let's meet Peri in India. As long as we're going to India, we might as well go north to Europe.' Pretty soon, a trip to New Zealand became open-ended around-the-world tickets.

Twenty-two countries in five months, across 3 continents, and I remember most of it – some vividly, some vaguely. Places I'd seen in books and in movies were suddenly real. Places I didn't know existed, we were walking past. Food I'd never thought of, I was learning to love. Languages I didn't know, I was speaking, if brokenly.

It was amazing, but it wasn't a vacation. It was work, and stressful, and sometimes very hard. But it was work in the way all the best things are. The kind you want to do. The kind that makes you better, and leaves you with the best stories, even if you cried your way through it while it was happening. The the kind that you want to do again and again.

It took me years to realize that vacation and travel aren't the same thing. Vacation is about the destination. Travel is about how you get there. It's about transportation and accommodation, keeping addresses in the back of your journal to send postcards to, and about scouting out the grocery stores because you cook your own dinner most nights. It's about keeping track of the number of countries you've been to, and about traveling through so many cities you lose count. It's about finding the longest books in the bookstore to make the train ride go faster. It's a little bit about looking for yourself, a lot about finding yourself, even if you aren't looking, and for me, it's about drinking coffee everywhere.

As time and memories drop away, single moments stand out. Scenes, not episodes. Pictures, not movies. Driving in New Zealand at twenty, my first time around a round-about and on the wrong side of the road. Hitting the curb and seeing the hubcap go flying. Pulling over so my sister can jump out and retrieve it. Driving there again almost twenty years later, and somehow doing a much worse job.

Standing at the Eastern-most point of Australia, listening to my kayaking instructor explain that he came to Byron Bay to surf, but he stayed because every morning he wakes up happy, and shouldn't you stay somewhere like that? Five years later, standing on the Southern-most point of the continental U.S. and thinking about that guy in Australia, wondering if he is still wakes up there.

Eating a pastry in cafe in Spain, sitting on the patio in early spring, under the shadow of the castle up the hill, watching a group of old men drinking their orange juice, waiting until they can start in on beer. Seven years later, sitting on a cafe patio in the South of France, drinking espresso with breakfast and friends, waiting until we can start in on wine.

Getting off a marshrutka in Moscow, carrying all my luggage and walking behind my best friend, finally arriving at Red Square, because it's the first thing she wants me to see, even in the dark. A few days later, its walking past Dead Lenin, because for some reason that is a thing you can do. For just a moment, it feels like we are alone in the dark, staring at a waxy, preserved body, lit up under a single, soft, spot light, then getting yelled at in Russian to keep moving. Ordering a mocha in the middle of Moscow, because I recognize the word in Cyrillic, drinking it in silence, surrounded by the hustle of the city outside the huge, glass doors, then walking to the bookstore down the street to wait for my friend.

Wandering through every book store across Europe, and remembering how it feels not to be able to read as I flip through any book within reach. Reading Crime and Punishment in a plaza in Spain, waiting to meet friends after breakfast. Reading The Woman in White on the train to Germany, and then passing it to my sister. Reading War and Peace on night trains through France, but in a country not quite twice the size of my Montana, there just isn't enough space across to finish it, and even though I've been back to France since then, I still haven't. Reading Anna Karenina during the day in Rome, because it's too riveting to put down in favor of site seeing, and also because I'm exhausted from night trains. Walking past the Trevi Fountain on the way to dinner with local friends, and spending an hour trying to explain the definition of jaded.

My memories are mapped onto the places we visited – a tourist site, a famous city, a picture of a picture. But the places aren't the memories. The moments are. And it's inside those moments that some subtle shift occurs. One hundred thousand things that cannot be pinpointed, quietly shifting my perspective, my preferences, my vocabulary. I don't even notice it until I'm an entirely different person. I didn't see it coming, and I can't explain it anyway, because I don't know who I would have been if it hadn't done those things. 

When you travel for so long, it the ordinary things make the biggest impact. Like eating homemade sauerkraut soup, in the middle of Russia, in the middle of a kitchen, in the middle of the apartment of a friend's friend, and hearing about the family recipe. 

Or, walking over the hill of a park on a quiet morning, and seeing the Coliseum as if by magic, appear sooner than I expected. Then noticing the morning traffic weave around it, as though it's perfectly normal to drive past the Coliseum on a Monday morning. And, of course, it is. These people live here, and they are driving to work. The extraordinary nature of ordinary things is that they happen anywhere in the world you are, you just have to stop and notice them while they are happening.

And so it is, one day in April, years after that first foray into travel, I find myself walking on the coast of the Mediterranean. Paul Valery is buried on the clifftop that looms over this small town, and I can see the cemetery from here. I'm following the boardwalk towards the lighthouse, knowing that once I reach it I will turn around and come back again. For some reason I think to myself that, in that moment, if anyone I know looks at a map, they would have no idea where in the world I am. I walk back off the boardwalk, to a cafe near the marina and order a coffee. Black.