(no subject)
Deep in my heart of hearts, I've always thought (or at least told myself) that one of the things that makes me me is a more-adventuresome-than-usual streak of wanderlust. I once got into a bit of trouble at my daycare center when I was four after the teacher read us a story about a little boy who liked to play "explorer" - he made paper flags to "claim territory" and went to go explore a cave near his house. After story time, the teacher helped us all make little paper flags of our own and set up one of those plastic kiddie-crawl-tube-tunnel things so we could all pretend we were "exploring" a "cave"; however, I got so into the spirit of it that I ended up "exploring" my way out the door to our playroom, down a hall, past the bathrooms, up a flight of stairs and into the administrative offices of the church where my daycare was located. It was only when a secretary happened to see me trying to plant my flag on a landing that anyone told me, "oh, no, you're not supposed to be here," and brought me back to the room with the kiddie tunnel. I didn't put up a fuss, and went back to the pretend-exploring in the tunnel, but I distinctly remember feeling that exploring the same tunnel over and over was pretty damn boring by comparison.
That's dropped off for the past ten years, though - I got hit with a lack of time, lack of opportunity, and lack of money. Meanwhile, my brother was backpacking around the world -- twice -- and my parents were starting to go off on cruises and European jaunts, and I was stuck at home, feeling unlucky and seethingly jealous. The real low point came in 2007: my brother's family went to the Cook Islands for their vacation, and my parents went to Italy. Me? I went to Chicago.
But on top of jealous and deprived and unlucky -- I was starting to feel fearful. The thing I've learned about solo travel is that it's kind of like a muscle; if you don't use it, that impulse atrophies. In my 20's I thought nothing of just up and running off for the weekend to surprise a friend stuck working at a Rennaisance Faire in the middle of nowhere; lately, though, a lot of my travel plans feel hampered in by my fretting about whether I can speak the language, whether I can be safe, whether I should be concerned about theft -- the kinds of things I never used to worry about, and the kinds of things that would have made four-year-old me say "yeah, but exploring the same thing over and over is boring, remember?"
However -- now that my luck's turned (and now that I'm in a job that actually offers a paid vacation), I've been spending the past couple weeks starting to browse travel sites online, looking for ideas about where to go. My parents have been trying to sell me on Europe (Dad has been a huge fan of Italy ever since that first trip, where he got to take a cooking course for a day), and I've also been browsing a few travel sites.
But for the past couple days -- for reasons I'm not able to ascertain -- I've been looking more and more at options for traveling in Morocco. To the point that I think I may indeed be in the early stages of planning for a trip there. Even though what I'm finding is that I don't really know the language (the little high school French I've retained is pitiful, and I know fuck-all about Arabic), I'll be a solo female in an Arabic country, and no one I know has ever been there before, and never have I had any thoughts about visiting Morocco prior to this. But none of that is dissuading me.
I'm back.
That's dropped off for the past ten years, though - I got hit with a lack of time, lack of opportunity, and lack of money. Meanwhile, my brother was backpacking around the world -- twice -- and my parents were starting to go off on cruises and European jaunts, and I was stuck at home, feeling unlucky and seethingly jealous. The real low point came in 2007: my brother's family went to the Cook Islands for their vacation, and my parents went to Italy. Me? I went to Chicago.
But on top of jealous and deprived and unlucky -- I was starting to feel fearful. The thing I've learned about solo travel is that it's kind of like a muscle; if you don't use it, that impulse atrophies. In my 20's I thought nothing of just up and running off for the weekend to surprise a friend stuck working at a Rennaisance Faire in the middle of nowhere; lately, though, a lot of my travel plans feel hampered in by my fretting about whether I can speak the language, whether I can be safe, whether I should be concerned about theft -- the kinds of things I never used to worry about, and the kinds of things that would have made four-year-old me say "yeah, but exploring the same thing over and over is boring, remember?"
However -- now that my luck's turned (and now that I'm in a job that actually offers a paid vacation), I've been spending the past couple weeks starting to browse travel sites online, looking for ideas about where to go. My parents have been trying to sell me on Europe (Dad has been a huge fan of Italy ever since that first trip, where he got to take a cooking course for a day), and I've also been browsing a few travel sites.
But for the past couple days -- for reasons I'm not able to ascertain -- I've been looking more and more at options for traveling in Morocco. To the point that I think I may indeed be in the early stages of planning for a trip there. Even though what I'm finding is that I don't really know the language (the little high school French I've retained is pitiful, and I know fuck-all about Arabic), I'll be a solo female in an Arabic country, and no one I know has ever been there before, and never have I had any thoughts about visiting Morocco prior to this. But none of that is dissuading me.
I'm back.