I love to travel. In this past year alone, I did Czech-Poland-Ukraine in March, 2008; Peru in August, 2008; China in December, 2008; and am now living in Europe. My ambition is to make it to Africa, probably Morocco and Egypt, by the end of my stint in Europe, so that I can claim to have been in five of the seven continents in the space of a year. And let’s just leave unsaid all the interesting things I’ve eaten during that space of time.
Yet yesterday I spent the better part of a night (it was rainy in London) watching an American football game. And I loved it.
It’s the same impulse that drives me to eat at least one McDonald’s meal almost anytime I go abroad.
I think most expats have it somewhere, that deep longing for something familiar and home like. In Peru, Cuzco, Jim and I thought it was so funny that the most popular bar in the central square was (drumroll) the British Pub! But it makes a certain amount of sense: you spend the entire day racking your brains, politely listening to other people explain their cultures to you, gamely trying the guinea pig that’s still got its claws attached to it, and, when the night comes, there’s an intense desire to go back and drink the same Guinesse that you know, love, and have drank all your life. (Note: I actually hate Guiness. Such a rich beer, and yet almost only half the alcohol of an actual real beer.)
That’s the basic tension for people like me. We’re bored by home. It’s why we leave in the first place. We’re bored by the same five restaurants on the same streets, with knowing what’s around every corner. We’re driven by a sense of wanting to be completely lost, with knowing that beyond our trusty Visa cards and folding maps, we’re alone and on our own. (I do admit that if the Visa card wasn’t there, it would be a lot more scary.) That feeling that it’s possible to be lost, and in fact the feeling of being lost and needing to find your way home in the cold, is one of the most exhilarating for me. (And I have the flu to prove it.)
But we do miss home. The ones we love. The friends we crave. The familiar meal that we know we’ll like. And in my case last night, the sports game where I knew all the rules, knew all the teams, knew all the history, and, in the end, knew what the score meant.
It meant that Pittsburgh won.
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You should read The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton - he does this sort of philosophical musing on traveling and it's significance to people. Really really good read and since you're in France, you can probably get it in its native French oui oui.
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