The Addiction

I think it’s possible to basically live in any place. We’re amazingly adaptable – and I find with myself at least, given a few days, I can feel generally comfortable in most cities. There is a part of me is definitely a collector. I like making lists of places I’ve been and seen – one of my latest ideas is to figure out all of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites I’ve visited. On the other hand though, I actually greatly dislike most touristy-sites. Most of them are there to be visited and then left behind. Even in cities, I find myself wanting to take at least a day and just go walking around and familiarizing myself with it. I don’t generally want to make it a priority to “see everything.”

Or anything for that matter; even though I spent over 9 months in Budapest, I actually never got up to the top of the Basilica, something that most of my classmates did their first week there. I’d rather soak up the atmosphere, sit in a café, watch locals go about their daily lives. It’s a perpetual tension for me when I travel. Tight time schedules, combined with my somewhat mystifying desire to check things off the tourist list (I’d feel like I missed out if I didn’t see the Louvre or the Tate or the Great (New) Wall) make taking that initial day somewhat of a luxury at the same time. Like I mentioned in a previous post, the truth is that only part of me wants to travel. The other part of me just wants to belong.

Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon, I can’t tell what is more politically correct or acceptable to the locals as it seems both are in use) is like this for me. There really isn’t much to see actually. I can tell though, that if I lived here, there would be plenty to discover. I met some locals yesterday who laughed at how foreigners loved walking around the city center. “What can a foreigner really see when walking around here? Nothing,” they said. It’s true. There’s really not much in the way of sights, and moreover, although we like to think we are making some deep and insightful observations about city-life, we are most probably not even scratching the surface. Without some language skills and a good variety of local friends, I don’t know that a city like Saigon would ever really reveal itself to me, deep and insightful one day observations that only I am capable of notwithstanding.

That can of course all change when you commit yourself to a city and a culture, making efforts to fit in. This is the part of being in new places that I really like. For instance, I went to a decent little spa last night to get a massage (fine, upstanding, high-quality massage with no offer of any extra services!) and began to make friends with some of the incredibly friendly local staff there. I could see myself actually becoming friends with these people if I were to stay here longer term, opening up a window to the city and the culture that would otherwise be closed to me. That’s what’s exciting for me. To bring it all back to the beginning though, I felt this way in NYC when I visited earlier in the year also, and it’s been so long since I’ve lived in the Bay Area that I don’t doubt I could feel this there also. So, in some sense, I don’t think I need to go halfway around the world to get my fix. It begs the question then, why DO I go halfway around the world?