Death… It's A Living

I have travel plans to Europe in the next few days. I’ll be there for 15 days (if you let me count the days where I will only be on a plane or train as “being in Europe”). It is the longest I’ve given myself to be abroad since I studied in Vienna when I was a junior in college, which was just before 9/11. In other words, a long time ago.

That trip was transformational in terms of how I understand the world. Okay, maybe not so much the world as my understanding of my place in the world. I tend to think and feel as two separate actions, except when I travel someplace strange. It’s during those moments where I somehow feel closer to being a whole person, one who can think and feel at the same time; one who sees a bigger piece of the big picture.

This time around, I’ll be primarily in northern Italy to scout locations (mostly in Venice and Trieste) for a study abroad course. On the one hand, I will be looking to design an educational experience that gives my students what I was given when I was an adolescent. On the other hand, I’m looking to be much more self-focused and give myself that same experience, a second time round.

What is it about travel specifically that provides these moments? To travel, especially to foreign lands, is to brush up against the uncanny. Travel turns the familiar into the unfamiliar and then back again. Travel transforms mundane experiences into memorable events.

In fact, of my most 10-20 vivid memories, I’d guess that 75% of them occurred outside of my home country (the remaining being the events associated with the births of my sons). Many of the neurotransmitters involved in the process of memory storage also play roles in emotional processing. That’s one of the reasons why our most emotionally charged events are some of our strongest memories.

(Without getting too far off-track, this is a major reason why most modern psychologists are skeptical of “repressed” trauma. Memory and mind models suggest that trauma is often difficult to overcome because it is so memorable. Any one with PTSD can tell you that they would love to be able to repress certain memories. “Memories” that are “recovered” during “therapy” are… problematic, as I hope my quotation marks have indicated.)

What is immediately interesting to me about my travel memories are how relatively mundane they are. Compared with the birth of my children (especially the first, who was born nearly 3 weeks earlier than expected via an emergency c-section), I can vividly place what I was wearing and what I was thinking as I was choosing a bottle of beer at an Icelandic visitor’s center outside of a geothermic park. It was a very good but incredibly strong beer, which is probably why my memory of the rest of that day is… hazier.

I remember trying to figure out how a curry restaurant works in Machida, Tokyo. (First you order at a vending machine, then you sit down and someone takes your ticket without conversation.) I can only think of two other times in my life where I can recall using a vending machine in such detail and the other two are also abroad (again in Tokyo and in Austria). This is strange because I know I have lost money and slapped a vending machine—as if that would help—but I don’t remember where I was or what I was trying to order.

Familiarity in the Foreign

Foreignness is uncanny. We tend to stereotype entire peoples in certain ways (the Japanese are reserved whereas Italians are loveable hotheads). And while it can seem that many stereotypes have a kernel of truth, that’s usually just a trick of how humans recall information. Even first-year psychology students can tell you about fundamental attribution error (at least the students who successfully make it to their second year!): If I believe the stereotypes listed above, then I am simply more likely to remember the quiet Japanese and loud Italians and forget about the loud Japanese and quiet Italians that I meet. The truth about human behavior is pretty boring: People are people everywhere, and they tend to behave in ways you expect them to across the globe. This is not uncanny. But these boring, predictable locals (for you are the foreigner) speak a different language. Communication changes. Conveying basic information becomes a challenge and conversation practically impossible. My first day in Vienna as a study abroad student, relied entirely on pointing and hoping. I ordered a knoblauch baguette because I thought it was funny a Viennese menu has something with the same name as Yankee second baseman Chuck Knoblauch, who famously got the yips and could no longer throw to first base without an error. Turns out that ‘knoblauch’ means ‘garlic’ in German, and I would only be eating garlic bread for dinner that night.

A foreign place turns you into an infant, of a sort. Pointing and hoping is also the communication strategy of a 9-month-old who wants a toy he can’t reach. Like the experience of a baby, travel forces you to reckon with a world that you do not understand and cannot succeed in without the support of others. This is hard for me because I like feeling like I know things. I like being comfortable. I don’t like having to ask basic questions (i.e., “what is that?”) before I’ve given myself the chance to learn on my own. I want to know what knoblauch means before I go to the restaurant. I don’t like being uncomfortable.

Who does? No one. There is no one who likes being uncomfortable. Discomfort is an evolved cue that something needs to change. Parents of newborns might occasionally believe that their tiny, crying, pooping lodger is angry or sad, but developmentalist don’t believe these emotions can be expressed until 7 months old at the youngest. Instead, infants are born only with the abilities to experience the most ancient of feelings: comfort and discomfort. Should I stay or should I go? (Or more accurately for those of us without a locomotive ability: should I remain quiet, or should I scream?)

I’ll write that sentence again: Discomfort is an evolved cue that something needs to change. When we are uncomfortable in our own homes, we know how to change (in my case, this usually means sweatpants). When we are uncomfortable in a foreign land, we might not know what or how to change. So, we are forced to learn. I suspect the reason why so many of my strongest memories across my lifetime are when I am in a new place are because this sort of learning, this sort of adjustment requires more parts of my brain, more creative problem solving, more sensory input. How do I get from this straße to that? How do I say ‘sandwich’ in German? Will the people I try to get to help me think that I am stupid?

In my home country, I might avoid people who think that I ask stupid questions. I hate hardware stores for that reason. But I can get away with this fear at home because it won’t prevent me from eating or finding a place to sleep. I’m not so lucky when I’m abroad.

And yet, while abroad, I feel incredibly lucky. It’s not just the fortune I feel to be at a point in my life where I can afford to travel (though I am thankful of that as well); I feel lucky to be able to have the experience of being a stranger in a strange land. I know that I’ll be creating experiences that I’ll remember and cherish my whole life. I’ll think things that I’ve never thought before that I could not have thought without travel.

Travel is also exhausting. I don’t like to fly. I definitely don’t like to sit and wait to arrive somewhere. I’m not a binge watcher. I have a difficult time distracting myself from just wanting to be there already.  

But it’s so rewarding. My favorite aspect of travel is food. I will no doubt see (and taste) foods that have never heard of before. There are things swimming around the northern Adriatic that aren’t in supermarkets in the Pacific northwest. I’ll eat them. When I get home, my savings account will be thousands of dollars lighter. And yet, I’ll be substantially richer.

-The Plague Doctor