An Experienced Claim
From the 4th August to the 18th August of the year 2013, I spent two weeks of my holidays with a group of trusty friends in Southern Europe, specifically in Italy for the first week and in Croatia for the second one. The point of travelling there was to extend our vision of the world, a world near our own country. A desire that we can find through the essay “Why We Travel” of Pico Iyer, a British essayist and novelist. In some sort, I’ve found myself in one of his claims. He affirms “Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love”. I couldn’t stop thinking of my previous experience abroad after reading that sentence because it is exactly what I felt there. The first thing that comes up in this claim is the concept of staying up late. I mean who wants to get asleep at 8 p.m where he leaves for vacation in a country like Croatia where party is the order of the day for the youth. Not a day went by without us going out. The choice was ours to go to outdoor nightclubs or spending the night in ours mobile homes to play soccer or cards. I think it is essential that for some time we don’t have any restriction (not all the time because we also need limits).
But there is something in this quote that defines who I am in a trip. And this is the fact of following impulse. The thing about going in a place where nobody knows you is that you can do whatever you can’t without taking care of the look of others. That’s my point. It comes with the impulsiveness because of the refusal to content yourself. It happened to me in Croatia. We were on some sort of a boulevard along the seafront like the famous croisette in Cannes. People were walking on the tiny road; my group and I decided to go paddling. We were sitting on the rocks located near the water to contemplate the horizon in the morning. Lucky for us, we were also equipped with small inflatable boats. And I don’t know why but I felt a strange feeling of excitement at this very moment. With no hesitation, I grabbed one of the boats; I jumped on it and lay down like a kid. And I just sang with a powerful voice “I Will Always Love You” from Whitney Houston. Everyone around was looking at us, well, especially the man version of Whitney Houston I was. I could see their smiles appearing on their faces on by one. It was like a big reunion of people who didn’t know each other but having a great fun. It is true that the laughter is the same whatever the culture you are coming from, even if we don’t speak the same language we can still communicate with pleasure and fun.
And all of this lead us to the point of finding ourselves as wide open as when we are in love, well, except that I have never been in love, or not truly I mean. But I can say I felt several times in love with my real-life experience abroad. Maybe my desire of singing this love song on this inflatable boat was revealing about my feeling in this foreign place. We can find our true self in this kind of moment, far away from the stress and troubles of our lives because these ones hide who we really are. What I mean is a man may have never been angry or stressed one day if we wasn’t working or trying to pay his bills. Holiday exist for this purpose.
According to what I’ve lived abroad, Pico Iyer is right in his claim. But I think nobody can be right enough because it is hard to explain the entire dimension of our feelings in only one sentence. The nature of travelling is to forget about your life back home or specifically the negative side of it and to follow your drives, what you really want to do in order to be who you really are.
