My Moment in Greece

Ben Fox I've said several times that part of traveling is coming home. It allows for your travels to be put in perspective and makes your next opportunity to go that much more special. Lying in bed very early this morning, fighting the 10 hour time difference between Seattle and Greece, I realized I don't like coming home. The last three weeks were amazing, full of beauty, charm, and adventure. I fell in love with Greece and was not ready for the affair to end. I couldn't tell you the moment it happened. So much moved me that to distill it down to a single moment, a lone experience, is impossible. This trip put me off balance, removed me from the familiar, and showed me that during travel, nothing is really mine save for the bare essentials of humanity and life. To travel is to compromise and to move. I had the buffer of fellow Lutes and a planed curriculum during this trip, but the chaos and brutality of foreign travel still came through. Waking up in strange places is one of my favorite sensations, so waking up in my familiar bed very early this morning was tough. To deal with it, I began looking through my pictures from the trip and those posted by my classmates. Looking at them sparked me to pull up ticket prices and itineraries for a return trip to Greece this summer with my brother. I guess that once you travel and you return home, your trip never really ends. During idle moments, your mind plays your journey over in your head, never really breaking away from the experience. Maybe my moment in Greece wasn't in Greece at all but instead back at home at 5:00am this morning with my mind playing the trip over again and looking forward to the next one. Keeping with the theme of the last several blogs, and Jessica's comments about them, I'll finish my dialog about this trip with a quote form Mark Jenkins and one of my all time favorites. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.”