Where do I begin?

A month-long journey

I spent the month of March in eastern Asia, and the experience consumed me even as I consumed it. For a full 30 days and nights I dipped myself into four wildly different countries: Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Cambodia. It’s been 10 days since I came back and I still can’t separate myself from the experience. Yet everyone has been excitedly asking me to describe it anyways, like the travels were something outside of myself.

“How was your trip?” they always ask first. As though it’s possible to condense a month’s worth of experiences and food and self-reflection into a response succinct enough for your average break-room conversation. “Good!” is my inevitable response, after which I wait and hope they ask a more pointed question.

“Well, what was your favorite thing?” they ask next, possibly after seeing the panic in my eyes when I realize my words have failed me yet again. This question is somehow even harder to answer, given its comparative quality. I hem and haw. I try to explain it’s not possible to compare Japan with Thailand or Korea with Cambodia. Or possible to compare hiking to a rainforest-cloaked temple in Chiang Mai with snorkeling in the turquoise waters of Surin Islands, or eating gluten-free ramen in Kyoto with khao phad served in a pineapple in Bangkok. Most ineffably: how do I compare who I was then with who I am now?

The travel blogosphere is chock full of words and photographs about these four countries, and soon I will add my own to the mix. I am too full of feelings and thoughts to not write about my experience in these places, despite what my conversational history would suggest. It’s just that the leading questions must differ, and I’ll only be able to write my answers after I’ve found a few of them that fit.

So watch this space, sports fans. Some standard-travel-blog questions will be straightforward enough for me to tackle in the interim: what I liked and what I didn’t, what I’d do differently because my planning skills are hilarious, what I want to see more of the next time I visit. Yet simmering beneath those surface-level questions, I am overflowing with stories, and they’ll spill out eventually. I am also drowning in photos. Is anyone shocked?

In some ways I’m different now, but in others I’m exactly the same.