What I Learned in 2022
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We have a couple more days in Hong Kong. We had lunch this week with a friend who lives here; we met her in Beirut, and our lunch together on Tuesday was every bit as enjoyable and memorable as our lunch together back in 2018. We loveto reunite with friends old and new as we move around the world, so I wanted to mention rosenfinder.com. You can check where we are, and see our future plans; please reach out if it looks like our paths are going to cross.
What I Learned in 2022
You might think that we’d have learned enough life and travel lessons after seven years on the road, but no. We still have plenty to learn.
Here are a few good lessons that will stay with me long after Saturday’s fireworks fizzle out and the confetti is swept away (but not here in Hong Kong—apparently the city’s official fireworks have been canceled, because Covid).
—Twenty-three days is a really long time to be without luggage, but weirdly, it’s also … not the end of the world. It might be hard if your destination is a rural village in a developing country, but I can say definitively—it is entirely possible to survive twenty-three days in any European capital without your luggage.
Having said that, we’re sticking with carry-on only for now.
—Related: AirTags are great at telling you where your luggage is. They’re useless at actually getting your luggage back.
—I’m ultimately happier if I haul my not-a-morning-person-self out of bed and take the tour. We went on a lot of tours this year—walking tours, driving tours, history tours, food tours, free tours, paid tours, one-hour tours, multi-day tours. Some were better than others, but every single one was, at the very least, an interesting opportunity to meet a local person and ask questions. And I had so many questions this year, about so many places.
—Speaking of all the places we went: I’ll go pretty much anywhere once. But sometimes once is enough. We spent time in several places this year that I had always been curious about. Now that I’ve satisfied that curiosity, I don’t need to go back—life is too short, and the list of other places I’m curious about is too long.
—Trains are not necessarily air-conditioned. You’d think we would’ve learned that one well enough in the European heatwave of 2015, but apparently we needed the European heatwave of 2022 for reinforcement. I think I’ve got it this time.
—Borders are a fascinating social and political construct. We’ve crossed a lot of borders this year, and the moment of crossing usually (but not always) feels a bit anticlimactic. It’s usually just a person with a stamp, sitting behind a sheet of plexiglass in an institutional space that could be anywhere. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy, all over the world. But there were a few borders that felt different, and make me think about what makes a country—Iraq, for instance, where passport control was complete chaos, or Transnistria, where it was a stubborn declaration of independence in the face of international eye-rolling. Here in Hong Kong, which is definitely part of China, we’re only 19 miles from the border with the mainland and the city of Shenzhen, but we couldn’t go there today if we wanted to. Borders are weird, and some of them seem as if they were made up in a committee meeting in another place altogether. Which I suppose they were.
—Age, on the other hand, is a very real thing. And I am never going to be any younger or healthier than I am today. It’s sort of unfortunate that it took me 55 years to viscerally understand this truth and incorporate it into my thought patterns, but I think (I hope) I really get it now. I’m not old today—I’m younger and fitter and healthier than I will be tomorrow.
—Back in March, we could see a wee tiny triangle, far off in the distance, from our hotel room—the Great Pyramid of Giza, an unmistakable monument to our human drive to grow and strive and build. Week before last, the view from our hotel room was dominated by the Taipei 101 tower, another monument to our human drive to grow and strive and build. In between, I saw ancient cities and modern ruins, castles and bunkers, mountains and oceans and deserts and jungles, historic graffiti and contemporary art. But what I will take with me from 2022 is the memory of innumerable kindnesses, from people as diverse as the landscapes they inhabit. As we turn toward 2023, I wish you not a year filled with wonders, but the ability to see the wonder, wherever you are.
Take care,
Lisa
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