Young Turks

Young Hearts, Be Free Tonight

As my parents--and Rod Stewart--remind me, time is on my side. At 9:40pm, Eastern Daylight Time, I'll push back from the gate at Boston's Logan International Airport and jump off into the exciting and challenging world of international travel with both feet. Aside from a couple of weeks in Vancouver on family vacation several years ago and the week I spent on a service project in Belize at the beginning of this summer, this will mark my first serious foray into the exciting and challenging world of international travel. And I'll be jumping in with both feet, waking up to change planes in Zurich and ultimately touching down in Istanbul, which I strongly suspect will be Exotic with a capital "E" after 20 years in the U. S. of A., whose shores I'm not scheduled to see again until May 31, 2011.

Yes, that's a long time to contemplate right now, but I'm confident that it's going to be a fantastic, truly once-in-a-lifetime experience. And it's time to move on: though it's strange to think I'm not headed back to Washington in a week or two, I can tell that I'm getting ready to move on and get back to school and Georgetown friends new and old. I've put in a long, challenging, and rewarding summer of landscaping by day and waiting tables by night to help make this trip a reality; sweat equity achieved, I'm ready to put it towards an unbelievable experience. Besides, not that I haven't been any fun at all this summer, but now that the first hints of fall are in the air, the light's getting longer and the days shorter, I'm ready to hit the Turquoise Coast. Sure, I'll have homework to do, but somehow doing my reading on a Mediterranean beach just doesn't sound like all that bad of a deal.

In keeping with the musically-inspired theme of this first post, I see this trip as my time to keep "Movin' ahead so life won't pass me by," as Jim Croce sings in "I Got a Name." In many ways, it's the culmination of so much of my experience over the last few years: going to college, the trials of freshman year, the joys of sophomore year, the outdoor and life lessons of NOLS, and most recently a week in Belize this June. In many ways, I knew I was ready for this on spring break. After finally making up my mind about where I wanted to take my year abroad and getting my applications in, I remember very distinctly when it hit me: having downed a cup of cafe au lait and the traditional beignets at Cafe du Monde, I walked out into the New Orleans sunlight with my fellow volunteers, looked around at the city--arguably America's most "foreign"--and thinking, This is it. I like this traveling thing! NOLA is kinda like a little slice of Europe on the Gulf of Mexico; I can't wait to see the real deal next year!

Incidentally, that's a very good omen, according to the epigraph to the classic novel of New Orleans, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. He quotes A. J. Liebling's The Earl of Lousiana thus:

" 'You're right on that. We're Mediterranean. I've never been to Greece or Italy, but I'm sure I'd be at home there as soon as I landed.'

"He would, too, I thought. New Orleans resembles Genoa or Marseilles, or Beirut or the Egyptian Alexandria more than it does New York, although all seaports resemble one another more than they can resemble any city in the interior. Like Havana and Port-au-Prince, New Orleans is within the orbit of a Hellenistic world that never touched the North Atlantic. The Mediterranean, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico form a homogeneous, though interrupted, sea."

I might have been raised on the North Atlantic, but this year I've visited the Gulf in March, the Caribbean in June, and now the Mediterranean in August/September. Though I'm visiting the different parts of this "homogeneous, though interrupted, sea" in the reverse order of how Liebling listed them, I fell in love with and felt very much at home in the first two. The first impression, of the Gulf, was naturally the strongest, and it was in New Orleans, as I mentioned, that I first felt the exhilarating rush of what I suppose might be that unique "Hellenistic" culture that unites the interrupted sea. My trip to Belize and the Caribbean taught me about traveling and living in the developing world, and what it's like to be unmistakably an outsider. Alanya, though perhaps not Hellenistic, will extrapolate on both of these experiences, as I land on the actual Mediterranean as an unmistakable outsider, this time without the benefit of sharing the same religious and linguistic background as the people I'm living amongst, and I'll be there for much longer. But I could have happily stayed longer on the Gulf or the Caribbean, so I'm hopeful that "I'll be at home there as soon as I land" in Alanya. I've swum in the Gulf and snorkeled in the Caribbean; once I dive into the Mediterranean, I hope to feel myself at home once again in the interrupted sea I've come to love so much this year.

So this is it. Showtime!, as I like to call it. I've got a ticket from Boston to Istanbul and a ticket from Shannon to Boston, but my in-between itinerary is TBD. There are sights to see, people to meet, pictures to take, leases to sign, languages to learn, an even greater measure of independence to experience, mistakes to be made, and confidence to gain. (I'm sure I missed a thing or two.) There will also be pictures and blogs to post in order to help you keep track of me and share in the experience from wherever you might be.

I'll wrap this first post up with one more song, this one by Brendan James, called "All I Can See." I've been finding a lot of meaning in it lately as I've been mentally and physically preparing for this trip; you can see it here, and I'd highly recommend giving this a couple of listens as you think about the journey I'm about to undertake and/or as you face the journeys of your own life. Without giving it all away, here's the second to last stanza, the mini-theme song of my trip:

Those who journey can easily understand, the more they see the more they'll learn, the more that they will be. So this I swear to you, and this I swear to me, I'll never rest till I've seen all I can see. No, I'll never rest till I've seen all I can see.

I won't see everything this time around, but I'm determined to do and see as much as possible in the next nine months or so. By the end of next May, I'm sure I'll be equally determined to return as many times as I am able over the course of the rest of my life to keep seeing a bit more each time. Now it's off to Istanbul, do not pass "Go," do not collect $200. Take us there, Rod:

We got just one shot of life, let's take it while we're still not afraid....
Young hearts gotta run free, be free, live free.
Time is on, time is on your side.
Time, time, time, time is on your side, is on your side, is on your side, is on your side.
Young hearts, be free tonight.
Tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight, tonight...