Travel is the little things. The small differences from home. The gradual changes as you cross one border to the next. The things you end up missing when you get home.
It’s different time zones. It’s the confusion of waking up to a dozen Facebook messages and trying to work out what time it is back home. It’s the ‘Welcome to Montenegro’ text from your network provider – when you’re in Kosovo.
It’s Cyrillic on tins of peas and Arabic on salt sachets. It’s the Latin alphabet dressed up to the nines in accents, umlauts and circumflexes.
It’s mayonnaise and chips. It’s the condiment on the table that you don’t know what to do with. It’s scanning the menu for the local cheap beer and drinking it everyday for the rest of your holiday. It’s red wine and coke. It’s fresh fruit juices made in front of you and bottles of ice cold water.
It’s a poorly translated menu. And the even poorer attempts at an English breakfast.
It’s that the taste of Coca-Cola is slightly different in every country but you can’t quite explain why. It’s that the price of Coca-Cola is completely different in every country and you know exactly why. It’s the token local dish on the McDonald’s menu. It’s 7-Eleven’s health food trend in Copenhagen and its ubiquity in Bangkok. It’s white chocolate Twixes and sunflower Snickers.
It’s that I can’t get Moldovan wine outside of Moldova in spite of how delicious it is. It’s the excitement of knowing I will be able to get hazlenut ice-cream where I’m going because I can’t get it at home. It’s the abundance of Kinder products. And that every other country seemed to manage to work out that paprika was the best flavour of crisps. It’s missing salt and vinegar crisps.
It’s table service instead of paying at the bar. It’s free poured spirits.
It’s total disregard for food hygiene or health and safety. It’s riding in a car without a seatbelt. It’s exposed wires in the bathroom and the man welding without eye protection. It’s eating that suspicious looking street food then waiting anxiously for your bowels to turn against you. It’s being pleasantly surprised when they stay your friend.
It’s different currencies. It’s the faces and colours of unfamiliar notes peeking out of the ATM. It’s coins with holes in them and no coins at all. It’s haggling. It’s walking away from a product you really wanted only to hear “Okay, okay 500 rupees…” being called after you. It’s struggling with exchange rates. It’s coming home and continuing to divide everything by ten and then the disappointment when you realise how expensive everything is at home.
It’s being able to buy antibiotics for a urinary tract infection without a prescription. It’s the imported Turkish medicine that cures your tonsillitis almost instantaneously but that’s potency would render it illegal at home. It’s visiting a Romanian doctor in Sweden on Christmas day. It’s the Vietnamese doctor telling you your leg will have to be amputated.
It’s fake Havianas and Raybans and “very cheap prices”.
It’s Belarusian borders where the guard insists that your passport photo “isn’t you.” And then the Laotian one where you’re allowed to illegally re-enter the country to pay the “exit tax”. It’s passport stamps. Mostly it’s passport stamps.
It’s the smell of sun cream and street side BBQ hanging in the humid air. It’s air conditioning. It’s breaking the air conditioning because you wanted to recreate the arctic tundra in your hostel room. It’s dirty feet from wearing sandals all day.
It’s the pride in going to another country and being able to understand something because it was similar in another place you were in.
It’s the names of far flung cities on departure boards.
It’s being terrified of some local law you’ve heard of then ending up breaking it anyway and everything being fine.
It’s spotting the immigrant population and wondering if they are as baffled as you. It’s recognising the other lost looking foreigners across the bar or the road and judging their big backpacks and lost expressions because you’re an expert now. It’s shitty customer service. It’s the monk on the beach giving you apples and pears. It’s Sri Lankan heads bobbing and Japanese ones bowing.
It’s the tourist map you take from the hotel insisting you won’t need it. It’s the night when you get lost on the other side of the city and that map gets you home. It’s knowing what metro stop to get off at without thinking.
It’s tuk tuks and unlicensed taxis.
It’s finding museum tickets and scrunched up receipts in a foreign script still in your purse months later.
It’s putting on the hotel room TV and not understanding a word of what’s being said but getting so invested in that Russian soap opera or that Cantonese game show. It’s when the hotel or restaurant tries to be “Western” and gets close, but no cigar. It’s the music video on mute that makes no sense.
It’s the place you’ve been thinking of as you read this.