The Transition Artist

Big Rose is the affectionate (or, at times, not so affectionate) nickname of the backpack I travel with. She’s a violent/rose shade, hence the nickname, and about two and a half feet tall and one foot wide on a good day. On a bad day, when my pockets are empty but my backpack is full of souvenirs, like, say, the camel hair rug I bought in Marrakesh, Big Rose’s seams stretch a little, making her proportions significantly larger and giving her the look and feel of an overstuffed sausage. On those bad days, Big Rose weighs about as much as a healthy 8-year-old, and could easily be considered an extra travel companion.

About a week ago, Big Rose, my roommate (with her much smaller backpack) and I took a two week trip to Portugal and Morocco. We traveled from Paris to Lisbon, Lisbon to Faro, back again to Lisbon, and then on to Marrakesh before returning to Paris again. The trip was a whirlwind adventure that would require a small novel to retell, but was essentially made up of uproarious bouts of laughter, what I’ve come to take as an expected number of misadventures due to a continual lack of organized planning, and an incredible number of new friends made along the way.

Big Rose got her name the first day of the trip as I stepped off the bus in Lisbon and was approached by a friendly local. Not a minute after stepping off the bus to look around, a man strolled up to Big Rose and I and asked, “Hashish? Marijuana?” A little taken aback by the greeting, I quickly shook my head and took a few steps away, teetering a little under Big Rose’s weight. However, as we began our short walk towards the hostel, a few other people approached to ask the same assuming question. I laughed as I wondered aloud if perhaps it was my appearance that attracted the solicitations, before realizing that my big pink backpack functioned quite well as a big sign reading, “I AM A TOURIST.” Needless to say, throughout the duration of the trip, arriving at a hostel where I could safely leave Big Rose behind in order to roam the streets a little more inconspicuously became one giant sigh of relief.

Throughout the course of our trip, we stayed in three different hostels, though after the first round of check-ins we began to fall into a routine. In each city we stayed in, we arrived, wandered around a little to get our bearings, found our way to the front desk of our hostel, and then began the friendly rounds of smiles and introductions with our hostel mates. Because traveling is more fun with company, we opted to stay in mixed dorms of 8-12 beds, though the rooms weren’t always completely full. I’ve been asked many a time by people who’ve never stayed in hostels how I could possibly share space with so many strangers, because, of course, there’s no privacy, but I’ve never had any qualms about it because all of the benefits are worth the lack of privacy.

Staying in a hostel is like summer camp times ten, with no counselors. Every single day of my trip, I met someone new. Every day I found myself learning about parts of the world I’ve never seen, either from someone from there or someone who’s visited, and sharing laughs and a few beers (or glasses of Portuguese wine) with people I’ve only known a matter of hours. I spent a day on the beach with a New Yorker I’d met only the night before, a day stranded on a deserted island with a German I’d met the same morning, an evening bar hopping with roommates from Paris and Thailand that I had only met hours before, a lunch on a terrace overlooking Marrakesh with a few Americans who happened to be heading the same way, and an afternoon swimming beneath the second largest waterfall in Africa with a group of Australians whose names I still didn’t know. I found myself communicating in English with people from places like Holland and Singapore and Spain, and speaking French with Moroccans and Argentinians, and was absolutely supercharged by the amount of life I was sharing.

Sharing became the overarching theme of the trip, in a certain sense. Between sharing rooms and home cooked hostel dinners, to sharing wine that we bought in a grocery store outside of the old town in Marrakesh, as well as the shisha (or hookah) we got at the hostel, to sharing stories at the end of a long day, I partook in far more than I had bargained for. I booked a trip to Portugal and Morocco thinking that I would come back with a rich experience of two different cultures, and wound up learning about many more.

While I learned quite a few lessons as a result of trial and error, like, say, not to forget the map lest you find yourself riding a rented bike on a major highway without a helmet following signs toward the beach, or perhaps to check the bus schedule before taking the last bus to a beach town outside of Lisbon, I learned quite a few more about the importance of sharing.

On one of my evenings in Lisbon, I found myself in the kitchen of the hostel talking with an older man from Belgium who said he enjoys staying in youth hostels for the environment of sharing. He told me that being around young people keeps him open-minded, and allows him to continue learning. He shared with me that the most important thing he’s learned from meeting people from all over the globe is that he is against tolerance.

“To tolerate someone,” he said, “means that you are willing to listen to what someone else thinks even if you disagree, but you haven’t learned anything there. To respect is quite different. Respect requires hearing what someone else thinks, finding out why they think it, and admiring them for it.”

He dislikes tolerance, he told me, because he prefers respect. Through all the countless conversations I had, this piece of wisdom was one that I was most pleased to have encountered.

And so I came back to Paris with a lot. I arrived still covered in oil from the hammam (Moroccan baths) that I had gone to the day before, a very stuffed Big Rose, a whole lot of new friends on Facebook, and a very full heart. Though I can’t fully put into words what made my trip so special, I know that it wouldn’t have been the same had I not spent it sharing with so many wonderful people.