Good Traveler, Bad Traveler
from the notebooks
Dear Wanderers,
We learn things about ourselves when we travel, but we learn more when we stay put. When we travel we can be the best versions of ourselves: more curious, more energetic, more open to trying that unidentifiable street food we would not permit to pass our lips on an ordinary day: the shark fin soup in Beijing in the 90s, before I even knew it was cruel, the snake slit open by a rusty blade on the sidewalk in Xian, the stew at the top of a mountain in Slovenia, where I'd been driven by an angry girl who wore a razor blade on a chain around her neck.
If I wrote an ode to all the unidentifiable meats of my youth, my current self, motherish and safety-conscious, would stop mid-sentence to deliver a sermon to my son entitled, "Don't eat it if you don't know what animal it is, and whatever you do, make sure the blade is clean." But when I travel, I let the safety commissioner slide. When I travel, I eat the street food, because it is all an adventure.
