I found it again. One of those moments that I knew I was going to miss the second it ended, even as I was living it. Riding on the back of a motorcycle, down some mountain in the Andes, with a new Chilean friend as the sunset threw the most incredible pinks and purples across the sky and the moon shone bright above me- I found one of those moments again.
The sunset throwing colour onto the insanely numerous mountains around me, the coolest air I’d felt since I boarded my plane to Santiago, the feeling of riding a motorcycle for the first time, they’re all things I tried to make a mental image of before I forgot a single detail.
It’s an incredible thing, getting to travel. It’s even more incredible making new friends in new places and letting them show you new things that to them are just life. So, while I was having my own Latin-American-spinoff Lizzie McGuire movie moment, all I could think of is how grateful I am to be right here right now on the back of this motorcycle.
I said, while writing about Vietnam so many months ago, that there was a specific moment in Halong bay that I could say ‘without a doubt in that moment, I have never been so wholly content.’ On the back of that motorcycle, watching the world I now know speed by me in all of its unbelievable glory, the thought crossed my mind that this was a ‘Halong Bay’ level moment. That’s how I knew that it was really so great, to rival a moment from a top 5 night of my life says something.
To be present in a moment is hard, especially when any sort of true routine sets in and takes up your time. Experiencing a country for any period of time that is not restricted to an itinerary or vacation or flight home is a different kind of travel. Making sure to take a minute in between classes or while visiting places in the city to be grateful and remind myself where I am at right now, geographically and in life, has been so important.
It feels familiar here now, my metro ride to school and walking around to get lunch in-between classes and using Spanish more often than not.
It also feels like a completely different world. I have the realization every other day that not only have I seen such a small piece of this country, but that I also have not seen so much of the city itself. My first time transferring on the metro was Tuesday, 20 days after getting here. I’m lucky enough, or maybe unlucky, to only have to take the main line home from school and everywhere I have needed to go. Looking at the map of the train system, after getting off at a new unfamiliar stop for a class, we realized how seeing a new area at a new stop multiple times a week has allowed us to see only a portion of what Santiago offers.
That understanding, though, that is what makes this so cool. We still have so much time and while we won’t be able to do every single thing in every single place, we will have the chance to do a lot of it. This is so unlike a vacation or visiting for 6 days at a time. We get to experience life here. We aren’t just experiencing moments, fractions of our life that are summed up by a greater duration of something else. This is the experience, these moments are all part of this one big comprehensive moment of growth and its exactly everything I needed it to be.
It’s interesting to find a new way to write about this all, because these aren’t just week-long adventures and they aren’t broken up into easily quantifiable sections of time or space. I started this blog to write reflections and overviews of each country I was visiting in 2018 and that is not something I am able to do anymore. Chile, the experience of living here and traveling to other regions and countries near us, is becoming more complex. Moments are intertwined with others and routines make it easy to forget which place we went for food or to explore on which day.
I know that right now it is best to write about the moments that come to me like this- the things I can’t forget because they were just so damn great. Here’s to those seconds in the day and days in the month that make the world feel like it’s moving slower, but just for a moment.
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