Campfire: Normal Is Just Local

 

People ask me one question more than any other because I travel A LOT.

"What's your favourite country?"

I never know how to answer that. I mean, not because it's a bad question. It's actually a perfectly fair one I think. It just assumes countries are something you can rank, like favourite songs or biscuits. They aren't. It's hard... Countries are conversations.

They're smells that sneak up on you years later when you walk past a bakery. I love bread especially a nice warm pretzel. They're the sound of dishes clattering in a little café where you don't understand a single word, yet somehow your tea arrives exactly how you hoped it would. Explain that one. Hypothetically...

They're grandmothers who've known you for precisely seven minutes and have already concluded you're dangerously underfed and must fatten you like a cow. Different countries, different languages, same grandmother. We all know her... I've honestly started wondering if they all attend some secret international conference where they compare soup recipes and discuss how skinny everyone's grandchildren have become and plot against anorexia. 

They're Uber drivers who accidentally teach you philosophy between red lights.They're children who ask better questions than most adults. They're old men who gather in the same corner of a bar every afternoon to solve the world's problems despite nobody appointing them to the job in the first place. Every culture has them. They usually have excellent stories and very strong opinions about bread.

Actually... bread might be humanity's true universal language. See?

Bunny Hole.

Get used to those. I am mental... You will see. My brain travels in scenic routes and not A to B...

I've been fortunate enough to collect more passport stamps than I ever expected in life. Somewhere north of eighty countries now, I legit don't recall. No cap. After a while airports begin to merge into one enormous international liminal space that smells of espresso, overpriced perfume, charging cables, BO from people who don't like deodorant and a lil mild existential dread.

Airports are fascinating because nobody really belongs there. Unless you're Tom Hanks in that one flick... Everyone's leaving somewhere. Everyone's trying to reach somewhere else. Everyone's carrying far more than whatever the airline thinks fits in a carry-on. Luggage. Expectations. Homesickness. Hope. Excitement. Occasionally a suspiciously expensive dumb looking neck pillow.

I quite like airports. I like watching people. Weird I know... They're one of the few places on Earth where everyone is temporarily from somewhere else if that makes sense. 

People often tell me travelling teaches you about other cultures and it does to be honest though it mostly teaches you how wonderfully odd your own culture is.

You don't really notice your assumptions until someone looks at you with the same expression you'd wear if they casually mentioned brushing their teeth with vegemite while doing interpretative dance to a pan flute...

The British ask, "You alright?" while praying you don't actually answer honestly. Right?

Americans say, "We should get coffee sometime," then collectively refuse to define "sometime" with anything resembling scientific precision. I'm still convinced it's less a point on the calendar and more a state of mind. Like is this magic coffee in Harry Potter's room of requirement?

Russians can communicate an astonishing amount with one perfectly timed "Hmm."

Saudis can make you feel like family before they've even worked out how to pronounce your name.

None of those are wrong. They're simply different dialects of being human. It's scary and f'n funny. Ya see, that's the bit that fascinates me. Not just what people do. Why they do it. Maybe that's the engineer in me. Maybe it's the history nerd. Maybe it's the autism.

Honestly, they're all in there together like an overenthusiastic committee that absolutely should not be left unsupervised. Not to self do not let others read that part. Remove before posting...

The engineer wants evidence. The historian wants context. The theologian keeps asking, "Yes... but why?" Why...

What if the person you're trying to understand is asking the exact same question about you? Is home a place... or the collection of things you stopped noticing? How much of who you are is simply the place you learned to call "normal"?

Autism has already opened forty-three browser tabs, found three obscure academic papers, and forgotten the tea I made twenty minutes ago. like f'n always... I am trying to break a Twitter addiction.

B.R.U.N.O. my smart home with entirely too much depressing Russian personality calls these "topic migration events."

He's usually correct. Don't tell him I admitted that because Gods... his ego is already unbearable.

One of the greatest things travel ever gave me wasn't confidence. It was humility. You see... I found that the more places I visited, the harder it became to believe simple answers.

History is messy because we people are messy. It's just who we are... Faith is messy because people are messy. Politics, music, food, language, architecture, humour... messy. Wonderfully, gloriously messy. Messy... messy... messy... Yet underneath all that complexity, people are remarkably familiar.

Parents worry. Children ask impossible questions and if like Cade awkward A.F. ones. Teenagers are convinced adults don't understand them. Grandmothers think you're too thin. Someone always knows where to find the best bread. Someone else insists their handegg team would win if only the sportsball referee had functioning eyesight.

Humanity keeps changing its clothes but my lovlies it rarely changes its heart. Maybe that's why I keep travelling. Not because I'm looking for somewhere better but because every place quietly hands me another piece of the same puzzle.

Sometimes that piece comes from standing in an ancient ruin where people laughed, argued, prayed, and buried their dead thousands of years before I arrived. Those spots touch the soul. I swear...

Sometimes it comes from a roadside café where refusing another helping would apparently insult six generations of someone's family yet make me go into a food coma or get diabetes... I've learned it's usually easier and considerably tastier to just say yes.

Most of my best stories started that way.

This little corner of the blog is called Campfire because that's what I hope it feels like. This part is not a travel guide. Not a history lecture. Fork balls it's not even a proper memoir. Just curious people sitting beside a fire after a long day on the road, swapping stories about places, people, and the wonderfully strange business of being human. The electronic version of an old tradition. Some of these stories happened exactly as I remember them. Others are stitched together from a dozen moments that somehow belong together.

We'll laugh. We'll disappear down the occasional Bunny Hole.

We'll probably end up talking about archaeology, birds, music, engineering, theology, or bread when none of those had anything to do with where we started.

Honestly... that's just how my brain works.

So pull up a chair and put the kettle on.

I've got a story about Saudi Arabia that somehow ends with barbecue in Tennessee. I'm still not entirely sure how we got there but then again... Roads have never been particularly interested in taking me where I planned. They've always seemed much more interested in introducing me to people I didn't know I needed to meet.