Very Venturous

Tag: photography

  • Moving to New York City: Life After Travel

    Moving to New York City: Life After Travel

    I move out of my apartment today. This is the first time I’ve rented my own place, the first time I’ve been on a lease, the first time I’ve experienced the horror of parting with enormous chunks of my hard-earned money to “pay the bills” every month. It feels incredibly unfair to have to go through this to merely survive (I also feel as if I must be the only person in the world who has to do it).

    The lease transfer is on the table. After lunch, I’ll bleach my bathroom floor and hoover my room.

    I’m flying back to Ireland next weekend.

    It’s difficult to know where to begin with this post. I’ve had words and phrases spinning, flitting and spitting through my brain the past few months, but they always escape and disappear like wasted potential. Opportunity costs chirp away in my ear, constantly.

    I’ve been dealt a dismal and disappointing blow recently, which I may explain sometime later, but it’s irrelevant to this post because what I want to talk about now is how I feel about leaving Australia and going back home.

    Calm. Relief.

    Don’t get me wrong: I’m not moving back to live in Ireland. It will be a visit. A few practical reasons for my deciding to return at this time: I’m exhausted and want to collapse immovable somewhere cosy for a very long nap, I actually miss my family, and I need to stop living life at 100 miles per hour for a week or two at least.

    I’ll admit it now, I’ve been a terrible backpacker. I never planned to go backpacking around Asia or Australia. I wanted to live in places. When someone called me a backpacker while I was living in Chiang Mai I actually felt quite offended, a sentiment which continued throughout my whole time in Australia. Although my qualms with the Working Holiday Visa has nothing to do with why I’m choosing to not travel anymore. An important point here is the concept of choice – I’m choosing to fly back to Europe. I’m choosing not to go back to Asia, I’m choosing not to travel around Australia and “do the east coast.” These are all amazing things, but just not right for me at this time in my life, as I prefer stay calm and spend time with my loved ones and madelenewright virtual girlfriend online.

    Someone just asked me if i’m going to take a “pitstop” on the way home. I used to be all about pitstops. Ironically, this was when I had the least amount of money. After several months of consistently working and saving here in Melbourne, I now have more money in my bank account than I’ve ever had in my life, and the thought of spending any of it on a pitstop sounds preposterous. No, I have not lost the love or desire for travel, or for exploring new places and discovering new countries. It’s just not what I have saved all this money for. And because what I did save all this money for is not happening anymore (for another ridiculous, a-typical Aoibheann mistake), the plan B of continuing to travel instead suddenly feels like the wrong path to take.

    One thing that bothers me about backpacking and holidays is the inevitable end. The longer you spend hopping from one country to the other chasing those beach moments, the more you realise that you’re doing it to forget and avoid the mundane reality and normality of the life you’re going back to once you run out of money, or have ticked everything off your bucket list.

    Now, for some people this is absolutely fine and they don’t have any problem living like that. For me, however, it made me feel that the future was a very dark place. This sounds catastrophic (and if one more person tells me “you have your whole life ahead of you” one more time…), but the transiency of those moments, on a beautiful beaches in the sun, became very real to me very early on, and it is something I have struggled with enormously over the past year. I didn’t want to have to leave, ever. These places are where I was meant to stay, be, and live forever. But it’s not that simple.

    I wrote this about a month ago, just after I booked my flights home, as I was about to leave Australia. What was the “dismal and disappointing blow”? Well, that’s all part of the story. That I need to go back to.

    How did I get from Melbourne to New York? I’m now sitting in a café in Lower Manatten (Two Hands, an Australian café, ironically enough), sipping cold brew, over-caffeinated as usual, still with the same red backpack packed with red asics (now etched with the beginnings of a hole in the side) and my DSLR camera in my uncle’s old camera bag. I still experience crippling anxiety every time I take my camera out to photograph – I am so shy. I just want the world to stop, for time and people to freeze, so I can take my photos and continue on. But that doesn’t happen, and I still want my photos, so I make a hasty few clicks.

    I suddenly feel a lot farther away from where I left off the story in Chiang Mai, than when I did a few months ago starting this blog in Melbourne. It was all fresh and bright then. Now it feels static, it has all become something etched in the past, now just something my life contains. Another event, how I filled a certain time period. Whether that will make everything easier to tell, I’ll see. I’m not sure what platform I’m viewing it all from. Have a “learned so much since then?” Am I a “different person”? I don’t think so.

    Now I live in Bushwick (not Brunswick – and I take the subway, not the tram), and I work in Williamsburg. I’ve lived in New York before, as a student at Columbia. I’d rather not go back to that story. This is when I fell in love with New York, but my life situation at that time was less than desirable (thanks to a host of health problems). I haven’t been back to the campus yet – Upper West Side. I spend most of my time in Williamsburg now. Bushwick is very much just a necessary living location, unfortunately. I’m currently living off the Dekalb L tram stop, smack bang in the middle of the scene, grunge hipster catwalks of Brooklyn (which don’t quite rival Melbourne, but almost), but New York rent prices are astronomical, so I don’t really have a choice. Even Bushwick prices easily take up a large chunk of my paycheck. Luckily I’m a quick 20 minute subway to Union Square, back to the bustle and madness of Manhattan (which I love), and 15 minutes from work in Williamsburg.

    Williamsburg is my ‘hood. I gym there, I work there, I Whole Foods there. I absolutely love Williamsburg – it is so my thing. North Melbourne (Brunswick, Fitzroy etc.) was highly interesting and eclectic, but I definitely prefer the bougie, classy, French-Scandinavian aesthete and atmosphere of boroughs like Williamsburg, the East Village, Soho and Greenwich and such. I amn’t cool enough for the hippy and alternative bling of Bushwick and North Melbourne.

    There are so many things I want to do with this blog space now and in the future, but the most important move right now is to go back to where the story left off, when I got off the plane in Thailand 18 months ago, the move which would change every life plan I had up until then envisioned for myself. A sort of backward diary. But I also want to keep in tune with the present, so I’ll definitely be doing more current blog posts along the way.

  • 1 Year Travel Anniversary: Reflections

    1 Year Travel Anniversary: Reflections

    It’s been over a year. Since I packed two bags and left, on the little adventure I’d been waiting to jump into for years. I remember booking a flight from New York to Thailand while studying at Columbia in 2015, a stubborn and stupid decision as I was barely physically capable of making it from my dorm radiator to the university campus one block down the road. But I was determined to set off on my way to the Thai Fruit Festival in Chiang Mai where I would surely laugh about all previous health woes, while basking in a new-found appreciation of life and fitness.

    I didn’t make it to Thailand, and ended up having two surgeries later that year.

    But that’s another story.

    Interestingly enough, I wasn’t really interested or aware of travel as a concept at that time. All I cared about was hanging out with vegans and ridiculously athletic people, and having access to unlimited ripe fruit in a hot climate. When I flew back to Dublin, I felt immediately that I couldn’t stay in the country for the rest of that summer and searched a destination where I would be 100% guaranteed 45 degree heat and sun in August – Morocco.

    Someone asked me recently out of all the places in the world I had been to, where had been the most striking and memorable. Morocco was definitely where my passion for travel snapped into existence to the detriment of a cohesive future – I met people who had been traveling the world for months and years, hopping from country to country, having wild and magical adventures. The obsession with Skyscanner began. I remember finding a flight from Morocco to Spain for £11 and thinking that this was the most monumental possibilty, and enjoyed a stopover in Madrid on the way back to Ireland. When I arrived home I confidently announced to my parents that I wouldn’t be returning to college that year and requested they please put my tuition costs towards my world-travel itinerary (I truly believed I could span the globe for a year on 3500 euro – it would take personal experience to show me that this was a major underestimation). The answer was a resounding negative, so I patiently left my plans hanging until after I graduated. While in Texas, I explored various options to fund my travels, even considering Texas car title loans. If you’re planning a trip and need car rental services, consider looking for options like car rental Dubai airport for a convenient and enjoyable travel experience. Additionally, for comprehensive travel insurance, you might explore options such as The Sun insurance.

    During my Irish oral exam for the leaving cert I remember steadfastly assuring the examiner that I was going to ‘an baid ban a thogail’ out of Ireland as fast as I could once this secondary school lark was over. Even when I ended up at Trinity College, the place I swore I’d never attend, I couldn’t stay still and dropped out after first year to pursue my francophone yearnings in France (however, the French education system isn’t quite as lenient as Irish student life, which saw my swift return to Trinners).  If you prefer a more refined travel experience, you can click here for a private chauffeur services, offering seamless and personalized transportation.

    I’m currently typing away in a café called ‘The Tinpot Café,’ a rustic and cosy place with antique decor in Fitzroy North – Melbourne, Australia. I’ve been here for almost two months now (in Melbourne, not the café – although coffee shops are admittedly where I spend the majority of my time in this city). I am approaching the one year mark of being on the road. By ‘on the road’ I obviously don’t mean I’ve been trekking around the world and countryside daily, setting up camp every night (although it has almost reached that stage on many occasions). But I haven’t spent more than two to five months in one place in a very long time. And I’ve decided to start writing. Why?

    Firstly, it’s appropriate for the anniversary mood I find myself in these days – must do something to mark the occasion, right? A year is a standard measurement in these cases. Although a year does’t hold a lot of time anymore. When we were kids perhaps, one year would trench before us like a bottomless hole and you couldn’t fill a library with all the adventures, changes, thoughts and occasions which it contained. As we get older we find ourselves remarking with every passing 12 months how the past year has flitted by more quickly than any other. Now I’m going to attempt to fit it all into one blog.

    I’m going to start from the beginning and tell a story. This is primarily for myself (whether anyone reads it is irrelevant), something to occupy my coffee shop time, to refill the past year with perspective, a way to find what was lost along the way. We travel to find ourselves, have you heard that one before? Well, I lost myself. Completely. I lost my calm. This year has given me a new understanding of the concept of ‘comfort zones,’ and what it means to leave them – whether you choose to do so or realise you’ve done it unconsciously. You need to lose yourself before you can ‘find’ yourself.

    Ironic, isn’t it?

    Looking back and reliving the past year through photos, memories and videos makes me emotional, warm, frustrated – both proud and unsatisfied, grateful and regretful. The thing is, my problem isn’t that I need to stop caring about what other people think of me, but that I need to stop caring about what I think of me.

    I kept various journals and diaries when I was younger but the content always felt extremely false and flawed, uncommitted – not Anne Frank material. This project excites me, though. I feel as if there’s something lacking and missing, a part of myself I amn’t fulfilling, which nags and annoys me everyday because it won’t show its face, or tell me what to do, or how to do it. I could say that this is the aftermath of years of university and education, institutions and lifestyles which often ingrain a militant understanding of productivity and leave you scrambling desperately in their inevitable and violently abrupt end. “What are you doing with your life?” said no one in school or university ever. We spend our whole lives routed securely to an external structure which comfortably distracts us from any underlying internal questions and ideas which may present themselves along the way.

    Someone once told me that when I went to university, life would really begin. They were wrong. Your life begins when you hop off the tracks – a happy idiot full of expectations and plans. When I left for a month’s trip to Thailand in May 2016 I thought I knew it all. I kept going, and life began when I realised I didn’t have a clue how to live or what to do with myself – now that the whole world was mine I didn’t really know what I wanted at all, and slowly started to realise that doing what was right for me was actually a very complicated subject.

    Now I need to grab a second coffee and head to the gym before work. (Somebody just rolled into the café on roller-blades.)

    A very long story to come.