Such A Lot Of World To See

Having globetrotted my way through various locales during my elementary and middle school years before my family settled in New York for the long haul, I found myself craving my old expatriate life once more. So this summer I packed my bags for London, my favorite city, thrilled at the self-indulgent prospect of being able to call it home again. One of my indelible memories from my time growing up in London was how my parents schlepped my sister and me on various weekend jaunts around the country and into the European continent. Although the two of us were fairly willing travelers, especially for the more exotic trips, we often complained that we were forced to relinquish our precious weekend sleep week after week to see one more medieval this or ancient that. Seven years later and wiser, I’ve had a change of heart and realized that this “torturous” routine is one I don’t mind inflicting on myself. Thanks to Harvard and, perhaps more specifically, The Crimson, I’ve also learned that sleep is not the most necessary aspect of life. The combination of these two timely discoveries resulted in my judiciously planning out weekend events with friends for each of the eight weeks we spent in London. Our Saturdays and Sundays were almost always chock-a-block full with activities ranging from sampling farmers’ markets to summer concerts in parks and from five-mile walks down the Thames to excursions into Oxford and Wimbledon. During this time, I loved to pretend that I was once again a full-fledged London resident, living the fast-paced expatriate life, and partaking in all the perks that come with it, including fabulous weekend traipses to other cities in Europe. My friends and I made a whirlwind weekend of it in Paris on Bastille Day and last week, we journeyed to Belgium as well. On the morning of our Belgium trip, my friend Liz and I boarded the first Eurostar train out of Waterloo International Station, blurry eyed from lack of sleep but excited for the weekend to come (worthy of its own postcard). As we waited for our train to pull out from the station, I turned to her and said, “You know what? Europeans are so lucky and I don’t even know if they realize how lucky they are. They can just hop onto a train and go to Paris for Bastille Day or Venice for Carnival without a moment’s hesitation. I can’t even imagine the places I would be going every week if I still lived here.” My short rant on the glamorous European lifestyle I imagined is certainly more than half true, I believe. The opportunities for travel here are just incredible and, having sampled it this summer, my craving—instead of being satiated—has only been teased and is more voracious than ever. Yet on those Saturday mornings years ago, I never realized how special an opportunity I had to travel and experience different places. And I could say the same for my life now in the U.S. Indeed, for the past two years I have fallen into that same trap at Cambridge, moaning about how the grass is greener on the other side of the pond. Weekend after weekend at school, I move between the same few haunts within the same three-mile radius (a generous estimate). I’ve made the “arduous” commute into Boston maybe four or five times a year, the rest of the time too absorbed in the same old campus events and parties and papers that litter my weekends. This summer, my renewed appetite for travel and sight-seeing emphasizes the way in which it had paled in the past few years, as I ignored the area around me: Cambridge, Boston, New England. And so, while Liz and I returned to London on the Eurostar after our weekend in Belgium, I promptly started a list on the back of a British tabloid (my new favorite reading material) enumerating the various adventures I plan to take this coming school year. I’m starting small, with trips to Inman, Porter, and Davis Squares. I also want to go to the Institute of Contemporary Art and the waterfront Back Bay area of Boston. I want to drive through Vermont to see New England’s beautiful forests as the leaves are changing color. I want to go to a Christmas Fair in Nantucket in the holiday season. As my eight-week stint in the city I’ll always love to call home comes to a close, I admit that I can no longer sustain my old routine at school. There are just too many places and events that I’ve missed out on. And, as the free-spirited Holly Golightly aptly sings in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” there’s such a lot of world to see, even in our relatively small corner of Boston. Aditi Banga '09, a Crimson associate design chair and news editor, is a history and science concentrator in Winthrop House. After she becomes a drifter and sees the world, she’d like to go after the rainbow’s end waiting ‘round the bend.