Due to university conditions, teaching was getting increasingly stressful and I was exhausted. Exhausted and homesick and blue. Riding the four hour train to El Jadida, I tried to think of nothing.
El Jadida is a very beautiful, sleepy beach town. Two other Fulbrighters were visiting from Agadir, so we did all the tourist attractions and then had a non-traditional Thanksgiving at the McDonalds overlooking the ocean.
We visited the Portuguese Cistern in the medina and drank avocado juice. Everything was cold and bright.
It wasn't the best day ever, but it was the best day I'd had in a while, and it turned out to be exactly what I needed. Nothing more, nothing less. I rode the train back that night and slept in my own bed and woke up and made myself a pot of coffee and was able to see - and appreciate - that it was a new day.
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I used to think – a little snobbishly, a little naively – that one couldn't get an “authentic cultural experience” without spending a considerable amount of time in a place. That may in some ways be true, but I’ve had a change of heart on the topic.
Recently I’ve been thinking over what it means to spend just a few days in a place, to have a singular experience there. To be able to look back later in life and think, “Oh, I love Essouira or Milan or middle-of-nowhere-fill-in-the-blank. I love everything about it.” Never mind that you only experienced two days’ worth. You’re not there long enough to be bothered or shocked or annoyed or bored. You get to see only what is truly great about it. And that, I’ve found recently, is a gift. Because we tie whatever is going on in our personal lives' to our outside surroundings, and when we talk about places we’re actually talking about who we were in those places, where we were in our inner lives.
“We’ll always have Paris,” says Humphrey Bogart in a fedora in the rain. And me in my fleece pajamas in my lonely, little studio, knows what he means.
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