Venice Imagined

        Never having been to Venice, I nevertheless have a vivid picture of what I imagine the city to be. Having read Cornelia Funk’s The Thief Lord as a child and having read Martin and Romano’s Venice Reconsidered more recently, my main perception of Venice is of a city in which nothing is as it seems. The Thief Lord conjures a mystic and magical city in which foreigners abound and characters hide behind literal and figurative masks. The buildings are beautiful and majestic, but old and full of hiding places. There is a sort of fog, a mask over the city, that lets one disappear into the shadows. It seems that every corner presents a new theatrical experience, and one never knows what is true and what is a façade in Venice. Full of exotic people and artwork, characterized by elaborate Gothic edifices and classic Renaissance structures, Venice seems a city perfect for an observer; it seems all to easy for a plain traveler to become unnoticeable in the extravagant crowds of the piazzas and merely take in the experience of Venice.

      More than just being unnoticeable to others, it also seems that there is the exciting, but unnerving, possibility of losing oneself in Venice. As Venice Reconsidered points out, Venetian history is malleable and has changed over the years to fit the current image that the inhabitants want to adopt. In traveling to a place without a firm history, does one’s own history become transformable? As Venice famously forces travelers to lose sense of their physical location among the narrow and winding streets, does it also cause visitors to rethink the winding trajectory of their own lives? In my romanticized vision of Venice, it is a city that allows visitors to become whoever they wish at that point in time. The city also seems like the ideal place to step back from personal experiences and reevaluate life from a novel, enlightening, and somewhat removed perspective. As De Botton writes in The Art of Travel, “we might return from our journeys with a collection of small, unfeted but life-enhancing thoughts.”

    As arrival in Venice draws near, I am increasingly excited for the discoveries that I will make in the city. In The Art of Travel, De Botton presents two scenarios: the imagined experience is far superior and more poignant than the actual crude action of travel or, conversely, the traveler replaces fantastical images of a foreign place with more accurate, yet just as thrilling experiences of that place. I certainly hope that I will experience the second. In my experience, the actual travel contains an immeasurable amount of details that cannot be imaged and is therefore a more intense and gratifying experience. In revisiting Venice, I hope to discover aspects of the city I that have never considered and, in doing so, replace “an absurdly idealized image with a more realistic but nevertheless still profoundly admiring one.”

Why I Travel

Before I was born, I was already on the path of adventure. My parents met in the tropics of Panama and raised me in the beautiful, yet unforgiving, state of Alaska. They encouraged me to move to the completely foreign Argentina at the age of seventeen and later to move across the country to Indiana so that I could study engineering. I have been fortunate enough to travel often, developing a love for Latin America and visiting countries such as Mexico, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Costa Rica, as well as the outlier New Zealand. Having been focused on college these last few years, my traveling has largely subsided and left me impatient for a new adventure.

Before moving away from Anchorage, Alaska, I didn't really appreciate the unique perspective that it gave me. We eat fresh produce year round, and we have a Target and an Olive Garden just like other states, but at the end of the day, nature rules in Alaska. The vast mountains that trap Anchorage against the ocean are a reminder that underlies our modern way of living; we are insignificant again the enormity of the landscape. Alaskan culture has a powerful reverence for nature, a delicate balance of fighting to protect ourselves and at once striving to live harmoniously with the beautiful country around us. The Alaska Native presence is also strongly felt throughout the state. The many native groups in Alaska create a window into an older time. The elders are a people of an oral culture and a subsistence lifestyle. Throughout the state, there are numerous examples of the beauty of the native lifestyle, but also of the harsh reality of its incompatibility with a modern way of living and American culture. This prompts one to challenge Alaska Native culture and American culture, as well as to challenge both past and  modern ways of living.

After living in Alaska my entire life, I moved to Argentina during high school. I studied abroad in South America for half of a year, accepting and being accepted into another family, culture, and country. I lived in a rural town in the northern forests of Argentina, and I learned to how to grow the vegetable mandioca, how to dance cumbia, how to speak like an Argentinian, and how to drink yerba mate. Away from everything and everyone I had known, I was able to discover another country and to discover new parts of myself. When I left my Argentinian family and friends, all unknown to me six months earlier, I was leaving a second home. 

My last great move came when I began studying at Purdue in 2011. I love my mechanical engineering classes and living in this separate world of a college campus. I am also a part of Purdue Solar Racing, a team of quirky and fantastic people who dedicate hours upon hours to build a solar powered race car. My life at Purdue has been about working hard, dreaming big (while staying somewhat practical, as engineering logic dictates), and finding friends and family in the chaos of a huge university. Indiana is very different from Alaska and Argentina, but after settling in, it feels like home too.

Several years ago, I wouldn't have appreciated George Moore's words: "A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it." I used to think that traveling was all about discovering new places and new people, but now I understand that it is also about understanding myself and my home, how I fit into this world and what makes me the person that I am. When I return home after a long time away, whether that home is Anchorage or Purdue or Argentina, I notice the same feeling. There is a contentment to be home, the peaceful comfort of returning, but also an underlying appreciation and understanding for some part of that place or its people that I didn't previously have. In traveling, home gains new depth and meaning. In seeing the world, I am better able to see where I come from and who I am.