All The Right Places (again)

I know I kind of wrote about this before, but I want to write about it again.

Long story short, I was returning from Korea in August, took a taxi from SF airport and at the end of the ride the taxi driver gave me a book he wrote.

I read the book.

I just finished it today.

It was great. It was about his travels through Japan, China and Russia. I've decided that reading travel books when you are traveling is a good thing. For me, it kind of opened my eyes a little more to the experience, because that is what travel is about - the experience. It's not so much what you do, where you go, what you see, but the overall experience. Little things like a day with an incredibly blue sky and big puffy white clouds, or seeing three little kids playing hide and seek and running through a restaurant while their parents sit outside at a table and smoke cigarettes. It's about things that when you return home and people ask, "how was your trip?" are almost impossible to summarize in the amount of time that people want to pay attention. It's about a journey that we take internally as well as externally, but mostly it's the internal one that matters.

I definitely recommend the book. It was a great read and entertaining on many levels, but for me one of the things I enjoyed the most about it was that it was about traveling through Japan, China and Russia in 1984. China and Russia were just opening to the rest of the world. Things are so different now. It made me realize that the experiences I am having now are not only my experiences, but they are my experiences in these places at this time. Ten or twenty years from now, these places may have different names or be in a completely different state. Traveling and being in a place in a certain time is one way of preserving the history of the place. I still remember being in Nicaragua to celebrate the 5 year anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution. That is a memory that needs to be preserved, kept alive, passed on.

After finishing the book today, which ended on a wonderfully quirky and amazing note, I looked up the author, Brad Newsham, who drives a green taxi in San Francisco. I e-mailed him and told him how much I liked the book. Amazingly, he remembered me. He remembered the name of my street! It was over a month and a half ago that he took me home from the airport. I've had people meet me two or three times and still not remember me, how is it that this taxi driver remembered where I lived? I still wonder if I was being recorded in that cab....

Anyway, it was a great book and has me thinking more about trying to pull together some travel stories and maybe writing my own book. But more than anything it has me marveling at the shear coincidence of the whole thing.

The book now sits on the bookshelf in this cute little apartment in Seville with other books that people have left behind. I hope future tenants of this apartment will enjoy it as much as I did.