A map of memories

Matt Gross, the New York Times' Frugal Traveler for the past four years, posted his last column yesterday. In it, he writes about the things he's glad he did, the things he regrets not doing and the different ways people define "frugal" when it comes to traveling. It's a great piece, and it got me thinking about all of the traveling I hope to do while I'm studying in Australia.

I've taken something of a hiatus from traveling, aside from visiting family and sometimes friends, since graduating college. Spring break my senior year, when I made a solo trip to Copenhagen (with a side trip to Malmö, Sweden) and Prague, is my most recent departure from the U.S. A quick trip to my hometown in Southern California last April was the last time I went somewhere for no reason other than that I wanted to. For most of the three years since graduation, I've been too busy - and too busy saving - to think much about traveling, but in the past six months I've started to actively miss it.

One paragraph in yesterday's Frugal Traveler column especially hit home:

[M]ore important, it’s about realizing that your budget — whether high or low — does not determine the quality of your travel experience. To travel well, you need to pack an open mind, a lot of energy, infinite patience and a willingness to embrace the awkward and unfamiliar. No amount of money in the world can buy those things — because they come free.

Reading that, I felt a pang of desire to hop on a plane or a train and go - anywhere - because it's a statement I recognize, and one that I agree with 100%. My most memorable travel moments have had nothing to do with spending a lot of money. They haven't happened when I've been in posh hotels or paying to visit a local attraction. In fact, most of them have happened with no money changing hands at all.

You see, for me, travel isn't about the destination, although entering a country I've never been to or exploring a city I've read about for years is thrilling. For me, travel is about connecting with the people and the culture of a place; learning just one small piece of what it is that defines that place and the people who call it home. More than museums or monuments, what I remember about the places I've been are the people whose lives I've brushed against in passing and what they've taught me about their views on life.

My clearest memories from my first trip to Europe, which I browbeat my parents into taking when I was 15, are of the people with whom I interacted. The Parisian waiter who smiled when I ordered my first croque-monsieur, the man in the Eiffel Tower information booth who patiently waited for me to fumble my way through what felt like the most complicated three questions I'd ever constructed in French and never asked me to switch to English, the dog that spent all day following us around Pompeii with a big grin on his furry face, the waiter in Sorrento who insisted it was a crime for me to not be joining my parents in drinking his chianti. I loved visiting the places - I could hardly believe I was standing at the top of the Arc de Triomphe, in front of the mosaics I'd studied in Latin class, in a German castle - but it was the people who made me want to go back.

My year abroad was the same. Aix-en-Provence felt like something out of a fairytale until I connected with the people there: the fruit vendor at the outdoor market on my way to school who took my euro, waved off the extra nine cents the scale had registered and handed me my pears with a wink; the pre-kindergarten student at the school where I volunteered who, after weeks of shyly refusing to talk, sat down next to me, lispingly asked me to read to her and leaned her head on my arm while I did; the elderly woman who, when three of my friends and I foolishly started to cross the street as a bus started down the hill toward us, lectured, "Attention, les filles !" in a tone that said, "What on earth do you think you're doing, young ladies?"

One of the best moments of that entire year was in late April, when my school's cleaning woman and I were making small talk in the empty lunchroom where I was studying. As she left the room, she paused, turned and said, "You know, if I didn't know you were American, the thought would never cross my mind that you weren't French." That's perhaps the highest compliment I've ever received, because it meant that not only had I mastered the language, but had also learned and begun to emulate the nuances of the local cultural patterns. Few comments have ever meant as much to me.

There are dozens of other moments like these that epitomize the places they happened in my memory: a British fast-food employee who was as bemused by my American accent as I was baffled by his Indian-British one, an Irish bus driver who made sure I had a seat with a view of the countryside, an elderly Italian man who commented on my being left-handed in a quiet plaza under the Florentine sun. Pieced together, these memories are a map of my travels that mean more to me than any souvenir I've purchased.

I know the scenery and the local customs will be very different as I travel through and from Australia. I plan to visit Southeast Asia, a part of the world for which I have no cultural frame of reference, and where I'll stick out like a sore thumb rather than blending in, as I was able to do in Europe. I fully expect to not understand half or more of what's said to me when I first arrive in Sydney, although the Macquarie Australian Slang Dictionary from my brother and sister-in-law will help. But the one thing I can be certain of, wherever I may be, is that it's in interacting with people - whether in English, French or pidgin Thai - that I'll find the heart of the place and make a memory to treasure it by that will last a lifetime.