Tetyana Kasima

Europe from my window

The more you move, the stronger you’ll grow
Ha Jin

 
It has arrived slowly and smoking the pipe was waiting until the passengers enter and settle down.
 
I bought tickets and holding my hat with one hand and balancing my bag on my shoulder, took my place near the window. Language, culture, memory, imagination, personal identity is all packed in my suitcase and I am good to go.
 
 
I was looking forward to a new trip as ‘if I was Captain Cook, Sir Francis Drake and Christopher Columbus all rolled into one’. The wheels of a chatty train were telling me stories. I love traveling, my inspiration, me experience, my friends and this story were found on a long boulevards, narrow streets and among people who speak different languages. It is like cycling with a butterfly and looking at a strawberry under a microscope; difficult to explain but exactly the right thing to do.
Pick strawberries and make jams of memories, cut ideas and make fire wood for the winter.
 
After studying with people from different countries you start to notice more, you perceive information differently. Articles, stories, food remind you of people you have met. You become more interested in the world, it becomes more personal and much closer then you think.
 
I think some people are so taken away by their trips they never fully return and their minds keep wandering in the bright hall of the museums, near town hall monuments of men on horses, across the bridges down the allies in the parks.
 
I have realized how diverse the atmosphere I am in when a Ukrainian is teaching Latvian and Estonian French on the basis of English in a Egyptian restaurant from a Russian- French book.
At this point in time I decided to look around more closely and see how many languages a day I hear, speak and read in. English, French, German, Estonia, Russian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Arabic is a usual day. I hear all this languages and use some of them just by staying in one place not even while traveling. I believe that the idea of a cultural shock has become less of a threat today and we are more likely to get a shock from a non-multicultural environment then from one.
 
Languages captures reality on the move that is why I am writing it on the train, while I am in the middle of the conversation and I am able to preserve the details better, impressing the unique aspects of the experience upon paper
 
 

All rights belong to its author. It was published on e-Stories.org by demand of Tetyana Kasima.
Published on e-Stories.org on 02/23/2011.

 
 

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