I find myself confounded by my own story of "what I happen to be doing here," and I ponder these common themes in both the stories that I share with others around the twenty-seated communal dining table and the activity of washing the raspberry marmalade-crusted breakfast dishes with the early morning creatures at the kitchen sink.
These others and fellow traveling comrades could also very well be considered strangers, but given the fact that we are sharing a hostel, we are obviously immediately friends (maybe not completely trustworthy), and you admire them just the same for the happening presence you share.
I immediately set about blogging about this "I am a traveler" feeling, and I was confounded by my own lack of descriptive words and thorough explanation of what these sentiments are ought.
I do find myself assuming an international identity whenever I discover that the Australian couple happen to live down the road from my grandmother's house in Sydney, or the lone Texan has visited my hometown for every one of his summers. I find my accent slipping into a familiar 'Strain slang, empowering a natural attraction to an assumed similar upbringing.
The characters who pass through these red-painted hostel walls, swapping all sorts of paperback novels, hiking advice, and personal accounts of various life-changing experiences won't necessarily be remembered when my stay at the hostel comes to a sweetly sorrowful goodbye, but in a new-age sounding sentiment my own travel will have been exponentially enhanced, and it will have become my own.
My Jansport school backpack shamefully pales in comparison to the typical backpacker's 70-lbs yellow duffle, but nevertheless it carries my own backpacking story and limits the unnecessary baggage I could have probably managed to shove into it.
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