Licorice whips

I made the loooong trek from my cozy condo to the Embassy of Myanmar on Monday in order to get my tourist visa. Once there I did what any other traveler tends to do: I found a little mini-community of fellow travelers. These little communities are wonderful. For a brief moment the multi-colored licorice whips of our lives that slash across this planet, and over oceans, and in and out of embassies are combined to make a nodule, a little pulse point, that becomes startlingly intimate in a millisecond. We all commiserate about the Line and the Bureaucracy. We swap travel tales and compare passport photos.

There was the elderly gent from Australia who was less than impressed with the behavior of his fellow countrymen while traveling through Laos. "Morons!" he repeated as he told me about the disrespect and the noise at all hours of the night and the drinking. His frustration became intense and overwhelming, and soon I had to practically sit in the lap of the person next to me as each exclamation ("Morons! Morons!!!") brought a quaking invasion of my personal space. It can be intense side effect of travel--you begin to scrutinize the behaviors of your own "kind," if you will.

There was the American guy who had been floating aimlessly around Asia for the past two years. His ultimate destination is India, but he just hasn't gotten there yet. We talked about global warming, and the military junta, and I taught him how to say "I don't want a plastic bag" in Thai. Of course, there were many questions that I restrained myself from asking: How have you financed this? How can you stand living out of a backpack for years at a time? Did those tattoos on your ears hurt?

There was the greasy-haired Canadian girl who hated the fact that visas to most countries seem to be more expensive for her than for those of us with U.S. passports. She had been in Asia for six months and has an uncle in Myanmar. Yangon will be her last destination before making the long trek home to Vancouver.

The Australian woman was my favorite. After waiting in line for an hour and a half, I was FINALLY next. She glanced down at my fistful of documents and casually asked me where the photocopy of my passport was. I looked around in sheer panic at the rest of my "posse" and they wordlessly showed me their photocopies. Fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck. I had read the requirements 8 gazillion times, and even got new passport-sized photos, but somehow I missed the photocopy requirement. My new friends told me where the closest copy place was and promised to hold my place in line. Four baht and a significant cardio workout later, I made it back to my spot in line, panting over the chorus of "holy crap! That was lightning fast! Are you part gazelle??" I tried to thank the Australian woman profusely for her sharp eye, but she was tangled up in her own document drama. After enduring the heartless stare that is the job description of all embassy workers, I was on my way.

I said goodbye to my fellow travelers and felt that strange, fleeting grief that I always feel when I have brief and interesting encounters with people, but I know I'll never see them again. I always feel silly when I have these feelings--I mean, you can't mourn EVERYONE who comes and goes throughout your life--but I have them, nonetheless. Later on I went to the food court at MBK Center (MBK being the Greatest Place Ever) and bumped into the Australian woman. Her document drama was quite the nightmare, but she was able to work through it with a red face and stern voice. Trust me--I wouldn't mess with this Aussie lady, and I'm sure the stone-faced embassy workers with their hate glares knew better than to try. I got a chance to thank her and we stood there chatting like old friends, resting for a moment in some comfortable conversation and the shelter of shared experiences before continuing to move, move, move.

These momentary rest stops, these flavorful patches of interaction, these chance and fleeting encounters that still leave me with a small twinge of grief like metal on a filling--THESE are critical tiles in the mosaic of reasons why my feet are just so darn itchy, and why I chase my wanderlust halfway around the globe like the character in my dream whose face is always just out of my line of vision.