This week-end we spent time with friends (on both sides of the Atlantic) and family (mostly Romania). There is this widely spread belief that we are going on an extraordinary adventure and will be completely isolated from the rest of the world for the next four months, so people - especially the more sedentary of the bunch - are taking their goodbyes. At times this is funny, but there are moments when I want to stop them because I'm afraid they might jinx our trip.
The different reactions we receive when people hear the first time about our traveling plans range from horror ("Oh, how can you do this? Don't you have any idea how dangerous this can be?") to ecstatic enthusiasm ("Oh, I so much envy you guys! I wish I was going with you! This is such a great adventure!"). Experience taught me that things are never just as bad or as good as you would expect them to be. Our trip will have its ups and downs and there will probably be moments when we will take turns agreeing with both crowds.
What I know for sure though is that this trip will be different from everything we've done before. Up until now we haven't been on the road for more than half a month or 10,000 km and neither me nor Flaviu have been outside Europe or North America. Furthermore, one might say that we didn't prepare enough: our knowledge of South America is limited to that of a decently well educated European, which is not much per se; we barely speak or understand any Spanish or Portuguese and we probably rely too much on our maternal language being related to them in our estimation of how easy it will be for us to learn them on the fly.
In our plans and preparation we tried to achieve the perfect equilibrium between detailed itineraries and flexibility but to say that we fully succeeded would be lying. To actually manage the perfect planning would be disastrous.
We spent the past four years anticipating these next four months while working nonstop to establish ourselves socially and professionally in a completely new world. (It's been a little over 4 years since we moved from Romania to Canada) We lived on a tight schedule around the clock for most of this period. It was perfectly natural during this time to build our own and each other's expectations, to speculate about how it will be like - in other words to dangle the carrot of the trip in front of our often overworked or stressed noses. Looking back in retrospect, I believe we tended to agree with the enthusiastic crowd, since if we had agreed with the horrified people more we would have ended up staying home.
However, for the past week or so I noticed something unexpected: while we've been struggling to hammer out the details, we lost our expectations somewhere between booking a hotel in Cartagena and making sure we packed Flaviu's favuorite nail clipper.
Let me make this clear: when I say we lost our expectations, this doesn't mean we lost our hope or enthusiasm for the trip. It's just that we stopped expecting that this thing or that are going to happen. We stopped speculating about how it's going to be like and we're waiting. We are just poised on the brink of the adventure,ready to take it all in, the sights, the people, the feel of the new places.
Sure, we might have been more prepared, we might have researched more, etc. but what we have now is more precious: without any conscientious effort, we opened ourselves to the new experience, we freed ourselves of any good or bad preconceptions and we are ready to embrace the new.
We stopped expecting and we are ready to learn.
