Existing in a bubble: life in transit

The past 5 days of have been quite the rollercoaster ride in a number of ways. It included packing up my life in South Africa, spending two days travelling to Taiwan and then settling into what will eventually be 2 weeks of quarantine in Taiwan. During this period I’ve made a number of interesting (well, to me at least) observations about life, travel and/or the world around me. I don’t claim that any of them are particularly unique, but in order to understand where I’m coming from, I want to use a seemingly obscure line from a movie (I’ve also included a clip from the film in question, ‘Along Came A Spider’):

The reason that this quote has stayed with my for so long, is that I’ve long felt that I’m a natural-born social scientist… that I studied sociology (after my qualifications in accounting and theology) because it helped me make sense of how I already saw the world. One of the ways that I (choose to) see the world, is by finding the fascinating in the apparently mundane. In my (not so) humble opinion, everyone’s story and/or experience contains something fascinating. I know some people have found my current adventure, and/or my previous 3-year sojourn beyond South Africa’s borders, fascinating, but my story isn’t all that unique (perhaps just rare in certain contexts).

While standing in the queue for the check-in at OR Tambo I met a young South African women travelling to the USA with her husband who’s from Kentucky, followed by a slightly longer conversation with South African guy who was frustrated by the current state of travel from SA because he’s been based in the middle east for a number of years and had been stuck without being able to return for at least month longer than he intended to stay. I also sat next to a Cuban woman on the flight, who had been to SA on a work-related trip (this was also a great opportunity to speak some Spanish again). While between flights in the airport in Istanbul I heard various languages being spoken including Spanish (some of which I understood), as well as others from different parts of the world.

To a passer-by, and perhaps to you the reader, there is nothing particularly fascinating about this conversation, but I guess this says something about how I look at the world; finding the fascinating in the apparently mundane. There I was, a South African (who speaks some Spanish and is learning Chinese) moving to Taiwan, having a conversation (in English, thankfully) with a guy travelling from Sweden to Pakistan, after I’d heard him speaking both Urdu and Swedish moments earlier. Maybe it’s just me, but I find these interactions fascinating… and something worth writing about.

PS: At some point I’m probably going to have more to say about the idea behind the following line: “And what you’re good at, you don’t take for granted.”