What it takes to "know" a place

Hi from Singapore! Sorry, I didn't disappear, I just crossed too many time zones.

I’ve been a bad nomad blogger, email fairy, or whatever you want to call this. I’ve left you hanging since the beginning of April when Ian and I were posted up in Tulum, Mexico, and I gifted you with a most dramatic retelling of my 2021 food poisoning affair.

The funny thing is, I got the karma I deserved for being MIA: another stomach ✨event✨. This one was 10 times less severe than the one in Mexico, thank goodness, and landed during our second week in Bali, where we just stayed for a month. (Do you want me to wax poetic about Bali Belly? Just say the word.)

My excuses for not writing? We’ve been doing the most. I feel like I’ve already lived five separate years within this half of 2024. Ian and I started the year in Argentina, in Neuquén (Ian’s hometown), then went to Bariloche (a nearby mountain town) and Buenos Aires. Then we spent about nine weeks in Mexico, between Tulum and Mexico City. I took not one but two separate trips to see my pregnant twin sister in Boulder, Colorado. (She’s since had a happy and healthy baby Juniper, and she’s the most precious thing in the world!) We flew to Naples, Italy, for a sort of weird, mid-globe, weeklong layover and had an actual 12-hour layover in Paris — these both on the way to Japan, which we explored for about three weeks in May and June. I hopped to Cairns, Australia, on a press trip to spectate the Ironman Asia-Pacific Championships and see the Great Barrier Reef, and then Ian and I met up in Bali, where we spent the last month. We hopped over to Singapore for a few days, and are leaving today for Bangkok. I’m writing to you from the fancy schmancy Singapore airport, with that cool indoor waterfall. *Catches breath.*

The Jewel Changi Airport in Singapore — just as cool as the internet makes it seem.

Now that I’m about six months into full-time freelancing, I’m also learning where my maximum-amount-of-work threshold lies. (The answer? Any amount of work is too much when you just want to explore.) As a result, any time we haven’t spent being tourists (or planning touristy adventures), I’ve spent with my face in my laptop.

But these are just excuses.

Really, the problem is that They say you should “write what you know.” (Even if you aren’t a writer, you’ve probably heard that.)

But the thing about being a nomad or even just a traveler is that you don’t know anything 99.9% of the time.

I think this is why my first few sends have dealt with things I felt I knew “well”: the story of how I started nomading (which I’ve told a trillion times), the story of my first food poisoning (ditto), the story of my relationship with Buenos Aires (which I still barely know, but have at least spent a collective 6+ months in and learned a lot about thanks to my Argentine husband).

When we’re bouncing around this much, it feels like I only start to have my bearings in a place just before we’re about to leave it. And even then, I’ve found that I don’t really ever feel like I know a place at all.

It’s part traveler imposter syndrome, I think. But also, partly what Aristotle was getting at when he said, “The more you know, the more you know you don't know.” With every new place we go, I’m left with a million more questions than answers, 10 new destinations added to my bucket list, and less faith in the idea that to see and experience is to understand. The best part about that Aristotle quote is that he probably didn't even say it, only enforcing my feeling that the world is so unknowable it’s absurd.

Take New York City, for example. I lived there for about six years, always in the same apartment. When I think about New York, I imagine it distinctly from that point of view: from leaving my place on E. 92nd Street, from the 4/5/6 train, from Central Park, and from my office buildings in Midtown East and FiDi. While I love and miss New York and it feels like home, I also feel like I don’t know it at all. When I went back and stayed in Long Island City for a weekend visit, it felt like an entirely new place, and ditto when I spent a couple of nights with a friend in Brooklyn. It’s not just about how geographically large a place is or even how culturally varied, it’s about how you can only ever see a place from one vantage point at a time, and an infinite number of those points exist.

This isn’t just New York, either. Visually, in my brain, when I think back to every place I’ve visited, I see them all with a view from the doorstep of where I’ve stayed or lived. How different would my experience have been, then, if I slept one street over?

I might be losing you here, but the essence of my rambling is this: I don’t think you can ever really know somewhere. We can only know what it looks like to us personally from that one place and moment in time. When we travel somewhere, we bring preconceived notions, personal biases, stories friends have told us, Instagram reels we’ve watched, and movies we’ve seen with us, and they warp our expectations and perception of a place more than we'll ever be able to properly understand.

This funny thing happens to me whenever we get to a new place: the main road we live on, drive through, or frequent the most (like the main drag in Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, the road we lived in Canggu, Bali, or even the quiet-ish street we stayed on in Ueno in Tokyo) always looks desolate to me when we first arrive. I see nothing. Perhaps one restaurant, one coffee shop, one dusty grocer. But over time, every time I go down said street, I notice more and more and more. Still, by the time we leave, I’m sure that 5% of the contents of that physical space has actually registered in my consciousness.

I’ve also found that leaving a place and returning to it — whether it’s a separate second visit, or we leave for a quick weekend trip elsewhere and then come back — makes a place feel entirely more real. Maybe that’s what makes our actual homes feel like home: not the fact that we spend most of our time there, but the act of coming back again and again and seeing it with fresh eyes. 

Interestingly, this overarching feeling of not being able to know a place also makes me feel like I’ve never been anywhere at all. I can tell you what I did in Norway and show you pictures but somewhere inside my head is something saying, “What?? We went where? That can’t be true.” Maybe I need to be more present, work less, scroll less, party more, meditate more, who knows. Or maybe this whole nomad life has been a simulation, and I’ve been dreaming it up inside my computer screen — something that looks exactly the same no matter where I am in the world.

Admittedly, this is all half-baked, but it’s better than no nomad lasagna at all (I hope).