I will tell you the absolute, 100 percent truth about me and traveling: it is not my favorite.
I know that there is no greater sacrilege in this world than to admit that (except for maybe not being a dog person, of which I am also guilty). It’s not that I don’t appreciate the tremendous value in seeing the world, experiencing other cultures, and widening your bubble; these things are of tantamount importance! But, also: traveling is very stressful. One hundred things could go wrong at any given moment, and I tend to get homesick very easily. I was raised to value travel above almost anything—my parents were married in Vienna, while both living abroad from separate countries—but the wanderlust that should be in my blood must have skipped a generation. Nine times out of ten, my favorite part of a trip will be coming home.
Which is why I was caught absolutely off guard by how quickly and how completely I fell in love with the Greek isles.To start, they are stunning—like, absolute picturesque, no-filter-needed-ever gorgeous. Every view takes your breath away, from the sparkling, sun-soaked Aegean to the rolling vineyards and brightly domed white houses that pepper the cliff sides. You could wander around any of those islands for a month and still be finding new and beautiful details; just to look around feels luxurious and surreal. It helped, too, that there was always a borderline aggressive level of sunshine, which, for this Florida baby, is a real metric of happiness and peace.
But what spoke to me about these sweeping panoramas was not just their aesthetics or majesty; they spoke to me because I know that, for the families who have lived there for generations, those views are home. I grew up on the ocean, with tides and surf as relevant to my life as the time of day or weather. I’ve spent my life in a place that other people visit, and I know that the fun, easy days they have on the beach only scratch the surface of what it really is to live by the sea. For a tourist like me, the sweeping caldera and too-blue-blue of the skies in Santorini is a striking snapshot; but when they are your skies and your caldera, those colors make up the exact palette that shade your heart at all times—a personal flag, a visual anthem.
There is history spiraled so tightly into every square inch of that country, and you feel it everywhere you go: between the cobbled cracks in Corfu; in the swirling red dust of Ancient Olympia; in the ruined forts and castles that litter the aisles. It’s breathtaking and humbling to walk through these places that have seen so much civilization and growth. But there were also babies being born and people falling in love and building quiet lives and dying without valor or monument. A personal timeline is never diminished just because it happens alongside a future history book chapter. Your home is never less yours because of the many people who vacation there, and that type of 3-D texture and shading is what ultimately, for me, makes traveling worthwhile.
Everywhere is home for someone.
Athena Kifa is TIP’s Staff Assistant in the Educational Innovation and Outreach department.
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