Traveling has a funny effect on me. Maybe everyone goes through this, I’m not sure. I find out rather quickly what places I miss and would actually like to be. It’s a weird thing to wake up in a city you’ve never been to, a day after you arrived, and find yourself musing about some other place you haven’t been in months or years. It’s happened a lot in China, and I’m sometimes surprised by the places I catch myself drifting off to.

Italy was the first place I pined for, mostly during that first week in Beijing, when I was questioning this whole China adventure. It wasn’t something I wanted to think about two days after getting off a plane–with no ticket home or onward–and remembering I’d signed up to be in this country a year. I haven’t been to Italy since 2003, when I spent three months in Siena on a study abroad program, but the Old Country holds some of my fondest memories and a beautiful language I can still operate in (though my rudimentary Chinese has been pushing out the Italian lately).

I don’t often miss Valencia, the town I generally consider home. I grew up there, cut all ties to it (parents not included) midway through college, then wound up back there when I found out that journalism rarely pays enough for recent grads to make proper rent payments. Hopefully, China will lead me somewhere else, because the hometown always feels like a step backwards.

More often, I wake up with half-preserved images of Santa Cruz in my brain. My old college haunts were always more welcoming that the suburbs of Southern California. “Why do I keep leaving that place?” I ask myself sometimes. Most of my friends have left Santa Cruz, too, although a few returned after trying to make it elsewhere. What I think is most appealing is that it was the first place I carved out my own identity. At home I’m always my parents’ son, even on my best days.

And today, at some unmarked hour on the busride from Dandong, I found myself missing Dalian. I’ve wanted to be back here before. Shenyang practically sent me screaming back here the first day. It’s just never connected, though. This city is starting to feel like, well not home, but a place I don’t mind sticking around so much. I liked Dandong far better than Shenyang (read: I didn’t hate it). It’s a small town by Chinese standards, with only about 700,000 residents, and it doesn’t seem to get much tourist traffic except what’s directed toward North Korea. The friends I met there don’t seem eager to leave, and there were moments when I thought, “I wouldn’t have minded coming here.”

And then I rolled back into Dalian, and I walked out of Victory Square onto Zhongshan Lu and looked up at the tall buildings and wide streets and thought, “This is my kind of city.”

Sure it’s freezing right now, and I plan to complain about that more in this space disproportionate to the drop in temperature, and I still don’t speak as much Chinese as any given two-year-old in town, but this city has grown on me, and that’s not something I’ve said about a lot of places.

So, where do you miss?

Coming soon: Strange memories, plus video of North Korea

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 12th, 2006 at 8:09 am and is filed under the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.