The next morning Meghan and I heisted on our backpacks one last time and lugged them across the huge bridge towards the cruise dock in Barcelona. After going through some security checkpoints, we boarded our ship that would take us across the Atlantic: The Legend of the Seas.
This ship is a Royal Caribbean-owned, offshore-registered cruise ship in a huge fleet of luxury liners. It was certainly a sight to behold. The ship had 11 floors, with a 7 floor-high atrium, and with grand marble staircases with glass elevators spanning the distance between. The ship has an internet café, coffee shop, library, study, two pools, spa, casino, fitness centre, photo gallery, hundreds of rooms, 7 bars, a huge cafeteria, and an 1000-seat restaurant.
Basically everything is jammed in there along with about 2000 old people who will go home and describe the ship like I just did (perhaps with not so vivid a memory), and all of it seemed so gloriously meaningless. This ship has no real purpose other than to cart old people around and sell paintings and photos and internet and phone time ($0.50 and $7.95 a minute, respectively) to their captive audience. It was truly a monument to Western civilization. Luxuriously cruising from poor country to poor country, blissfully ignorant to everything else in the world. Imagine living in an impoverished country and watching a five-star hotel pull into the harbour every other morning, discharge a bunch of rich tourists, who come and haggle about the price of whatever trickets you are trying to sell, and then as you go home to feed your family, the tourists sit up on deck eating all-you-can-eat dinners as their hotel sails off for some other 'exotic' location. Imagine what that would do to your view of the world... and of the people of the West. But I digress.
After some guy died on our ship while in the Canary Islands, we headed out across the ocean, mostly hanging out with our table mates from the dining room; Les and Zoiey, a fourty-something couple from Britain, and Ed and Linda, a sixty-something couple from the US. We partook in a lot of trivia games during the journey, but the majority of our time was spent on the deck in the sun, reading books, or eating. The days at sea themselves were quite uneventful, but it was a good oppurtunity to reflect on the past month. Those five days at sea were really the culmination of my trip, allowing me to read the books and think the thoughts that were hard to get through while we were jumping from train to train and checking in and out of hostels.
One might say that the thought of being 2000 kilometres away from the nearest land and that the ocean floor is seven kilometeres below the bow of the ship is quite unnerving, but what I can certainly say is that the colour of the ocean in the middle of the Atlantic is so beautiful that it is hypnotizing. At first it looks like a black but after looking at it for a moment, you will see that it is actually a deep deep blue, and even as I stared at it, I could hardly believed that such a colour could exist. It was in view of this water and in the presence of absolute solitude (save for the other 1999 people on the ship) that, in many ways, my journey concluded.
I asked myself at the beginning of my trip: 'Why does one leave their home?' It is quite obvious to anyone who knows me that I am comfortable among the people I know and within a community where people know me, but over the span of the two months abroad, I realized that sometimes, one must see for themselves that the world is more than a sum of its parts. That for its beauty, nature reveals most of herself in its variety. That human kind is most gifted in its rich cultural mosaic, and that we share in our own cultural experiences not by insulated ourselves from all others, but in understanding that societies naturally complement the amazing aspects of one another.
One must also travel to understand that beauty exists in many forms, and that everywhere and everything is beautiful to someone, somewhere. Stare at a captivating landscape or at the world's most amazing masterpiece for long enough, however, and the colours will meld, and the lighting will become unremarkable, even commonplace. And so, one must step back, re-focus, and realize that just as the people of the netherplaces of the world are incredible and beautiful, so much more are the captivating and amazing people that we care about, the same people who, over time, have come to seem commonplace.
In that, upon seeing the immensity of the world, one must come to understand that the incomprehensible size and scope of the world does not make one insignificant, but instead, highlights the careful and beautiful intricacies of life and creation, wherever it is found.
For all their adventures and experiences, travel is as much about coming home and seeing it anew. My trip affirmed for me one thing in my heart: there is no place quite like home.
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