The plane lands. After adding another stamp to your passport, you suddenly realize a mildly terrifying thing: You're in a country whose language you don't speak, and you need to figure out the public transportation system, find your hostel and - oh yeah - have a good time.
Your parents aren't here with their ten-page printout of hotels and train tickets. It's just you, your backpack and possibly another equally confused friend. Welcome to the wonderful world of backpacking.
As expressed last semester, I see traveling as an essential part of the abroad experience. Embedding yourself in another area of the world is important. But you can't discount the monumental effect that bouncing between countries, cultures and languages on a weekly basis can have on you. Each journey shakes away a little bit of your ethnocentric nature. And I mean shakes, because at the beginning of each trip, it becomes clear that this is not a vacation.
While I plan to jump around thematically in this column (from general thoughts and philosophies that have emerged over my travels to summations and advice on certain cities), what better place to start than at the beginning - the first impression.
They say to always make a good first impression, because that's what lasts. If that's true, then a whole lot rests upon the first few hours (hell, the first few minutes) of your trip. That short time determines not just a few days of your life and the cost of a plane and a hostel, but also how you will view an entire country when you think of it for years to come.
Thankfully, I've learned time and time again, not all hope is lost even if your first thought of a trip is, "Why the hell did I come here?" For instance, I approached Munich passport control only to hear men shouting in German and thought, "Oh God. I'm trapped in an Oscar-nominated film."
In Turkey, the story was similar. After finding that my hostel's directions from the airport were useless and that few Turks spoke English, I was greeted with another fine discovery that I wasn't in the main Istanbul airport, but in an airport miles outside the city. Only with the aid of a French-Turkish lesbian tour guide who was on vacation herself was I able to navigate the three-and-a-half-hour journey to my hostel that involved everything from buses to boats.
Within my first hour in Marrakech, Morocco, I got horribly lost at least three times, was shaken down for 100 dirham, and ran from angry snake charmers.
What's amazing is that I just described the beginnings of my three best trips so far. Believe me, first impressions aren't always accurate.
And while I've stated that I can often laugh at my misfortune since I know I'll get a good story out of it, that isn't why these trips were the best. They were only able to work because no matter what disaster came my way, I learned that you just have to dust yourself off, take a deep breath, and realize you have two options: You can let a bad beginning ruin your experience, or you can acknowledge that there's a lot more to a city or a country than a few unhappy incidents and that all you need is some effort to get your reward.
So take all they say about first impressions with a grain of salt. As I've learned time and time again, very often, the more you get to know something, the more you get to understand it - and the more you love it.
Devin Toohey is a junior majoring in classics. He can be reached at Devin.Toohey@tufts.edu.
