Photo by Scott Muscatello

My first solo trip abroad was less than a year after 9/11.

Life in the U.S. was still tense, especially on the East coast, where I was a junior in college.

Airports were enveloped in almost sanctuary-like silence. While I waited to board my flight to Dublin I watched people remove shoes and sweaters and belts.

Women hadn’t yet learned not to wear knee-high boots or anything with complicated laces. Security guards went through their motions with heavy, serious expressions.

Tomorrow I would be in Ireland for the start of a long summer away from home and I felt a distinct sense of relief when the U.S. gave way to the Atlantic Ocean.

I thought that, in addition to leaving behind all of my personal worries (like what to do now that graduation was approaching, or how to heal my failing relationship), I was also leaving behind some of the cultural worries you couldn’t help but absorb in the United States in 2002.

I was going to escape my American identity and cultural baggage. In Ireland I would reinvent myself completely.

No Escape?

Now that I’m a little bit older and a little more travel-savvy, I realize that my idea of complete escape and self-renewal was naive.

It’s true that I was temporarily able to detach myself from the personal decisions and messes I left behind in the U.S. For four months, I managed to ignore the aspects of my life back home that no one in Ireland knew about.

However, I soon found that escaping my cultural life and American identity in Ireland proved impossible from the outset.

From the moment I landed in Ireland and opened my mouth to ask directions, I revealed my nationality and, given the current state of world affairs, there was no denying my American roots.

In fact, now that I was a foreigner, I felt more American than ever, since in my own country I took this part of myself for granted.

A New York State Of Mind

In Ireland, when I told people I was from New York, sincere expressions of sympathy and empathy greeted me.

I made half-hearted attempts to explain that I was from upstate New York (like way, way upstate with farms and cows and no Bloomingdales) and had only visited the city a handful of times. A few weeks later when I had made some Irish friends I realized a good half of them had spent more time in New York City than I had.

But it didn’t matter. People heard New York and that was all it took.

Before then I had never really thought how citizens from other countries were affected by the terrorist attacks in America. I was so wrapped up in my own shock and sadness that I hadn’t given a sustained thought to the rest of the world.

That others were sympathetic to what I previously considered a wholly American trauma was not the only thing I learned as an American abroad. I also found out (and please stifle your giggles) that Americans are often considered loud and ignorant.

The idea that I might embody either of these traits to even a small degree truly flabbergasted me. And then I found something even more disturbing.

Apparently, even though we are an affable and fun-loving people, there are those (some might say many) out there who don’t like us, who, it might even be said, downright loath Americans.

Coming To Terms

Photo by La Petite Gourmande

I grappled with these revelations in different ways.

First I was surprised by what other people thought of Americans, the stereotypes and then, especially as time ticked further away from the immediate post 9/11 sympathy, the overt frustration and cynicism many expressed over the actions of the U.S. government leading up to the war in Iraq.

At the same time, I was meeting people from other countries who offered me wholly new perspectives on things like universal health care, affordable education and the consumptive lifestyles we in the U.S. tend to lead.

After getting over my initial shock, I began to experience something like betrayal. A lot of childhood messages instilled in me about being American – essentially that we do everything better than everyone else – started to ring false.

After surprise and betrayal came embarrassment and even denial. (Yes, I once or twice pretended to be Canadian).

After that came self-deprecation, heartily lamenting the state of my government alongside people from other countries and listening to diatribe after diatribe while I tried to convince people that Americans themselves, especially those who travel, were clearly distinguishable from George W. Bush.

Home Sweet Home?

When I returned home after two years, I was still in this weird place where I both knew that I was definitively American, but didn’t really want to be.

When I got off the plane in New York, I saw my own people through the eyes of the travelers I had met. We were loud and nosy and unaware of other people’s personal space. I felt more like a foreigner than ever.

But eventually, after I settled back into my life and reconnected with family and friends, I started to remember the good things about Americans as well–our chatty warmth, our willingness to make fools of ourselves, our desire to be better and to have a better country than we do now.

I also realized that I was the only one responsible for the way that I lived. If I wanted to, say, start a recycling program in my neighborhood, I could. If I wanted to enter politics and become an advocate for universal health care, I could.

And if I wanted to change perceptions about Americans by writing about my travels and continue to make connections with others around the world who also believed in the revelatory power of travel, I could do that too.

Making Peace With Myself

Somewhere in the months after I returned home, I stopped apologizing for things outside of my direct control, for my government and my politicians.

Instead, I looked for similarities between people and places and, when I began doing that, I started to feel better about who I was and my place in the world. Although I still struggle with my identity, I realized that I had to make peace with the American in me in order to move forward.

So I did. Mostly.

Do you struggle with your nationality abroad? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Kindle is Amazon’s new portable reading device; it’s smaller and lighter than a book and it holds over 200 titles.

Other companies have launched similar, relatively unsuccessful products in the past but Kindle’s connection to bookselling giant Amazon is making people wonder whether this could be the device that actually redefines how we read.

At work we’ve all been considering Kindle’s implications for publishing, but none of us can personally imagine this new gadget replacing the tactile delight of curling up in our favorite chairs with a good book.

It’s not just that I’m fond of bound and printed pages as physical objects. I’m also partial to reading books in the bath, where I can only imagine dropping Kindle in the water would be a much more traumatic experience than dropping, say, The Devil Wears Prada.

But it’s more than that; books are attached to my memories. When I look through my wooden bookcases, I remember where and when I read a particular book and a whole scene from my past rushes by in a photographic snap.

In Search Of The Perfect Backpacking Book

I was thinking about this relationship to books and where Kindle might fit into my world when I found myself remembering the two years I spent backpacking around three continents.

This was right before I took a 9-5 job and had to worry about things like the future of reading.

As I was preparing for this trip, the biggest packing dilemma I faced was figuring out which book to stuff into an already overflowing backpack that was no bigger than the luggage most people take for a weekend jaunt in the countryside.

In my own mind I was packing THE book, the only book I would be able to read in the coming months. Should I bring War and Peace? Or maybe Finnegans Wake? These were the only ones that might actually take me two years to finish.

Having just graduated with a B.A. in English, I was also intent on choosing a text that would accomplish the following goals:

• show all the eccentric expat intellectuals I was bound to meet on the road that I was smart and interesting
• entertain me after multiple readings
• and be light enough so that I wouldn’t need to see a chiropractor for the rest of my life when I returned home.

It was clear that War and Peace and Finnegans Wake were far too heavy (and I also had serious doubts that I would actually enjoy reading them) so I eventually settled on Gulliver’s Travels. It struck me as serious but enjoyable reading and definitely a fitting choice given the adventures I hoped to experience.

“Hey, Wanna Trade?”

Recalling the days I spent contemplating this decision made me think that maybe the mobile library of Kindle would have a place in my backpack – if I ever took off for an extended period of time again. But then I remembered my actual reading experiences abroad.

On my third night in a hostel in Ireland someone asked me if I wanted to trade Gulliver’s Travels for a water-logged copy of The Hill Bachelors. Its pages were swollen and soft and it looked dark and mysterious which is exactly how I was feeling about Galway at that very moment.

I had arrived alone and wet and had been wandering around the city for days now by myself. I was too unsure of my surroundings to either make friends or comfortably eat a meal alone.

My initial excitement was starting to give way to loneliness, so I was relieved when this stranger approached the bottom bunk where I was pretending to read Swift (but really contemplating going back home to a familiar bed and existence).

I needed to interact with someone. But trade?

I tentatively handed over my book. It felt wrong to let a boy whose name I didn’t even know walk away with my story – with what I had come to think of as the definitive book that would accompany me during my journey through the world.

But once I let go of it I felt liberated.

After the trade we started chatting about where we were from and what we were doing in Ireland and a few hours later I was having dinner and drinks with him and his friends.

A Global Community Of Readers

That night I discovered that in the world of backpacking the static rules of ownership no longer applied. This was only the beginning of many suspensions of the realities I lived by back home.

Texts were being traded at breakneck speed, moving from hand-to-dirty-hand as we devoured them on long bus rides through the Outback and cold nights in the Andes.

Hostels, backpacker friendly tour offices, and even restaurants had revolving bookshelves where you were encouraged to leave one or two of your books in exchange for one of theirs.

But this wasn’t where the real action was happening. It was all about book-swaps between travelers.

Here trading provided an easy segue-way into conversations and friendships. Books were a particular type of currency in the land of the transients – like a clean t-shirt or knowing which tour operators would rip you off.

Books were judged not only on content, but also on weight and popularity.

One Grisham title could get you two or three books in exchange in Australia, the same with Allende in South America. Michael Moore’s books were always floating around. Children’s books in Spanish were a hit in Argentina, where many of us struggled to learn the language.

I once got stuck with a Judy Blume book for three weeks (don’t get my wrong, I’m a huge Superfudge fan) until I ran into a middle-aged German man who shouted “Yudi Blume, Yudi Blume” and thrust a worn copy of something in his native language at me.

We backpackers created our own bestseller list and the competition was fierce. I read books I had always wanted to read and ones that I never knew existed.

The Traveling Life Of Books

On my last day in Sydney, I traded The Lovely Bones for Not Without My Daughter.

I opened my new used book’s first page. In it, someone had written “Auckland, New Zealand” and below that someone else had put “Milford, New Zealand.” The entries went on and on through New Zealand, Bali, and Australia, working their way down the first blank page and over onto the title page.

The whole geographic history of the book was there. It was like the text itself had transformed into a traveler.

Just then I couldn’t think of anything more depressing than putting it on a bookshelf and letting it sit there untouched year after year.

I read the book on the plane to JFK. Before I handed to it off to a harried-looking young woman extricating her massive backpack from the conveyor belt, I scribbled “New York City” in it. And then I sent it off into the world feeling like I had left some piece of myself in its pages.

Some part of me would travel to far-flung cities long after I was back in the routine of my settled life.

I realized that while I was traveling the whole dynamic of reading had changed for me-the book now owned a piece of me and not the other way around.

It was just one of many shifts in perspective.

So even while Kindle provides easy (and light) access to a wealth of books – I would have missed out on a whole serendipitous experience which was, for me at least, a big part of the adventure.

What do you think? Will digital reading eventually replace paper books? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Rachel Friedman’s travel writing has been published in Get Lost Magazine, The Arizona Republic, and Clever Magazine. She works in publishing and is currently writing a book about backpacking-a kind of Motorcycle Diaries meets Devil Wears Prada-minus all the expensive clothes.