It was the middle of August. I was sitting in Portofino at the harbour watching multimillion-dollar yachts docking in the marina. It had been one of my favorite places on earth for years, long before the internet seemed to discover it too.
I was watching the people who owned or chartered the boats as they stepped on and off the yachts (sans shoes btw, because who wants to ruin the teakwood the deckhands spend all day scrubbting?).
By the time the guests had left for dinner at Dai I Gemelli Al Molo, the crew finally seemed to slow down. A few of them stepped off the boat. Moments later, one of the crew members sat down next to me by the water and called his family on FaceTime.
It wasn’t long before I found myself listening in.
He admitted how exhausted he was. It had been a long summer. Demanding guests. Barely a day off.
Five minutes earlier, I’d been looking at a superyacht.
Now I was looking at someone’s life.
Once travelling became part of my normal, I started paying attention to other people’s.
The places themselves were still interesting, of course, but especially as some of them became familiar, I started noticing what was happening around me.
What are people wearing? What are they talking about? What do their houses look like?
What is life like over there?
A few years ago, I found myself in Amsterdam at a random café … well, fine, I did google where to get the best matcha, but: priorities (shrug).
I sat down and took out my earphones. The café had floor-to-ceiling windows facing a pedestrian area — prime real estate for people watching. As I sat there daydreaming with my matcha, I overheard a conversation.
Two girls, chitchatting about life in Amsterdam. One of them was American and seemed to have moved there fairly recently. She was talking about settling in and I could hear she was still struggling to adjust.
I recognised the feeling. I had been there, many times.
Settling in had become more familiar to me than the feeling of being settled.
I put my earphones back in. I didn’t want to feel like I was imposing on their conversation too much.
I started noticing moments like these elsewhere too.
Like the day I made the 40-minute drive into the mountains close to where I grew up to see a new doctor. It was a beautiful drive, through scenery I clearly hadn’t appreciated enough as a kid.
Sitting in the waiting room, I overheard a conversation between two assistants at reception.
Something I’ve come to love about people I’ve met in this area is how grounded and direct they can be. One of the women was telling the other that she had to drive down to the valley after work to pick something up. She was dreading it. What was fascinating was that she talked about the town down in the valley as though she were heading somewhere genuinely busy.
In comparison to what I was used to, it was small. I had spent most of my adult life thus far in huge cities.
I smiled.
What was a small town to me was a big excursion to her. I understood.
The funny thing was, her perspective could easily have been mine.
My normal if I hadn’t lived abroad for most of my adult life. My normal if I hadn’t been surrounded by all of these different people and cultures around the world.
But it was not my normal anymore.
For a tiny moment in time, it made me feel closer to the people and places I had grown up around. That is why I smiled.
A tiny bit of my now unfamiliar suddenly reminded me of how familiar it once was.
The feeling came back quickly. I hadn’t forgotten.
It almost felt like a relief.
I remembered.
And then there are places I haven’t been to at all.
At some stage, I found myself watching movies about high-altitude mountaineering. Then documentaries. Then YouTube. Then live coverage. Then I apparently needed to know the ideal weather windows for mountains I had absolutely no plans to climb.
At least, not immediate plans.
Mountaineering led to climbing. Climbing led to remote adventures. Remote adventures led me back to wildlife conservation and the rainforest.
Apparently, even sitting at home, I still find a way to go somewhere else.
I think that’s what I keep coming back to. Learning about what life is like for other people makes my own world bigger. Their ordinary is my unfamiliar. My familiar is their unfamiliar. And once in a while, I get to watch it happen the other way around.
It was April. I was in New York City with my family for my mom’s birthday. I had spent so much time in the city throughout the years that I didn’t realise how at home I’d actually started to feel there.
I took my family to Central Park and decided to hop into a coffee shop for a quick coffee. They waited outside. As I was standing in line, I looked out the window and saw them in conversation with a random stranger. They were talking and most of all: laughing.
It was the kind of laugh you can tell is real from across the street. I snapped a picture. I wanted to remember this moment.
Right there, I could see them fall in love with a place where I felt so at home. It was beautiful. Not the words, just being able to witness my familiar become more familiar to them.
These days, I take my headphones off more often. Not because I need to know everybody’s story. I just like catching glimpses of lives I otherwise wouldn’t know existed.
Sometimes I understand something differently. Sometimes I find something I want to take into my own life.
Often, I learn more than I realise in the moment.
I think I’ll always want to know what life is like over there.