Traveler Profile: rebekahnn

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Screen name:

rebekahnn

Age:

Gender:

Female

If you must know:

I'm single

Travel status:

Traveling soon

Hometown:

Bay Area, California

Currently in:

Sonoma County California

Traveling Next:

Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru

Favorite places I've been:

London / mm hmm; Berlin; Lake Bled / Slovenia; Zakopane / Poland; St Andrews / Scotland; Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina / USA; Northern California

Places I want to go to:

Thailand, Kuala Lumpur, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil

About me:

I love languages and listening to people speak them, and trying to speak like them even though I can´t; I love school and studying and learning about fascinating things; I love finding good deals and good food, and good deals on good food; I love being on the move.

Profile URL:

http://matadortravel.com/travel-community/rebekahnn

Read more about rebekahnn

I'm fired up on:

Good fiction, good nonfiction, the way writers play with language; grammar and foreign language; learning salsa with my shoes ON; walking in big cities and small cities and progressing from seeing a place as an overwhelming mass of streets and shops and intersections, to a manageable, comprehensible grid. Finding a way to make a place mine, even when it´s not really, and never will be.

Travel style:

Sometimes alone and sometimes with people - too much of either, for me, isn´t good, because one leads to potential overwhelm, and the other to potential profound loneliness. More than doing a whirlwhind, multi country tour, which I've done, and which is cool but not coolest, I like to stay in a city for a while. Until I get it. I like to listen to and maybe learn the language, to meet the people, to walk the streets that most visitors don´t find and to eat at tiny places with tiny signs on the outside.

Quote:

'I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent,
that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening
to contemplate them.'

- Ted Simon, Jupiter's Travels

Sports I do:

Running, yoga

Favorite books:

Heat by Bill Buford, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor

Who I'd like to meet on my travels:

Interesting people with cool stories.

I want to make a difference by:

Living authentically. And learning what that means along the way.

Languages spoken, other than English:

Spanish, troche po polsku, un peu de francais

I felt the most immersed in a foreign culture when:

I was drinking beer and eating pub food in a Walthamstow pub on Pub Quiz Night with some Londoner friends.
Eating meals with my Spanish (host) family in Madrid and listen to them argue in Spanish, fast - so fast - eyes big, voices raised, and such passion...

Why I travel:

Before I left in May, I asked myself this question: Who am I when all the layers are stripped away, when I´m vulnerable and bare, when I have none of the pretensions I rely on in day to day life to hold up a grand image of myself to the people around me, the people who know me and expect me to look, behave, be a certain way? When those expectations have fallen away, and no one knows anything of me but the me there before them, when my decisions are not influenced by unspoken standards and expectations... who am I?

I thought I wanted to know the answer to that, before I left last May, because it´s so easy to want something; and I have gained some answers, fragments of them at least; and yet the months I was gone last year were some of the most excruciatingly difficult and painful of my life. And some of the most worthwhile.

In other words: To know who I am, apart from familiar or societal expectations, authentically - that is why I travel.

Oh, and also because I can't sit still.

Ideal place to watch the sunrise:

Bodega Bay (beach), Northern California

Ideal place to watch the sunset:

Lake Bled

Before I die I'd like to:

Love someone forever.

Let's collaborate:

I love to write. And I love travel, culture, language, and food so it would be cool to write for Matador or other travel publications.

My links:

www.flickr.com/rebekahnn