Chloe Lew: Traveling involves finding familiar elements in foreign spaces

The first thing I do when I step foot on new land is look toward the sky.

It was clear blue when our program cohort drove into Scotland the first weekend, clean and crisp the way it is most nights home in the Bay Area, but a far cry from the thick veil of glaring smog that hovers over Los Angeles.

On a rare sunny day in Cambridge, England, where I am currently spending my summer studying at the University of Cambridge, white clouds frame the blue.

Cliché a habit as it is, there is a reassuring comfort in seeing different shades of the same entity, wherever I wind up during my travels.

Like so many other students who study abroad, I embarked on this trip seeking something new. That’s the classic reason for traveling – to discover new cultures, to meet new people and to ultimately connect with a part of ourselves that is difficult to reach in the comfort of our hometowns.

But as much as traveling is about branching out, there is an undeniable beauty in connecting to something familiar in the dauntingly unfamiliar. It’s natural, if not desirable, to feel lost while traveling, but reaching out to familiar tokens will keep you grounded – a nod of encouragement that being lost does not mean being alone.

Three weeks in, I call Cambridge “home,” have several favorite reading spots and get variations of the same bad coffee every morning. There is no such thing as “routine” when you’re primarily lost in a new country, but I find a little peace in carrying old habits to brand-new places.

The same sentiment goes for people in this program who hail from all corners of the world – the States, Egypt, Italy, China, Australia, Lebanon and more.

Here, in a place that is foreign to all of us, it has been surprisingly easy to find common ground with one another and with our surroundings. When the Fourth of July rolled around, we – Americans or not – paraded the streets, a crew of patriotically painted faces, far more obnoxious than we ever are in the United States. When I felt the childish urge to roll down a mountain of grass in Edinburgh, I didn’t have to look behind me to know others would follow. And when we dusted the dirt off our pants at the bottom of the mountain, we bonded over the familiar tickle of unrelenting allergies and then ignored it, because this fleeting moment was worth it.

The most heartwarming discovery I have made on this trip is that the desire to create bonds is universal, and naturally trumps our differences. You can’t take everything from home with you in your suitcase when you travel, but you’ll find everything you miss about home exists even across the sea. A foreign country becomes infinitely less scary once you have something familiar to hold onto.

That something familiar is not always obvious. For every overly spirited, synchronized 8-clap I’ve participated in with fellow Bruins here in Cambridge, all at largely inopportune moments, there have been other, equally rewarding moments that seemed trivial at the time but are meaningful in retrospect. These simple pleasures have ranged from meeting someone across the table who adored the same novel as me years ago on another continent to soothing a sore throat with the same jasmine green tea that carried me through so many sick days in the dorms at UCLA.

You forget to feel homesick when things that feel like “home” follow you.

Latching onto something relevant to our lives back home doesn’t mean forgetting to engage in what is alien to us, nor does it mean that we should proactively seek routine. Anchoring ourselves to something familiar in no way lessens our search for something new. It enriches our travels by showing us how being from different places and growing up with different backgrounds don’t make us incompatible as people.

This should not have been an unfamiliar concept to me. After all, every doe-eyed freshman at UCLA, or any of us at the beginning of any new adventure, learns this firsthand. Just like a particular patch of grass in the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden became my second home during freshman year, so did the patch of grass on the Backs of the River Cam here in Cambridge.

I’ve found I’m generous with the idea of “home” when I move around so much. There must be something in the air in Europe, because traveling makes it really, really easy for me to care about virtual strangers and borrowed places.

But this attachment makes sense: Everything we encounter while on new adventures begins as something foreign and ends as something irrevocably personal to us.

This world is by no means small, but is in every way connected.

Email Lew at [email protected] or tweet her @ChloeLew8. Send general comments to [email protected] or tweet us @DBOpinion.