Sitting on the shelves upstairs in my house in Austin are albums after albums filled with photographs of various travels from my childhood. Trips to Bali, Thailand, and the UK have thankfully all been physically manifested into books because my memories wouldn’t do them justice. But towards the late ‘90s, the documentation stops. Photo albums just aren’t a thing anymore. Sure, we still take pictures, but how many are being printed and placed methodically into heavy leather-bounds? Even the culture of picture-taking has changed. Freshmen year of college, I remember having my trusty, little red digital camera glued to my hand for EVERY SINGLE THING I ever did (interesting or not, and let’s be honest, most of them were not) before I gleefully uploaded them all onto Facebook. Today, however, you could be at the most exciting event of your life, but you're only limited to one Instagram. Just the one. Any more than that is seen as over-sharing or annoying and will just "clog up your friends' news feeds". 10 years from now, we will all look back at our major milestones with only one (highly-filtered) image to remember it by.
What I’m trying to get at is that I can no longer rely on photographs as fulfilling souvenirs, so I have turned to video. Capturing little moments while traveling and putting it all together at the end is so much more satisfying as a means of looking back than your occasional #tbt pic from studying abroad in Shanghai. My only regret is that I didn’t start doing that sooner (imagine the possibilities!), but I now have a (hopefully growing...) collection of videos from trips around the world. The first one I made was for my dissertation on my textile research grant in Southeast Asia, followed by a family trip to Cuba, then the Stans, a Catskills adventure with my friends, and now (drumroll, please): the World Cup in Brazil!
This past summer the six of us spent some quality time in Recife, Brazil during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Watching the games was exciting, to say the least, but there was also plenty of coconut water-sippin, food-eating, and beach-lounging that needed to be done as well. Returning from that country was not easy; once you get used to the lifestyle of fresh fruit on every street corner and spending your days reading and being with family, it’s makes coming back to the concrete jungle that much more painful. But I'm so thankful to have been given the chance to be in the middle of such a global phenomenon, even if it is the only sport-watching I do all year…
Check out the video below and try to forget about the depressingly cold weather outside.
And now I will conclude this post with the exact tendency I mentioned above: singular Instagrams!
That time that Teen Vogue regrammed this picture of Selina, Lorelei, and myself:
What I’m trying to get at is that I can no longer rely on photographs as fulfilling souvenirs, so I have turned to video. Capturing little moments while traveling and putting it all together at the end is so much more satisfying as a means of looking back than your occasional #tbt pic from studying abroad in Shanghai. My only regret is that I didn’t start doing that sooner (imagine the possibilities!), but I now have a (hopefully growing...) collection of videos from trips around the world. The first one I made was for my dissertation on my textile research grant in Southeast Asia, followed by a family trip to Cuba, then the Stans, a Catskills adventure with my friends, and now (drumroll, please): the World Cup in Brazil!
This past summer the six of us spent some quality time in Recife, Brazil during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Watching the games was exciting, to say the least, but there was also plenty of coconut water-sippin, food-eating, and beach-lounging that needed to be done as well. Returning from that country was not easy; once you get used to the lifestyle of fresh fruit on every street corner and spending your days reading and being with family, it’s makes coming back to the concrete jungle that much more painful. But I'm so thankful to have been given the chance to be in the middle of such a global phenomenon, even if it is the only sport-watching I do all year…
Check out the video below and try to forget about the depressingly cold weather outside.
And now I will conclude this post with the exact tendency I mentioned above: singular Instagrams!
That time that Teen Vogue regrammed this picture of Selina, Lorelei, and myself:
Re-hydrating:
The most spectacular sunsets:
What we woke up to every morning *sigh*:
Stay tuned for the next installment—who knows what it will be! Perhaps India, or Bhutan, or maybe even Nepal? One can dream xx
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