I love every place I've been.
I loved camping as a kid. My family didn't have a lot of money and we would go cabin camping often. I loved sleeping in an itchy sleeping bag on a hard cot for some reason. The novelty of something different was so exciting. Sometimes we would sleep in a tent in our backyard, and I loved that too.
I love Rome. A giant city with the entirety of its history in every stone. I loved Florence, the squares, the coffee, the food. I loved Bologna, its quiet and everyday volume, free of tourists. I loved the soft pasta, and the lilting language. I even loved Venice, even though they hung a hideous billboard of Kate Moss over the basilica. I loved Sorrento, nobody could not love Sorrento, riding a scooter at night over the cliffs and feeling the wind on your face and the twinkling cruise ship lights in the water. I loved Capri, the pizza, the water. The pizza in Capri was so good that when I took my first bite I was shocked. I love Italy.
I love Ollantaytambo. I loved the rustic, woody smelling hotel we stayed in attached to the train station. I loved the creak on the floorboards as you walked and the funny looking flowers in the garden. I loved trying to spot the faces of the gods in the mountains. I loved Cusco and the hawkers, the rooftop restaurants, their odd obsession with pizza. I loved the little mummified girl who lived her entire life only to be sacrificed. I loved the painful reverence they built their cathedrals with, in this colonial style that was so alien to them. I loved Arequipa, its palm trees, having breakfast on the roof. I loved the avocado sandwich I had in the airport hotel in Lima. I love Peru.
I love Reykjavik, how you never have to lock your house or car door because there's no crime. I loved the sliced hard boiled eggs in every sandwich. I loved how there were no trees, because the Vikings cut them all down for fuel and light, and how when Iceland started to try and propagate trees again they planted them in weird lines and squares. I loved the spotlessly clean gas stations and hobbit homes built into hills. I loved spotting tiny white fluffs of sheep, and all the different kinds of stones and rocks that were once lava. I loved the glacier lagoon so much, when I saw Vatnajökull I almost cried. I love Iceland.
I love Bogotá, its sprawling, dusty energy. I loved that malls are in their heyday there. I loved bandeja paisa, the "country platter" that literally was supposed to sustain you for an entire day. I loved having so much avocado and how shiny my hair became. I loved that they have a museum devoted to gold and the thousands of years we have been obsessed with it. I loved Medellín's progressive approach to city planning and ecological conservation, and I loved the exotic, jurassic greenery of the foliage that surrounded it. I loved ajiaco and mojarra and the street stalls. I loved the isolation of isla Barú, the medieval architecture of Cartagena, and the friendliness of the locals I met in the tattoo shop. I love Colombia.
I love Honolulu, how everyone there is the most American Asian person I've ever seen. I love the touristy surf culture. I loved how pervasive east and southeast Asian culture/cuisine is. I loved the low humidity and blinding sun. I loved loco moco, the mash up of so many different things into something so new but so familiar. I loved Kauai's Napali coast, the canyons, the chickens. I loved bicycling along the coast line and feeling the sun march its way across the sky so you eventually got evenly tanned all over. I love Hawaii.
There's more but I'll stop here, because I'd go on forever. I need to travel again. I'll miss my cats and home when I do.
