The first recollection

The first thing you feel is the severance from the familiar comfort zone. Without looking back, you instantly feel the growing gap as you are leaving, and sailing with time itself into an uncharted dimension. In my case, that place was anything but known.

With a one-way ticket and a last picture with my family, I had deposited my large bag in the plane’s cargo hold and boarded the bus to the terminal. Not looking back, I felt the shudders of the bus while simultaneously I had felt a peculiar sense of levitating, a certain feeling of sweeping separation. While gushed by expectation, fear and excitement I sensed how I was led, unclear if by my will or forcibly, to uncertainty that will not cease to surprise me. That same lingering feeling was to be my first memory of my voyage.

As I walked through the jet bridge, advertisement and other smiling figures bid me farewell in foreign languages. It finally came to me that this was it – my journey begins. My childhood dream of visiting the vast Plaines of Britain and Ireland are coming true. As the plane took off and I saw the lights of the coastline disappearing into the distance, a broad smile spread across my face. I took out my music player and played the tune that summarized my feeling of expectation and excitement that held me.

Introduction

In my travels in Ireland, my favorite way of traveling was hitchhiking. It saved a substantial amount of money, but more importantly, it was an inseparable part of my trip. Meeting the people, conversing with them, hearing their stories and even the uncomfortable silences were a core experience and a way to really get to know the local people and culture. To start a conversation I always had to answer the usual questions (how old are you? Where are you from?) For one of that question, one that was a basis for the things to come, I always had a hard time to answer.

“So what are you, a student?”

The solution was to quickly and clearly answer No, that in Israel when you reach the age of 18 you are enlisted to the army, you serve your time (women serve two years and men three), you are relieved, you work, save money and hop, you travel!

For some reason they had a hard time understanding that my current status was “traveler” rather than a “student”. It was probably the conformist and common logic that said that, because at the age of 20 surly I will be at college.

It seemed that in the few seconds after I answered their question, they had to create a new category to classify my part in life. In a less known part.

In one of my hitchhiking adventures in the land of the Leprechaun, as usual, I entered a car and that same banal question was asked. For god-knows-how-many-times I answered the same answer that by now sounded like a broken record. I waited for the awkward minute in which the person has to digest and reacts to my answer with a fake polite smile, to pass as soon as possible. I already thought of defenses and explanation for my current status but this time - this time was different. He reacted different.

He had a different smile on his face.

A satisfied smile, not a fake one. A proud smile and not one of suspicion

“you know what?” answered this gentlemen “Better! Even perfect! What you are doing now is graduating from the University of Life”