Calculate my salary in trips and other ways to feel happy
A few days ago I received my first salary from my new job. Only those who have been ruined during Erasmus (99.9%) will understand what kind of joy I am talking about.
The thing is that months ago, while I was on another internship, the exact same thing happened to me. Day I was getting paid, day I was tinkering and planning new trips. Those of you who already know me will know that shopping bores me, and having my sister, who is a clothes freak, I have it easy. Mobile phones and other gadgets like that, I'll kill them just by looking at them, so that's a big reason why I decide not to spend a single penny on this subject. Expensive postureo dinners are usually replaced by cheap places or family dinners and although I love eating and dining out, I control myself a lot. The car plan? The car plan goes with the times... For now, I'm still clinging on to the thread of hope that my little red one will revive.
So, from today onwards I'm looking for a new adventure (recommendations are welcome in the comments). Even though I'm not Galician, I'm also a bit homesick for travelling...
And with this word (morriña) I drift into another topic which is the one I came to talk about.
The other day I found a website called 101 Incredible Trips with a series of terms in several languages that, as such, do not have a translation in the Spanish dictionary.
Spanish has more or less 100,000 words. However, to say that our language -or any other- is rich enough to express the whole human experience is simplistic. Therefore, here are some examples in which other languages have found the exact word and ours has fallen short.
Mokita (Kiriwina tribes) Used by the tribes of Kiriwina Island, part of the Trobriand Islands, it means "that truth that everyone knows but no one speaks", which is said to be an open secret.
Wanderlust (German) Wanderlust comes from German and is the sum of desire + walking. But the imprecise translation (there is no equivalent word in English) would be "a strong desire to know and explore the world". So if we feel the desire to travel the world, what we feel is nothing less than wanderlust.
Mamihlapinatapai (Yagan) Sadly, a word that we will not hear in use, because it belongs to the language of the indigenous Yámanas of Tierra del Fuego, of whom today there are no speakers left and who, in the future, will have no pure descendants. Mamihlapinatapai means "a look between two people, each of whom waits for the other to begin an action they both desire but neither of them dares to initiate". Come on, that sensation-moment that we all experience, at least in some "little moment" of life, which must have generated so many poems, but which the Yamanas summarised with precision.
Pochemuchka (Russian) From a traveler's point of view, everyone is a Pochemuchka at some point: "a person who asks a lot of questions".
Serendipity The term serendipity is perhaps not so unfamiliar. It derives from serendipity, a neologism born in turn from a fairy tale, which today means "a fortunate and unexpected discovery or find that occurs when one is looking for something else". It is a word applicable to so many discoveries made also by explorers who, while travelling, found what they were not looking for.
Dépaysement (French) The feeling of not being in one's own country (it occurs to me that in Spanish it would be related to uprooting). It is something that, curiously enough, I think one comes to feel even years after being far away. And it seems that being born and spending years in the same place leaves indelible marks.
Fernweh (German) to feel nostalgia for a place you've never been to; that irrepressible desire to see new places, to never unpack your suitcase and travel to who knows where.
If you want to see more words without translation, you can find them below:
Of all these terms, I have focused on Fernweh. In contrast to homesickness, which is missing home, Fernweh is the sadness of NOT being far away, the desire to see new places, the longing to travel the world.
I don't identify with this word 100% because I feel comfortable and happy at home. So I have given my own meaning to the term as the nostalgia for what we don't know yet. I think this happens to many of us, especially to people who like to move around and get out of their comfort zone.
It was a friend who told me about this word for the first time. He told me that what he liked most about travelling was not the breathtaking landscapes, but the feeling of being far away.
In my case, on each trip I am also left with the sensation of feeling I am in a different place, but above all with the characteristic essence of each place. I still stand by that phrase I heard one day that says: "A smell is the cheapest and fastest time machine". And how right. How easy it is to teleport when a scent brings you back to something you have already experienced.
And you, do you suffer from Fernweh 😉?
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