Before I Knew What Travel Was Really For
How taste and memory connected an early solo trip to a deeper sense of purpose
A little over eight years ago I logged my first ever solo journey. While life has certainly been lived between then and now, and some of the sharpness around that November 2017 trip has faded, I am confident I never second guessed even for a minute traveling out on my own.
By accepting an invitation to see the world on my own terms, set to nothing but my own rhythm and timing, I was signaling to the universe around me I was ready to travel as a means of self-discovery. Whether I knew it or not at the time, and I likely didn’t, I was opening my mind and heart to a whole new way of moving. And… being moved.
Circumstance and confidence had finally aligned that Fall and I appointed Prague as my first solo destination. I don’t remember why I chose Prague. Whatever my reason, as someone who now spends an inordinate amount of time dissecting the why before we go, I find this glaring omission from my own memory bank of all places to be ironic if not inconvenient. All the more problematic too as I set out to excavate meaning from this first call to untethered movement.
In my early travel days despite being a rookie on the road, I can comfortably say I was one heck of a planner and record keeper. I know I could take the easy way out and turn to iPhone forensics for help filling in some of the gray. But I challenge myself instead to go back in time the good old-fashioned way. I anticipate a sudden raid on my memories will be equally if not more revealing than some staccato digital footprint.
It is.
I am immediately transported to a table at Naše Maso, a hipster bistro / butcher shop in the old centre of Prague. I remember freezing rain, blistering cold and cursing the soles of my slippery black boots.
I remember stepping inside and being greeted warmly. I was shown to a table by the window. The shop was small but cozy, no frills but intimate. It is the kind of place I describe now as one of my favorite places to eat – a foodie shop full of energy, local flavor and hard core reverence for taste.
I was there for one reason – their steak tartare.
My memory does not fail to fill in the details, tuning as it does, the familiar frequencies of storytelling, color and taste I’ve come to travel behind. I remember the tartare being served on blue and white packing paper sitting alongside a stack of toast. I don’t know if I strongly suspect or I strongly remember red wine.
The Steak Tartare at Naše Maso
What I don’t have any issue remembering is how downright, damn delicious it was. My meticulous record keeping tells me the entire meal was 11 USD all in. This first recollection makes me smile and most of all makes my stomach growl. After perusing Naše Maso’s Instagram, I half-jokingly think to myself, I should check flights to Prague. I want that tartare again, to try their spicy beef sausage and for sure their Czech Bůček. Other bites and sips from Prague surge forth. I have opened a most delectable Pandora’s Box of taste.
But some part of me lags behind, refusing to turn away from that cozy bistro table. How I wish I could go back and take a seat next to that becoming, independent young woman. I’d ask her, why? Why did she get on that plane? Was she escaping? Defying? Proving? Seeking? Craving? There’d be so much I’d be tempted to protect her from and tip her off to in her years ahead – the heartbreak, loss and failure but also the joy, skipped heartbeats and unexpected wild wins.
Instead, all I can do is admire her with a few seconds more of deliberate and doting pause. I thank her for having the unbridled gumption and curiosity to travel wherever her heart called her. By taking those first steps out, she moved us right where we were always supposed to be, here.
I go back to the relationship I shared from last week’s Tessera between movement and destination, “if movement is the metaphor, destination is the mirror.” I stop typing. My thoughts swirl. My heart catches in my chest. I suddenly don’t know if I’m stuck or struck.
The truth is I’m not able to say with certainty if I found what I was looking for in Prague or if I was even looking for anything substantial in the first place. But today, when reflecting on my solo time there, I see a version of myself staring back at me I wasn’t expecting to be so moved by. Of course, I was always going to connect the Amanda who stepped out solo for the first time with the Amanda who converted that initial burst of courage and momentum into meaning and purpose. But this feels different.
This is the first time my own writing has so cleanly and definitively connected the dots for me. I would love to take credit for teeing up my character arc so deftly from one week to the next, across two blogs that bridge seven years. But I can’t.
But that gift of timing and powerful synchronicity between them is exactly what prompted me to focus my search for meaning in Prague on more than just its role as gateway. Prague didn’t just come up in the rotation so I could see proof of an early obsession with taste, it came up when it did because I was supposed to sit at that table.
When we tap travel to expand our worldview in any direction, we end up commissioning a piece of work that can unmask a truer, more authentic version of ourselves. When we fasten together the versions of who we were, to who we are becoming, we add tissue, texture and character. We expand.
My iPhoto library does in fact document an appreciation for Taste that seems to initially come into focus around my first untethered trip. For every “Prague is stunning and beautiful” snap there are three times as many images of inspired plates and flavors. In combing carefully over my digital footprint, it is clear I gave Taste more than enough space to seduce and condition my palate in Prague.
Those first few trips out by myself were all about freedom to try – and not just the bites and sips. I went to the ballet, to classical musical performances, to museums, castles and places of great and sad historical consequence. I discovered the allure of wandering to whim, intuition and curiosity, a habit first put into practice exploring Prague’s holiday markets, its old town streets and passageways, its iconic bridges and storybook nooks and corners.
I still maintain there is nothing quite like a solitary stroll through a new city. Our senses firing on high alert, our imaginations working in frenzied overtime. We are at once alone, but anything but, as the world around us seems to shift and bend to every spellbound step we take. It is here through a lens of heartfelt perspective we come to see that every move we make – be it a wrong turn, a detour, the long way around – has meaning and potential.
Tessera 43 drops one more coincidence in front of me as my eyes inexplicably find and lock in on the only artifact I brought home from Prague – a quirky $21 metal snail that sits in the windowsill of my kitchen. The shopkeeper where I bought it on Golden Lane, a picturesque row of little colored houses, shared its symbolism when she saw me curiously pick it up.
Prague’s older districts spiral out like a snail’s shell from Prague Castle which represents the snail’s head. I took to that story enough I bought it. Now every time I dust around it I think about that charming little lane of artisan shops and cafes.
But this time, I decide to attach my own story to it. For Christians, snails are symbols of life, death and rebirth. In China, they stand for love and desire. They represent the cycle of fertility and harvest for Greeks.
But for this untethered traveler, snails carry the metaphor of slow and measured movement on their backs – each and every one of travel’s purposeful twists and turns. A lifetime of lived journeys that connect, expand and stay within us forever.
An unexpected metaphor of movement
Every week, I send one new Tessera Blog on taste, travel and the truths we collect along the way. If this piece resonated, I’d be honored if you’d share or subscribe.
