Recap: The Numbers

2008 was a great year. A hell of a year. How much of a year? Well let's roll out some numbers:
(as always, all stats according to Wikipedia)

11,940,000 - Population of Beijing proper
680,000 - Population of Boston proper
588,000 - Population of Washington, DC proper
505,000 - Population of Dublin proper
7,811 - Population of Monaghan
105 - Nights in DC
89 - Nights in Dublin
74 - Nights in Beijing
39 - Nights in Newton
28 - Cities I spent the night in
16 - States in the US that I visited, including the District of Columbia
16 - UN World Heritage Sites that I visited
13 - Countries I visited, including a few of arguable sovereign status (Hong Kong, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Vatican City)
12 - Institutions of higher learning I was significantly exposed to, including attending Georgetown and UCD, staying at Bowdoin, Brown and near Edinburgh and 北京大学
11 - Olympic events I attended
10 - Capitals of these countries I visited, not including Vatican City and Hong Kong
9 - States that I stayed in
8 - Languages which were the primary language of a country I visited, and I said thank you in all of them
8 - Currencies used (actual prize in one of these currencies if someone can name all of them)
6 - Patriots games I watched, including 3 from last year's playoffs and 3 from this year's squad. Unfortunately I will not be watching any of their playoff games this year. Thanks for nothing Brett Favre.
4 - Cell phones I used
3 - Continents I visited
3 - Heartbreaking losses for me (Super Bowl 42, Davidson on Easter, Red Sox-Devil Rays game 7)
1 - Presidential elections that I voted in

I've kept pretty good record of this year and looking back on them, it still amazes me how much occurred, both personally and globally, in 2008. For example, I went to Las Vegas to play an ultimate tournament and had a ridiculous time, I got my roommate to believe he had chlamydia on April Fool's and I went to an out of control Anything But Clothes party and returned with everything but my wallet. I was abandoned by my second cousin Parissa during a drunken night at Bowdoin and I rescued my cousin Justin during his drunken night in Hong Kong. I ate dog meat, met a German professional poker player who had recently married an 8 months pregnant Chinese girl, sprained my ankle, mistakenly drank 4 or 5 Long Island Iced teas in one night, and met an American Olympic wrestler. I briefly faced homelessness in London, hung off a cliff with a 100 meter sheer drop, spoke Chinese to get around in Florence, and blew a bunch of euros to get drunk in a pub with some Australians. When you're young, a lot does happen in a year and this past year was 5% of my life. Every year brings in a lot of change, again both personally and globally, but personal change happens only from life experience, life experience does not come linearly. Life experience comes when you do things you've never done before, when you see things you've never seen before, when you find yourself in positions that you never could have imagined before and you learn from it all. It can come from meeting new friends, from working jobs, from reading books, from picking up new hobbies or from experiencing personal tragedy. For me this year, I gained a lot of life experience, which was really limited during my high school days, through traveling. Traveling formed this blog, has led me to taking 2600 new photos, cost me a ton of cash, and really freaking opened up my perspective.

Even before I went to China and Ireland, I had traveled within the US moreso than I normally would. Frisbee tournaments had brought me to Las Vegas and Savannah. The trip down to Georgia, coupled with a drive up to visit my cousin in Maine meant that I passed through every single state on the east coast except for Florida. In addition, I was a little surprised when I returned to the US, turned on my Verizon cell and was greeted with a picture of the Southern California coast that I had taken when I visited Charlie in Irvine.

My travels have been restricted to the Northern Hemisphere, but I went as north as Stockholm, which is 59 degrees north, and as far south as Savannah, at 32 degrees. I was over 10,000 feet above sea level in Yunnan province, and probably about 100 feet under sea level in either the DC, London, Hong Kong or Stockholm subways. I've passed over the Charles River, the Potomac, the Thames, the Yangtze, the Liffe, Lake Malaren, Hong Kong Harbor, the Tiber, the Arno, the Spree, the Vltava, the Vistula and the Hudson. I have this Excel spreadsheet that has documented where and when I've been this year, and according to it, I have changed locations 54 times. My longest continuous stay in one place was a 42 day stretch in Beijing. The longest I ever stayed in Dublin was just 20 days. It's been a year of barely relenting packing and unpacking, and a plethora of trains, planes and buses. I've now been to 29 different countries, including all the countries in Western Europe excluding the microstates, Denmark, Switzerland and Norway. I now know who Wenceslaus, Jenny Lind, Joe McDonnell, Zhang Yimou, Norman Bethune, Robbie Keane and Filippo Brunelleschi are, all names which are common knowledge in various parts of the world. Furthermore, I've learned a new language and a new accent.

So these numbers and facts are pretty neat and all, but it doesn't really tell a story. The real story is deeply personal, which is odd because traveling can be so public. When you're visiting new cities, you're out and about more than ever, seeing crowded tourist spots and spending minimal time inside. But when you're living abroad, you soon realize that you can't be a tourist for very long and that you have to do a lot of the boring home stuff that you normally do. And it's really when you buy groceries, take the public transportation, go shopping, check out different bars and talk to people that you realize how life is actually different in different places. I have been privilged to have traveled a lot when I was younger on my parents watch, but I really didn't appreciate it all enough. This year was the first time I had ever lived abroad though, and I did my best to make sure that I would appreciate it all. There's still a lot of stuff in every place I went that I wish I had done, but I left each place very satisfied with my experience there. Really I did not have a single bad trip - maybe Italy was the worst. When I left Beijing, I realized that those were the best times of my life, and that everything upcoming really would be downhill, and that was a very sad but accurate realization. Even though it feels like I've been gone for an eternity, I wasn't in either Dublin nor Beijing long enough to really understand what it means to be Irish or Chinese. I'm not an anthropology expert and I really don't even know if my impressions of the countries and their peoples are really accurate. I can just relay my own genuine experiences and most importantly, that I think I now understand what it means to be American, at least from my perspective. I've learned how I am simulatenously incredibly unique and overwhelmingly unremarkable. A million different events and experiences have brought me to where I am today, but the path I have walked down, incredible and difficult though it may seem, has been trod by so many people like me before me. It's pretty humbling.

This summer in Beijing, I realized that being Chinese-American has almost nothing in common with being Chinese Chinese. When you're surrounded by other people like you, in a society run by people like you, there's not a whole lot of space for stereotypes. In addition, I realized I came into the country with stereotypes for the people there, with a Western-biased view for how society should be run. I expected to find an overpopulation of dirty, spitting people tightly controlled by the government who didn't know how great the democracy they were missing was. Now I leave with an understanding that yes, there are too many people in China. There always have been, but that has shaped the way that country's identity. Our way of life, our way of government, our way of trade, simply cannot work in China at this moment in time. I leave with an understanding of fierce Chinese pride, respect for the grittiness unity of the general populace, and while I shed a tear for the marginalized individual freedoms and human rights in the country, I accept that they have resulted in a much more efficient and powerful country.

This semester in Europe, I've seen a counter image to my Asian experience. Instead of the sprawling, polluted megacities, I've walked through great cities that never exceed 7 stories tall and are still centered around the centuries-old town square. I've seen and studied a continent of incredible linguistic and cultural diversity, and realized that it's even more diverse and complicated than we assume. I've begun to understand how national pride differs throughout the world, but how so many different people can claim to live in the best country in the world. I've realized how cultural sports, holidays and celebrities are