What I miss About Traveling the World
The Best of 2 Years Backpacking The World
It’s been just over a year since we stopped full-time travel. At the time we’d had our fill, having backpacked for two years continuously and so we were looking forward to the next chapter. Now that we’ve been in Toronto for a year there’s one thing I can say without hesitation that I miss about traveling the world.
Our lives changed pretty drastically when after five years living in Vancouver we quit our jobs to travel the world. The next drastic change was when we moved to Toronto and went back to school. Now that we’ve been here for a year I realize that we still haven’t really settled down. One reason is because we’re in the university’s student housing and we know we’ll move out in two years when I finish my degree but the other part is that we’ve just never really been anywhere and felt the permanence of living somewhere indefinitely. Even though we lived in Vancouver for five years the whole time we knew that we’d sell everything to go travelling so we only bought the necessities and didn’t decorate. Then and now there’s nothing on our walls. I was surprised when my friend moved into a new place and he’d bought pictures from Ikea to hang on the wall beside newly installed floating shelves. He encouraged me to buy a couch because we’ll be here for another two years and I was struct by how he see’s the two years as long-term but I see that as short-term.
In Toronto waking up in the same places every day is good and bad. It’s nice to have familiarity but it also sucks when you’re not excited about where you live. Our home just isn’t very homely, because we didn’t decorate and don’t want to accumulate things, but it’s not being stationary and not traveling to new places that I miss the most. Nor is it photographing new places, nor living in perpetual summer. The one thing I miss about traveling the world more than anything else is eating out every day.
It’s not the luxury of eating out per se, though that is and continues to be very special, its about having good food. When we were traveling we always ate something different every night and usually it was what we were craving that day be it sushi or ramen or pizza. Neither of us likes cooking nor spending the time to prepare food so we often end up cooking big batches. This saves us money and trips to the grocery store but it gets stale pretty quick and so we don’t get excited about meals. It’s also difficult to get simple ingredients sometimes like basil to make Thai dishes and that can be frustrating.
Although we ate out almost every day while traveling, it still felt special because it made us look forward to each meal. In Toronto we haven’t found many good places and only one that we’d want to return to. There are okay places but overall we haven’t found any favourites. We keep trying new sushi, Korean and ramen but they’re just not that exciting which is a surprise because we live on one of the busiest streets in Toronto and have something like a dozen restaurants within a block of us.
The lack of favourites in Toronto does mean that we eat out less saves a little because Toronto food is expensive. A meal here costs upwards of $40 whereas in Vancouver we ate at the same sushi restaurant religiously every Friday for $28. But that’s nothing compared to the $27 per day average we spent while traveling for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
So if there’s one thing I miss about traveling the world, it’s getting to eat delicious food every day.
