Too Big

I was in Paris for four months in my spring semester at university in 2008. A month into my stay, I had already felt too big for Paris.

I was in Berlin, Germany for two weeks on a spring break trip while I was studying in Paris. After a few days into the trip, I felt the sad emotion of feeling ‘settled in’ creep in, clouding my mind and lingering there. I slowly felt too big for Berlin.

While teaching in China for two years and traveling around the country, it felt as if all of the cities I visited were one and the same (all with impressive modern and preserved ancient buildings, food stalls, and being far from short of having shopping centers). I felt that the city I lived in — Ningbo — became a bit small for me.

After visiting different European destinations, such as Vilnius, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Pristina, Sofia, St.Petersburg, Moscow and having lived in ‘T’bilisi and observing and chatting with locals there and all over Southeast Asia, it unfortunately didn’t take long for me to feel that, as time passed, the days felt monotonous and normal.

Every time I go to a place and spend some time in it, I start to feel that the place isn’t enough to keep my interest lit.

I am currently in Istanbul and Istanbul is one of the world’s most populous cities but I feel that I have become bigger than Istanbul. Maybe I’m tired of locals asking me why I came to Turkey, if I liked Turkish food, if I had been to Antalya, Cappadocia, Izmir, Bodrum, Trabzon (I actually don’t have much interest in visiting other Turkish destinations. It’s unusual because when I travel to any country, I tend to want to explore other cities and towns. When I hear stories and read articles on other Turkish cities and towns, I don’t feel inclined to go and see them). I get tired of being asked if I had heard of Rize or Erzincan or Gaziantep or Hatay. I easily get tired of being asked how long I have been in Turkey. I understand that these questions are typical and are often asked and I know it’s always a different person asking but I don’t like to repeat the answers anyway.

Everyone is an individual but I feel that there’s something about everyone that is the same that I can never ever explain.

Every place feels small.

It’s not so easy to just get up and move because I also wish to have stable relationships. Somewhere deep down, I wish I could have a group of people I could regularly go to, call up, find out more about. I wish there were an area where I would be okay with going to the same markets and cafes and restaurants every day, where I would be okay with seeing the same sights, going by the same establishments.

I don’t know why I am stubbornly still here, really. Perhaps, I’m just tired of moving around to attempt to live somewhere.

Most of all, I think I may be tired of feeling too big for a city. It’s possible that if I were to travel to all 196 countries in the world, I would feel like the place is too small for me. I don’t want to keep going everywhere and then start feeling depressed because the ‘settled in’ emotion has taken over; I don’t want to feel this feeling everywhere I go, every few days.

I’m not happy with staying in one place at any time anywhere and I’m also not happy about not having one place to feel good about settling in and be okay with following routines.