The Best and Worst of Us

Spring break has come right around the corner again, and I have found myself driving for hours through the Icelandic countryside with a few good friends. Truly, we have been driving around basically the middle of nowhere, and there is no lighting on the highway at night, so I have been driving in the pitch darkness. We flew out a few days ago, and are now in the southeastern corner of the island in this small fishing village called Hofn. This isn’t a very dense country - certainly a whole world away from what we are accustomed to in the cities of Boston and New York. Sometimes it feels like a completely different planet.

We drive by looming mountains and half-frozen glacial lakes that span as far can be seen.
Surrounded by colossal waves crashing as if stirred by titans dwelling in whirlpools.
Plains, snow-covered and never-ending. We drive along, the sun in the sky and at its antipode.

Gazing into the abyss, we craned our necks to see whips of light dancing overhead.
Our lens capture what our eyes cannot, storms in green, white, purple. To us, only white and grey, shadowed by celestial flickers.
“Can you see any constellations?… Yes, that one right over there, called Phallus.” (see https://phallus.is/)

Something I’ve realised about travelling alone and with friends in the past few years or so is the amazing learning I always come back home with. And I often wonder why I feel like time has been dilated when I travel. Or why it seems like time is just a dimension that I’m totally unconscious about when I travel. Hey, I’m waking up before 8am on travel days when I get up much later during ‘ordinary life’. Four days in Iceland, and it feels as if we’ve been here for two weeks already.

Travel brings out the best and worse than us because of its novelty. When you are hungry, tired, and bothered for a few days straight, your mind seems to let go of itself. Less meta-cognition about how you seem to others and self-control, more impulsive action and letting your guard down. Friendships are often tested when we travel, as we put higher pressure on ourselves to ‘make the most’ of our financial and temporal investments in our flights across the world. Language barriers, deadlines, uncomfortable situations, all the norm when we travel.

I found myself taking on more responsibility for the group in organising our itinerary, driving, cooking, check-in and check-out times. Perhaps I was reverting to my oldest sibling tendencies. I often feel rather disappointed when people try to guess what place in birth order I am (upon invitation, of course), and I am picked out to be the youngest brother or an only child. I suppose that’s a product of how I present at college, and generally being away from home + feeling free of burden and responsibility at college. Also, the hyperactivity in ADHD could play a part there as well.

At the same time, I felt myself becoming more easily irritable, tired most days, honestly a bit of a wanker to talk to. Travel magnifies scarcity. You can aggregate a dollar amount to each hour, and every destination feels as if a missed opportunity if we choose wrongly. And under that pressure, we begin to guard how we spend our time and mental energy like birds swooping for one last fish. I have really enjoyed travelling with this group of friends, but we are all inevitably human with our own preferences of how to spend our time. Whether it be the music in the car or whether to go to a hundred meter high waterfall or a charcoal sand beach, solo travelling gives one full autonomy to do as one pleases.

But we can’t share those experiences with our friends, the beauty of travelling in a group. And we can’t experience the inevitable forgiveness as we realise that our discussions are often trivial, and the most optimal way to travel is not to optimise, but protect one’s peace and enjoy the scenery.

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A few days later, and I’m back home in my dorm at school. How is it possible that I was in this same place exactly a week ago, and am getting back into my routines? I’m reading Catullus, analysing AI research papers, getting back onto the Concept2 Ergometer, and biking around campus in this beautiful spring weather. The snow has melted since we left and the grass is green again. Spring has truly started, and the remnants of my adventure in Iceland seem but a faint dream.

You know how you wake up from a vivid dream, think about how crazy it was and then get to your business for the day, brushing your teeth, thinking about the day’s meetings. And inevitably, a few hours later you have no idea what the dream was, and it is forgotten in the abyss, until some day you eventually come across the dream’s settings again and feel this odd sense of deja vu as if you’ve subconsciously been in the same position before. That’s what travelling sometimes feels like. This totally novel situation, where you’re thrust into responsibility, and forced to readjust to ‘normal’ life again.

My roommates are trickling back into our suite from around America and the World. Some from Europe, some from the West Coast, some from the East. Life whispers that it will start again soon and nudges the mind to brace for impact. The memories will soon fade and life will take their place.

But they stay alive in our photo albums, somehow. On our trip, we debated the idea of taking photos a lot. To pull out our phones or to simply enjoy the experience? Photos recall our memories, and some days I often find myself smiling cheek to cheek, thinking about the great times I’ve had throughout the semesters and holidays back home and around the world. I think it’s hard for me to rationalise something so deeply human. Maybe at the end of a long day some time in the future, I pull out my phone and admire the photos and memories of my travels around the world. It’s one of those unsolved mysteries that I have never been able to come to a definitive theory that even I am happy about (let alone something that I would propose to other people).

I often say that I feel most connected to humanity in Europe, most alive in America, and most connected to home and family in Australia and Asia. Life happens in seasons, and I feel I have no right to throw life onto its back and start decomposing why things are the way they are. That’s something I can do a posteriori rather than theoretically.

Some things on our trip stand out as some very happy memories. The first time I saw the Aurora Borealis. My friends and I debating ethics and financial markets for the six hour drive from Hofn to Reykjavik through glaciers and mountains. And the endless pylsur we enjoyed every day. The first time I successfully completed an eating challenge, which has led to my enshrinement on the restaurant’s wall at https://www.icelandicfoods.com/.

As of March 2026, Icelandic Street Food in Reykjavik has a wall of fame for their all-you-can-eat traditional Icelandic soup, and to have your picture on that wall, you need to finish fourteen portions of any of their three soups (Lamb, Shellfish, and Tomato). You can have any permutation of those three soups, but you need fourteen portions. Over the span of four hours, my friends very kindly accompanied me and cheered me on as I paced outside the restaurant and nearly spewed multiple times. I was going insane on the drive home, as I repeated out loud the ways you could say ‘shellfish soup’ and ‘tomato soup’. Sellfish soup, shellfish soup, shellfish shoup, and sellfish shoup. Needless to say, I was not going to leave Reykjavik without my photo on that wall. My body said no (for good reason), but my mind said yes. It was something primal, stupid about being immortalised in a foreign country that drove me to drink all that soup.

agite, vos omnes! scribamus id quod cogere dedicationem memoriis nostris.
Come on, all of you! Let us record that which compels commitment to our memories.

Yurui