To pretend to fly. To serve.

Para la versión en Español, haz clic aqui.

One of my earliest memories is of me walking down the concourse at Tijuana International Airport waiting to board a flight to visit family. I walked down the departures lounge, looking at the grey marble tiling on the floor trying to find a better vantage point from which to watch the planes going by.

At the time, I knew nothing about aviation–but I knew I had flown before and that one of those metal tubes would be my metal tube.

Language, flight, and planes have forever held a place of importance in my life. Living far from your extended family meant regular trips to see them. Every trip a new set of flights.

Despite being a Millennial, I still have vivid memories of the wood paneling of a travel agent near Main St where we would get our tickets. The confirmation numbers and airline logos a physical manifestation of the flights to come.

Every trip whisked me to a world that was familiar-but-yet-different to my life in the United States.

As we traveled more and more, I began to fall in love with the method of transport as much as the journey itself: the airplane.

Faraway Lands

It’s impossible to call a Matchbox toy car a valuable item.

One day, while visiting family in Mexico, my grandmother gave me a gift. It was a little Matchbox toy airplane–not unlike their toy cars. The plane–a classic Boeing 747-400 in a classic Landor livery–captivated me.

Whenever I wasn’t singing with toy frogs (sorry, aunts), I was playing with this airplane. It rapidly became one of–if not my absolute–favorite toys. I’d imagine takeoff sequences, landings–my little Speedbird taxiing to the runway and requesting takeoff clearance or flaring at just the right time to land.

I’d recreate flights in their entirety–cruise flight and turbulence as much as takeoff and landing. I would spend (what seemed to me like) hours boring holes in my grandmother’s patio as I flew my little 747 everywhere.

Because of that, I began to get an interest in the mechanics of flight–and of aviation as a whole. How planes flew was just as important as how an airport worked and how security worked–about customs and visas and passports.

As I flew my pretend plane, my mind raced not only with flight itself but with the greater notion of air travel.

Inside my little plane were people travelling to distant lands. I felt their thrill every time I picked it up–becase I had felt it before when travelling to Mexico.

I knew the 747 was bigger than any other plane I’d flown on (it has TWO FLOORS!) and that British Airways was a global airline. Even though I’d never seen a 747–much less a plane from British Airways–from then on I was hooked on the idea of air travel.

The global community

That love of travel paired with the fact that my parents were great about instilling the value of being bilingual in me and my siblings taught me the value of multicultural awareness when travelling.

Knowing the language and keeping an open mind, even to 10 year old me, was a key to a good travel experience and to unlocking the similar travel stories as I had in Mexico–local. Authentic. Human.

It’s why I started learning French rather than Spanish.

It’s why I followed through with it and studied abroad in Lille.

Why I chose to embark on a journey to pick up Portuguese, Italian, German, Norwegian and further improve my Spanish.

That knowledge has given me the ability to have experiences around the world in countries I would have only imagined visiting as a kid and making friends in a global–and multilingual–community. At the same time, that knowledge has given me an increased appreciation for what I already have: my own culture with its own words and cuisine and music.

The best gift in the world

Just recently, I had a layover in London’s Heathrow international. My flight from London to Washington was in a Speedbird A380–bigger than a 747 and just a global an airliner. It was my first ever flight on British Airways–almost twenty years after first getting that toy 747.

As we taxiied for takeoff–I saw it.

The 747 in retro British Airways Landor colors. The real one.

Winds of change

That little toy 747 is still in my bedroom today.

Do I still play with it? Pretend takeoff and taxi?

…Sometimes.

Are they to yet-unseen and foreign destinations?

Mostly–but not always. Sometimes, I take myself back to destinations whose names are paired with memories.

But it more often than not it sits there. A reminder that–while the toy 747 itself is not the reason why I became who I am today–it serves as an indicator of the how little touches from parents and grandparents spurred a love for the world and for travel.

—

Do you like what I write? Follow Why Mondays Are Cool to get more useful information and useless irreverence delivered to you on a consistently erratic schedule.