Finding Anna

In the summer of 2011 I was in the middle of an epic crusade through Europe. I had explored more than half the continent with only a 22.45kg backpack within which I carried my most prized possession: my passport. One doesn’t need to be a seasoned traveller to know the gravity of ones passport and I guarded mine like it was a vital organ. And then one day in Berlin I lost it.
The serenity I conducted myself with when I realised I had lost the sacred book was bizarre. Instead of collapsing into hysterical fits of despair in the middle of a busy pedestrian street I simply looked at my two travel companions and calmly told them that I’d lost my passport and that we needed to hurry up or else the Jewish Museum would close. I wasn’t allowed in the museum. Turns out you needed a passport for that. So I sat outside instead, alone, and whilst waiting there the most glorious thing happened to me: I lost my identity.
Without a passport, who was I? That tiny book with its badly cropped photo and indecipherable series of numbers defined me as an Italian citizen. Now without it I could adopt whichever culture I liked! I could eat bratwurst like a German local and say, "guttentag” as if it was my mother tongue! For the first time during my whole backpacking experience I finally knew what it was to experience a foreign culture not through the eyes of an intruding tourist but rather as a lost citizen coming home.
I realise now that my euphoria would’ve worn off when the realisation that I was stranded in a foreign country sunk in thus I am eternally grateful to the saint who found and returned my passport to my hostel later that day, however I am no longer defined by that little red book. I guard it with my life if it means I can continue to travel acquiring new identities but I will never let my credentials define who I am. Travel moulds one into the person they were never meant to discover. How marvellous life is for ones newfound foreign identities!