Travels in time

My Big Adventure
By Anita Waller

Ever since I was a child I have yearned to have a big adventure.
Discoverers like Columbus, or Marco Polo have been my personal idols. Instead or Superman, or Batman, it was their stories that lined my wall, and filled my thirst for knowledge. I too wanted to discover faraway places and cultures, like our ancestors did.
But growing up, it has seemed that the world has been discovered already. I was generations late to the party. Only very isolated areas of the world are unknown to us today.
Even so, this knowledge of our World derives mainly from statistics and data, and alas, it is nothing more than that: the collection of cold numbers and distant facts.
So I still yearned for a big adventure.
It is one thing to see here and now portrayed through our data and statistics, and quite another to understand the complexities of life in a far away land.
I yearned to go further. I wanted to transverse time.
The answer to my dilemma was a Time Machine. I wanted to travel in time.
Travel forward two thousand years and see the world from this vantage point of looking back through the ions.
I wanted to travel back in time, to see where our ancestors and forefathers have been.
And when I got on that plane to China, on that foggy morning in September 2001, I got what I had been for lusting for all these years.
I have got to travel on my very own time machine.
In China I was in the Now, but also in the Future and the Past at the same time.
I have never been in a country where the past, present and future are living side by side and next to each other.
With a few steps you can go from the Ming dynasties legacy to the imperial structures, and then you can slurp on homemade noodle soup in a rural farm. In the next moment you are lost in ageless shopping maze of a modern metropolis.
Look beyond, and you will move forward in time – and witness the coming space age, the China we are still about to experience.
The people are similar. They are very antagonistic. Their hearts are open but in many ways their minds are cold and calculating. They have leant to live in the Past, Present and Future, and survive in all these circumstances.
Truly a travel in time.