What is it that you cherche?

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Siham is hunched over a bowl of harira, her mother snoring under a blanket on the cushion between us, an Egyptian political talk show playing in the background. “I have an idea,” she says in her high, femine voice (well-suited to her small frame and perfect for high-pitched Berber singing). “A small idea.”

“I think that everyone who travels cherche something. You understand me?”

My sister and I nod encouragingly. We are facing her from the opposite segment of the couch, tucking our feet under the blanket that we share with her father. Before we can respond, she finishes her thought.

“They don’t know what it is that they cherche. But it is something.”

We have happened across this conversation from the topic of her marriage. Siham, who is 20 years old, will soon be married to her cousin, and together they are going to move to Canada for his job. She asked me if I was married, or if I had yet met anyone who I thought of marrying.

“Not yet,” I told her, shaking my head repeatedly (and perhaps excessively). Despite the number of times I’ve been asked this in my travels (at 23 I seem to be approaching the age where this worries many of the people that I meet in foreign countries), I still find it a slightly awkward question that I never know what to do with. Usually I just laugh it off, saying “No, not yet,” until whoever it is that is asking me senses the awkwardness and drops the subject. But Siham kept looking at me as if I should have more to say about this, so I offered her two explanations. One, Americans don’t want to get married until they’re older, so marriage is not something my age set often talks about or admits to thinking about. And two, “Traveling is very important to me…”

“But I think this is very easy,” she interrupts. “You find someone that you like and who likes you, and you travel together.”

This, of course, is easy to say if you fall in love with your cousin who has a job waiting for him in Canada. Siham is clearly delighted to talk about her own excitement for the travels that she and her husband are soon to begin. “We go together for the first time out of Morocco,” she giggles as she steals a glance to see if her father is listening. He isn’t (and he doesn’t understand English anyway), but she whispers anyway: “It is romantic,” followed by another guilty giggle.

But for Siham, the circumstances of romance and travel are quite different from the ones that I, for example, find myself in. Siham will travel because her husband is seeking economic opportunity, and because she is his wife. I travel because I seem to have an inability to stay in one place when I know that there are so many unexplored places waiting for me. But perhaps we are not so different after all. Siham was probably right when she said that those of us who travel often do so because we are looking for something. We might not know what it is, and we might not be aware that we’re looking for it, but we are.

What is it that I look for when I travel? For the sake of conversation I suggest to Siham that perhaps I am looking for diversity; I am looking for the chance to experience difference so that someday I can construct a life for myself that reflects the most positive aspects of all the lifestyles I have encountered. For awhile we talk about the varying importance of family in different cultures, and I remember one of my first observations when I moved in with this family in Morocco. I noted immediately the way that this large family looked after its children—mothers picking up babies that didn’t belong to them, men kissing children as frequently as women, babies calling everyone “mama” and grandmothers administering light spanks followed immediately by kisses. I remembered thinking that this was a house full of love and that this was a model of family that I wanted to someday recreate in my own life.

So maybe this is part of what I seek when I travel: lessons to take home with me that can inform the life I hope to build. But that can’t be it. When I travel I am also searching for something more basic—something I can take at face value.

Like most travelers, I go to foreign countries simply for the chance to have cotidienne experiences that I could not have in my own country. Like this precise moment, when I am sitting in the salon of a riad in Fes, discussing marriage and travel with my 20-year old Moroccan sister. The conversation in itself is not remarkable, but the chance to have it with Siham, in this house, under these blankets and with this Arabic news show in the background, is remarkable.

This is the same brief satisfaction that I felt today when I learned a recipe from Nazua. She was in one of her beautiful and smiling moods, and she beckoned me to the kitchen, where she pulled down kitchen props to demonstrate quantities: one bowl of coconut, an almost-full bowl of sugar, half a tea-glass of oil, and five eggs. Whether I use this recipe at home or not is really not that important; I may even go home and completely forget about the cookies. What I was looking for was simply that moment—that chance to stand with Nazua in the kitchen as she eagerly searched for words in a mixture of English, French and Arabic, proud to share her recipe. Without realizing it she was in fact sharing more with me: providing me with a small piece of that thing that I cherche.

Today at the central market, the vendor whom we always buy fruit from gave us free mandarins. This is not unusual. In fact, he gives us free mandarins every time we go. But each time it is strangely heartwarming and this, perhaps, is the feeling that I cherche: the ability to built subtle and simple relationships with people despite language and cultural barriers. And perhaps what I seek is the reassurance that, in reality, there are no such barriers—that, in the end, the commonality of the human experience can and will save the day.

Speaking in English, MC and Siham and I only have so much that we can say outloud about this topic; our thoughts are limited by the fact of our language deficiencies. But the basic ideas have been expressed, and we seem content to have had at least this much of a serious conversation. When I ask Siham what it is that she is looking for on her trip with her husband she just shrugs. Apparently neither of us know exactly what it is that we cherche, but I promise Siham that I will tell her when I figure it out. She just giggles and promises to do the same.

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