From Brooklyn, NYC. A series of memories by Joseph Faris.

I just took my first two sips of a brilliant iced tea - leaf of Rooibos - purchased from a small corner cafe in the suburb of Williamsburg, which, today, in this heat is the most welcome of all the small joys that NYC has to behold. So, this is the final leg of my journey. I’ve been on the road for two months, chewed through my life savings (which wasn’t a lot to begin with), taken out an interest-free loan (thanks Parentals), made some of the best friends in the world, seen some of the craziest, weirdest stuff in the world, and seen some unbelievably beautiful things too. I’ve filled up journals from front to back with thoughts, musings and experiences, soul aflame and smoking with the inspiration that only alights when fate permits, and presently, I’m aglow with the satisfaction of having set foot in more countries than one ever could’ve hoped to at this young age. The funny thing is, a little more than three months ago I had absolutely no idea that I would’ve been here.

Neushwanstein, Bavaria, Germany (more commonly known as the castle that inspired Disney’s own).

Some crazy clear lake that we camped next to - near Castle Neushwanstein in Bavaria, Germany.

I left on a whim; I had a bunch of pals who were traveling Europe already, the rush of music month and the Summer busy period was waning, and, convinced this was too good an opportunity to miss, I booked my ticket. I sold some stuff (guitars… ouch. It hurts parting with old friends), worked my butt off for the weeks remaining and made plans, three weeks from deciding to leave, I was sitting on the tarmac at Auckland International and wrote my first journal entry. I believe New Zealand breeds a certain kind of kid, we are those who cannot perceive anything larger than what we have already seen with our two eyes. So stuck in with what I was already doing in little old NZ it took a big wake up call for me to realize seriously how easy it is to get on out of there.

This small-mindedness I felt is largely due to our young age collectively as a country, and our geographical inconvenience (or geographical advantage; it’s a glass half-full/half-empty kinda thing). It seems to me almost as if nothing outside of what I already knew truly existed until I’d stood there smack in the middle of it, breathing that acrid subway air, or until I closed my eyes and listened to the buzzing crickets in the Austrian countryside while the flies bit my legs in the scratchy grass. I feel it’s not till you’ve truly soaked in the vivacity, or the awkward banality of an experience that it will actually make sense to you that it exists. It seems to me that we take a lot of convincing, we humans, we animals of habit. Here is a place that I now know.

This is my buddy Ralph, shooting some mountaintop views in Feldkirch, Austria, right before we got hit by a freak electrical storm.

I feel somehow older, not necessarily wiser, that remains to be seen, just older. I feel as if a lot of things I thought I knew before were like incorrect maths sums on my homework sheet as a young kid, feeling confident that I got them right I’d hand them in, only for the sheet to come back the next day with a bunch of corrections in pencil. So now, the world is my teacher, and the numbers, figures and formulae that I previously applied have been found wanting.

Winged Victory, The Louvre, Paris.

Art makes a hell of a lot more sense when it’s not viewed on a screen or in a textbook.

The view from our Parisien apartment rooftop. Paris, France.

There is something about a faded empire that leaves its mark on you, and in that sense those Eastern cities are indelible upon my memory, not for specific experiences but rather the swathe of history, poverty, seediness and beauty that co-exists all within a few blocks, down cobbled streets and once-majestic-now-pathetic old train stations. Adopted Greek architecture has been shunted aside, left to crumble and now buried under swathes of the most banal of stick figure graff, scrawled on flaking walls in whatever poor adaptation of English the occupants/squatters/street kids have, which has a certain charm about it anyway. This graffiti may be a bastardization of our language but it brings forth some pretty interesting and rarely, poetic, adaptation of English words mashed to the grammatical tune of the native language of whatever country I happened to be in at the time.

Majestic Prague, Bohemia.

Crazy fun beer garden, East Berlin, Germany.

Graduates at the waterfront, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Nothing hits you in the guts as hard as good show from musicians you admire and respect. Doubly so when that show is in Madison Square Garden. For those of you that caught the show streaming live on YouTube, nice work, but it was so much better being there. Win Butler knows his crowd, knows them and loves them to the point that after testing with a couple of stage dives, singing a whole tune while running through the pit raises no issues for him. All the while, working the whole MSG to a fever pitch, there is no better way than to celebrate with a confetti laden encore.

Arcade Fire, Madison Square Garden, NYC.

Central Park, NYC.

I know it’s one thing to rock overseas and have dreams and crazy experiences, and another to try to bring that entire wealth of experience and inspiration back to your hometown without slotting right back in to old patterns of existence. But, I thoroughly believe that because of doing this, my life will be different forever. I’ve got so much more to work with now. So readers, whoever you are, whatever walk of life you come from, live it with your eyes wide open, and put yourself in the places that you’re going to get the most out of, don’t listen to people who tell you that things can’t be achieved - they just haven’t learned to keep their eyes open. Wake up, it’s a big world out there.

St. Paul’s Cathedral from the Tate Modern, London, England.

It’s almost home time for me. See all y’all on NZ soil soon.