Recently this past week, I traveled to Portland, Oregon on a little vacation. I got to see a wide variety of culture and local pride on my visit along with the vastness of the great outdoors in forest park and the Colombia River Gorge. On my visit I took some tours to the 'must see' stops in Portland and learned a lot about the history of this wild town. I learned that Portland, Oregon has a friendly rivalry going on with Austin, Texas on which city can be kept the weirdest. I experienced a lot of great things while over there but what really stuck with me the most was the people. Everyone was so great and polite in Portland.
A big reason why I love traveling so much is because I am so intrigued with all the different experiences going on in the world. Seeing and meeting different people in different places kind of gives me a little taste of those different experiences. There was one person in particular on my recent journey that I have not been able to get out of my head, and she was not even from Portland. This individual's name is Ida, and that is a photo of her at the top there. She is from Europe and I met her while I was on a tour of the city, she was visiting just like I was.
We sat and chatted and she told me all about her beautiful family whom she was there with. We soon got into talking about where we were from and our backgrounds and it was a great shock to me when she told she was a holocaust survivor. She opened up to me and told me some inhumane things she has witnessed. To which she showed me the numbers tattooed on her arm and I nearly jumped out my seat just looking at it. I ran my index finger over the faded coloring on the numbers and felt a sharp chill shoot through my spine and the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. It is one thing to talk about stuff like this in history class, but a totally different experience to see something like that in person.
Her stories were hard to actually think that a person could go through such horrible things, but that is not the real reason why she is still in my head. The reason why Ida stuck with me out of all the people that I met is how her perspective is on life right now. It almost brought me to tears on how beautiful her outlook on life is. Crazy to see that someone who was screwed over in life so hard and had to go through the horrible things she went through and the extent of sheer horror and still be so optimistic and hopeful in life. It was just very refreshing to see that Ida has more than enough reason to have anger and hatred in her heart but she chooses not to. Instead, she chooses to love all and to forgive. I think there is a lot people can learn from Ida.
