Former US Oxford student writes travel memoir

Former Oxford student Robert Babirad

IN my upcoming non-fiction travel memoir, In-Transit Passenger: Making the Journey Matter, I write about the diverse array of experiences, places and individuals encountered during my travels and their impact upon me at different stages in my life.

However, it was my time at Oxford that comprised the gateway experience, which in a sense opened up the world to me and would lead me on to living an international life as a global citizen.

Oxford is the entry point that encourages me to later go on to all of the other destinations that are visited in the book.

The city itself helped to shape my writing, because Oxford was the first time that I was away from home in the United States, and it acted as my first international experience.

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I went back through the journals that I had written while in Oxford in order to return to the place where my passion for global travel began and to consider how the city had sparked that interest for me.

I wanted to capture the entire span of my time there, but in a meaningful way that showed what the city had meant to me.

I desired to bring to life again the young and uncertain person who arrived in Oxford and in a new country.

At the end of those core chapters, that same individual must go on to leave Oxford and begin a new adventure elsewhere, but not without having first changed significantly, because of the impact of the city.

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I also wanted to remember and convey how it felt to be in such a historic, culturally rich and interesting city for the first time and at that moment in life.

I wanted the book to then consider how Oxford had in fact been the gateway that would expand my own view of the larger world and lead me on to experiencing a variety of other cultures, countries and places.

The book also reflects upon where those early Oxford experiences would lead me, right up until the present day.

Finally, I chose to include prompts for the reader so that they too might reflect on their own related life experiences and what those have come to mean for them.

Front cover of In-Transit Passenger

The book discusses the mindfulness that Oxford brought into my life.

Mindfulness and being in Oxford went well together, and I wanted the book to reflect that component.

There was the taking in of course of all of the rich architecture, culture and history that is omnipresent seemingly everywhere in the city.

However, there is also the equally important aspect of the rich international array of cultures and present day people from differing backgrounds and countries that span the world, which is taking place simultaneously in the city as well.

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It was this unique mixture of history and the present day which had a significant influence on my writing of this book and which Oxford uniquely provided.

This influence that started in Oxford goes on to also form a decidedly distinct underlying current that continues on long after the Oxford chapters and continues to be influential regardless of the location being visited in the book.

It was also those early conversations in Oxford with people from all over the world that reinforced the importance of mindfulness and being present.

Those conversations and being mindful would lead on to many others with individuals from other and widely different parts of the world years later.

Oxford city centre. Picture: Ed Nix (Image: Oxford Mail)

However, it began in Oxford because of what the culture of the city uniquely offers.

One conversation in particular mentioned in the book took place between me and an individual on the train back to Oxford from Salisbury, who was initially from Guyana and a fellow passenger in transit like myself.

Additionally, there were those talks with people in the dorm, at a pub or late at night on the High Street when heading back to the college.

These all influenced my writing of the book, and their significance became much more evident to me years later while working on this project.

Overall, it was Oxford and my time there that started it all, and it is for that reason that I devote a significant section of the book to those moments and to that time in my life which has continued to be of great significance to me.