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SEEQ Stories of Travel Stories of Travel (May 2019)

Living In the Moment

Community Curator June 01, 2019
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This story was submitted by Bingjie Liu to the Stories of Travel collection as part of the May SEEQ sessions.

During our life, we should at least have two impulsions:

One is to pursue whom you love, the other is to fly in a hot balloon in Turkey.

At 3am on June 7th 2018, Cappadocia, we, a group of eight of my friends from high school, left for the hot balloon and planned to watch the sunrise. Passing by other tourists who were getting on the hot balloon, we approached to our own hot balloon. The hot balloon, orange at the end, light pink at the top and yellow in between, looks like a giant tent that has not been set up yet. A few of the staff members were busy pumping air, mostly nitrogen according to my chemistry textbook, into the balloon. After people finished pumping, the hot balloon stood up, became inflated and waited for us to get on. We couldn’t wait climbing to the balloon, and once we were in the balloon, we feel something burning with a little bit smoke at the top of our heads. As we looked up, there was an equipment providing fuel for the hot balloon, and the director was trying to fire the flammable gases for the balloon takeoff. As the fire at the top burned more and more heavily, the hot balloon gradually left the land and flew upward to the sky. Within seconds, the increase of the height also buried the voice of the staff members on the land. The director fired the hot balloon every seven seconds, and the hot balloon went straight to the higher altitude.

I stood opposite to the rising sun, and everything looked static at the moment. My camera was the only thing that moves along with my hands. Flying for more than twenty minutes, we were in between other balloons in the sky. One balloon looked huge from my perspective, and the others were high up and far from us.

As the sun was rising halfway in the sky, the hot balloon reflected a shape of love on the nearby mountain through the sunlight. Director said, “we are now in the Valley of Love.” “This is the place where love originates,” I said to myself. I looked at two of my friends who are currently single, and we all laughed at the same time. Someone might hope and even pray that he or she would find the right one very soon. Looking at the other side of the hot balloon, hundreds of the hot balloons seem to be locked at different places of the whole sky.

As a student, I often keep myself busy with my schoolwork and don’t have time think about other things. I’m often searching for living in the moment and being connected to my surroundings, and I think this is it.

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