This is a bit of a quirky blog, and it was inspired by a recent trip I took with a very close girlfriend of mine. We’ve been friends for over seventeen years, and though we’d been through thick and thin with each other, we’d never actually travelled together. So after what has felt like the most harrowing year so far, we decided to pack it in, throw caution to the wind, abandon our responsibilities and take off to the sun and surf. Cuba baby! We had a wonderful, adventure-filled trip. We spent our days lazing around on sugary sand beaches, and our nights drinking rum and dancing until the sun came up. It was my girlfriend’s first time to the island, so I made sure we got out of the resort to see some of the beautiful sites the island had to offer, and when we finally touched down at home, before our plane had even taxied to the gate, she looked at me and exclaimed, “So, when are we going back?”. I laughed, relieved and elated that she loved it so much. And while our trip was seamless, little did we know that there was trouble on the horizon.

We both went to our respective homes that evening, and like I always do, I practically tore the memory card out of my fancy camera and started uploading the hundreds of photos I had snapped. I shrieked with delight as photo after photo came into view. They were perfect, and it would seem that my six week long photography course had paid off, whew! I sat their for hours, reliving all of our crazy moments. But I was still missing all of the photos from my girlfriend’s camera, and like clockwork, she arrived later on in the evening and handed me her drive so I could download all of her photos. After a little less than twenty minutes, the two of us were looking at each other as if we’d seen a ghost. I looked at her and finally said, “Ummm, we’re missing like 150 photos!” We were actually missing photos from an entire city that we had spent a day wandering through, and what was worse, is that because I hadn’t goaded anyone into taking photos of me with my own camera, I had but a handful of photographs of myself. I was devastated, but no more than my poor girlfriend. She went home in tears that night, and spent the better part of an evening searching her memory card, her laptop, and her desktop computer to see if she had downloaded them in the wrong place, but it was to no avail.

After feeling understandably bummed out for a couple of days, she sent me a text message: “You know what, it’s awful, but it’s really just another one of those first world problems”. In that moment, I had a bright epiphany. She was so right. I just had the privilege of sightseeing around a country where most people don’t even have cameras. And the only photos that they have of themselves is their government issued identification. They have children, but unlike North Americans who have entire libraries of their children’s photos, these people don’t have a single photo. Things were quickly brought into perspective. My girlfriend could afford to go back and visit, even on my menial writer’s wage and her administrative assistant salary, salaries that were 25 times that of the average Cuban. We didn’t need photos, we had our wonderful memories. And though photos are a lovely memento, they can never replace the real experience. Losing photos on a card is just another first world problem!