Category Archives: Travel

Flying the Fat Skies

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Dearest fellow travelers, let’s get uncomfortable. Not oops-I-mispronounced-your-name uncomfortable or we’re-both-trying-to-go-the-same-direction-from-opposite-directions-and-keep-walking-into-each-other uncomfortable. No, I’m talking about roll-your-eyes, let-out-a-long-sigh, grumble-loudly-about-the-inconsideration-of-SOME-PEOPLE uncomfortable.

I refer, naturally, to the discomfort a thin person feels when seated next to a fat person on an airplane. The encroachment of sweaty, flabby, smelly flesh on your space, which you paid a damned good portion of your paycheck for, thankyouverymuch.

Oh wait. No, I’m not. Your discomfort sure is too bad, but it is by no means the only discomfort experienced in that situation. As the sweaty, flabby, smelly lump of flesh oozing into your seat, I can promise that you are not the only uncomfortable one here.

When I’m in an airplane seat, I am squeezed in on all sides — by the small seats that barely contain people with bikini-model bodies, let alone anyone else; by the low overhead compartment that I invariably bump into when standing up/sitting down as I try to fold up my tall 5’10” frame to fit; by the fully extended seat in front of me bruising my knees with every readjustment; and by the endless succession of passengers lurching down the aisle into my head on their way to the can and flight attendants rattling drink carts into my elbow. These are all complaints that everyone who has ever boarded an airplane has voiced (except for maybe the tall stuff — that just adds to it).

Now add to that the claustrophobia of total disapproval and condemnation. The resentful glances every time you shift in your seat, the looks of contempt every time you dare put food in your mouth, the pinched face of the flight attendant as she holds out a seatbelt extender at arm’s length. In daily life, but especially in the cramped confines of an airplane, I’m crowded in by people’s disapproval of my own body and the way I inhabit that body. Not only am I a walking moral failure, too weak to resist overeating, but other people have to see that, and that’s just offensive. On top of which, people seem to think that if they get too close, if they physically touch me, they’ll catch my fat. It sure isn’t my job to disabuse people of these totally false notions, and I’m quite content with the body I have and the way I live in it, but that isn’t a comfort when I’m hemmed in by judgment and I just want to get to my destination in peace.

Of course, not everyone is so unpleasant. A couple years ago, I sat next to a petite college-aged woman who was able to curl up in her seat and rest her head against the window. She was fine with me moving the arm rest up, and didn’t glance over with disgust when I ate the unappetizing meal of limp chicken and rice. She didn’t care what I did, so long as she could sleep for the eight-hour flight. Last year, a flight attendant held out a seatbelt extender to me with an apologetic look and said, “Oh these are old PanAm planes, and their belts are shorter.” Condescending, sure, but sweet. The remarkable thing about these women — and I shouldn’t have to remark on it at all — is that they simply treated me as another human being. I got no special treatment, just the simple courtesy you afford others when you’re all packed in like sardines and eager for a smooth journey. I don’t see why that should be so hard for people to do.

I’m going on a plane on Wednesday, and I’m not looking forward to it. I’m flying United, which last year joined Southwest as one of the major airlines that is very public about its anti-fat people policy. They received a whole 700 complaints from people who felt infringed upon by their fat neighbors (I’m guessing their fat neighbors number far more than 700). I gotta say, I feel pretty infringed upon by this policy, which states that if a flight attendant finds a passenger too large (unable to put the arm rests down “comfortably”), that passenger will be asked to buy another seat, buy a seat in first class, or if those aren’t options, get off the damn plane they’re already on and wait for another flight that has one of those options available. This policy has been covered in a lot of fat acceptance blogs, but I’ll just add to the chorus of “oh no you didn’t”; everyone is uncomfortable on a plane, nobody can afford two seats, and making the decision up to the whim of a harried flight attendant is icing on this particularly tasteless cake. Not to mention, as that Shapely Prose post details, it’s all one-sided; if those 700 people who wrote United are so upset about their comfort level, how about THEY buy the extra seat or first class ticket?

In anticipation of my impending flight, I bought a seat extender in the hopes that I could avoid the nasty looks of other passengers and the very real possibility of a humiliating encounter with a flight attendant who finds my substantial hips to be a “safety issue.” (I promise you, if the plane crashes, I will be moving off it plenty fast enough.) I spent $55 on this precaution, and then asked my friend T. to embroider my name on the extender so TSA agents and flight attendants won’t accuse me of stealing theirs. Isn’t it pretty?

my embroidered seatbelt extender -- thanks, T!

But for all that, it might not work. I might be delayed by more than a day as I wait for a flight that has two free spots, I might drain my checking account to pay for those two spots, I might miss my cousin’s confirmation (which is the main purpose of my visit to England), or any number of things could go wrong. I shelled out an extra $55 just in case my body might cause someone else to freak out, because their freak-out could very easily turn into my punishment in the form of humiliation, inconvenience, and a huge outlay of even more money. Flying is a stressful enough activity without adding these worries, and I shouldn’t have to consider them when booking a flight.

I think it’s clear to anyone reading this blog that travel means a great deal to me. It’s a freeing feeling to soar above the clouds in a giant metal bird, but lately I’ve been feeling more and more constricted by airline rules, passenger comments, and the attendant anxiety, to the point that I hesitate before booking a flight, and I find that terribly sad. I strongly encourage you to read Kate Harding’s piece in Broadsheet last week about the Kevin Smith/Southwest debacle, and bring a Kleenex, because she gets personal and very moving. She gets to the heart of why these airline policies are wrong, and why people who argue in favor of them are heartless.

For those who think the policies are reasonable and fat people need to pay for the sin of inhabiting their own bodies, just remember that however uncomfortable you may be with that mound of flesh next to you oozing into your seat, that mound of flesh is working every day to maintain a sense of dignity in a world that reduces her to just such a characterization. I am constantly re-humanizing myself in a society that doggedly works to forget how human I am, and I promise it doesn’t get much more uncomfortable than that.

Book Report: Australia

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Greetings, dearest fellow travelers! How’s your winter wanderlust? Mine usually gets extra-itchy when it’s icy and cold outside, so it’s a good thing I have a big trip planned at the end of this month. In the meantime, I can get my fix by researching future travels.

Today: thoughts on Stuart Macintyre’s A Concise History of Australia, through the first few chapters.

I’m really enjoying the Macintyre history, although his discussion of the “females” is a bit grating. Still, it’s early days yet. What I am finding interesting though, and what I hope to write more about in the future, is what the national narrative is for Australia. What stories do Australians tell about themselves? Who are their heroes, their folktales and popular myths, their national qualities and values? I’m especially interested in the ways the Australian narrative intersects with and diverges from the American narrative.

We have a really strong story of brave pioneers setting up a new country of religious freedom and self-governing independence; we gloss over some messy relations with the people who were already quite comfortable living here, thankyouverymuch, and now they get to be our friends in grade school Thanksgiving plays; and we have a big war full of homegrown heroes who thought up a new way to run a country that no one had ever tried before. In reality, of course, the Puritans who came over here were religious zealots who wanted to use this new land to make their religion the only way to live (and make money while doing it), and anyone who didn’t agree was literally cast out into the wilderness; there were many nations of Native Americans living here who responded to the invaders in various ways, including with violent resistance, treaties, assimilation, and appeasement, and the colonial settlements were by no means an inevitable or righteous undertaking; and the Founding Fathers (oof, loaded term!), who were vocal in their callbacks to Greek democracy when declaring independence from Britain, were slaveowners who needed the French to bail them out.

So that’s the American origins narrative; what’s the Australian narrative? I’m getting a sense of it from this Macintyre book, but it’s a very different thing when the invaders are convicts explicitly exiled from their homeland and ordered to work off their sentence for the good of the country they wronged. (Imagine my surprise when I found out that there was actually quite a bit of this going on in New England, and the American Revolution is what put an end to that and forced the British government to consider Australia as a dumping ground for convicts!) Here, the hardy pioneer is just as important as he (yes, always he) was in the American story, but there are two extra elements — the Australian landscape was wholly, harshly different from the English one, and the Australian pioneers were mainly made up of  subjects of the British crown who had been deemed unworthy of being full citizens of that crown. They were expected to settle this new continent for the benefit of a government and upper class citizenry that took their free labor and gave them tiny amounts of unfarmable land in return. I imagine that involves some bitterness and resentment, and I wonder how that works in the Australian story.

Which doesn’t even touch on the bitterness and resentment of Aborigines, who were of course on the continent for over 40,000 years before the British showed up and said, “This looks like a nice vacation spot.” I know there’s a lot of similarities between the British treatment of Aborigines and the British/American treatment of Native Americans — land theft, broken treaties, raped women, stolen children, forced resettlements. It’s interesting, and depressing, to see what those similarities are. Despite the fairly rapid British takeover of the Eastern part of the continent, the Aborigines didn’t just give up their land and way of life, as seen in the story of Pemulwuy, an Aboriginal man known as the Rainbow Warrior for his work uniting various Aboriginal peoples. He organized various groups of Aborigines (the term “tribe” is no longer in use, I’ve learned) to resist the British settlements, and was the first to show the British that the Aborigines weren’t going to take the invasion without a fight. He was killed in battle and his son carried on the fight. His name is left out of the definitive Australian Dictionary of Biography, since as late as the 1960s, Aborigines were considered by the dominant white class to only get in the way of the progress of the country and thus didn’t merit mention in the history books. Happily, he is now recognized as a rebel hero, and his name is getting more recognition in mainstream (yes, white) Australia.

Research update: I’m barely into the 1800s in this Macintyre book, and I have yet to read some fiction or Aborigine dreamwalking tales, but those are next. Also, the food and music, yes. I’m fairly up to date on films; I’ve seen The Piano, Muriel’s Wedding, Mad Max, The Road Warrior, Strictly Ballroom, and now Love Serenade.

My schedule for the next few weeks involves hosting a couchsurfer, hosting my sisters, and going to England for 12 days. Let’s just say Australia is a freakin’ continent and not just a country, and therefore gets two months. I’ll try to finish up what I can before my England trip, and then when I’m back in March we can talk New Zealand.

A Biblio’s Struggle

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I am currently fighting with the Chicago Public Library, since I can’t get to several books I have on hold, including a history of Australia that I’m anxious to start on. Which is not to say I’ve been slacking, dearest fellow travelers. I’m reading Art in Australia and listening to The Rough Guide to Australian Aboriginal Music, and Love Serenade just showed up from Netflix. But since the Logan Square branch, which is holding some materials hostage, has apparently changed their operating hours, I haven’t had a chance to get some other things. Never fear, I’m on it. My lovely roommate D. may get a chance to retrieve them tonight, which’d be great.

Updates on my Australian research to come!

P.S. Did you know that Tuesday was Australia Day? January 26 is like a combination of July 4th and Columbus Day — it’s the national celebration of Captain Cook’s arrival in Botany Bay. The Columbus Day angle comes into play as this is, of course, a European-based celebration of the English settlement of an already-occupied land. Some people refer to January 26 as the Aboriginal Day of Mourning, Invasion Day, and even Survival Day.

ETA: Lies! It’s the national celebration of the arrival of the First Fleet, the convicts sent over from England as punishment. Cook showed up many years before. Shoddy research; my apologies.

Research: Australia

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I am busily collecting various resources on the nation of Australia, as I imagine a queen bee gathers her various worker bees to her to construct a single grand colony (before mating with many of them and depositing the eggs of the next generation, but that doesn’t really work in the metaphor). My research skills are poor, as I may have mentioned, and they mostly involve Google, Wikipedia, Lonely Planet, and the Chicago Public Library’s website. Still, I’ve found some materials that I’m actually able to get my hands on in the next week or so, and these will be the basis for my research in the first country to come up in the Country a Month challenge I’ve set myself. FEEL FREE to add more suggestions in the comments; I can use any help you have to offer.

Books (nonfiction): I’m hoping this will provide historical perspective on various peoples in the country, before, during, and after colonization.

A traveller’s history of Australia by John H. Chambers
Telling stories: indigenous history and memory in Australia and New Zealand edited by Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan
Art in Australia : from colonization to postmodernism by Christopher Allen
In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson

Books (fiction): I won’t have time to read all of these, so I’ll pick one and go with that. Suggestions?

Eucalyptus by Murray Bail
The Tree of Man by Patrick White (Nobel Prize winner)
My Brother Jack by George Johnston
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara

Movies: These are quite the mix, and I’ve seen quite a few already, but I think it’s a good cross-section of the historical, the comedic, the present, the tragic, and even the future that Australia has seen and envisions for itself. I’ll watch at least one of these by the end of the month and report back.

The Piano
Australia
The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
Crocodile Dundee
Jindabyne
Mad Max
Muriel’s Wedding
Rabbit-Proof Fence
Ned Kelly
The Man Who Sued God
The Proposition
Strictly Ballroom

Music: The Rough Guide to Australian Aboriginal Music (compilation)

There’s so much more! Australia has obviously been a major player in the English-speaking pop/rock world, and I intend to form a playlist of some of the bands I might want to know about before visiting the country. But it’s also good to see what doesn’t make the Top 40 charts, the kind of music that sustained communities for generations before iPods were even dreamed about.

What else am I missing? Other than the Vegemite sandwich K. mentioned in my last post (eek).

Have another moment of adorableness, courtesy of a baby kangaroo:

sometimes cute is necessary

Have a great week!

Ready, Set, Challenge!

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Happy new year and welcome back! The decorations are packed away and the champagne is drained to the last drop, so now what? We’re back in a full week of work, it’s bitterly cold outside, and right about now is when people start making grand resolutions for vast personal makeovers in an effort to transcend the gloomy post-holiday feeling and regain a sense of specialness about themselves and the lives they’ve chosen. I’m plenty special already and very content with the life I’ve made for myself, so you won’t see me setting huge, unattainable goals this year. (I’m going to wear a bikini by Memorial Day! I’m going to have my first novel published by Flag Day! I’m going to be CEO of my company by Halloween! I’m going to be committed for maniacal overreaching by Thanksgiving!)

However, I do have this one huge goal that I’ve been working toward financially for years now (you are all well aware of the Giant Personal Voyage That Shall Never Be Called a Personal Voyage to which I refer). Financially, but not really in any other tangible way. I’m shockingly ignorant about most of the places I’m so excited to visit, and three years out is about time to remedy that.

So, dearest fellow travelers, please join me as I embark on the Country a Month Challenge. (It’s either totally passe or way trendy to be setting blog challenges, I don’t even know which, but whatevs, go with me here.) I’m going to research one country a month from here until you tell me to stop or I take off on my trip, whichever comes first. Of course I won’t attempt to become an expert on anything, but I will try to get a bit more knowledge than the small amount that constitutes danger. I’ll read up on the history, culture, and current events of the country. I’ll also watch a movie and read a work of fiction from artists of that country. Finally, I’ll make a dish native to the country (or seek out a tasty restaurant that specializes in such a dish) and enjoy it with friends (I’ll need the help of T and K, gourmands, for this part).

Oh and one last note: I’ll approach each country in approximately the order I intend to visit, so we’re starting with Australia for the month of January. February is New Zealand, March is Indonesia, and so on.

I’ll report back here with what I find out. I’m not sure what form all this will take, exactly; I don’t want to write up book reports for you to use as sleep aids, but I also don’t want to pass through each country too quickly or superficially with guidebook-style wit. I’ll probably post a little more often than the once a week I’ve been doing, especially as I’ll want to occasionally alternate to posts on other topics, but we’ll see how that goes.

Any ideas on what you’d like to see in this space for this project? Any ideas on ways to approach it? Any ideas on media I should look to for researching Australia?

What up

The Travails of Holiday Travel

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Dearest fellow travelers, in the next week many of you will be literal travelers, bundling up against the winter cold (or winter heat, as the case may be *cough*Tucson*cough*) and wending your way to a loved one’s home for the holidays. Right around now, in addition to the panicked press releases-glossed-into-news-articles about how we as a nation are not spending enough money on blood diamonds and plastic toys produced in sweatshops to keep this troubled economy afloat, AAA sends out handy guides to the travel habits of Americans during this busy month of holiday cheer. This year, Thanksgiving travel was up, as people were feeling slightly more optimistic about the economy turning around, and a little more willing to spend on gas money or air fare. Early estimates are that Christmas will show a similar trend.

How are you traveling? By car, by train, by plane? Are you traveling on your own or with friends? Will you be in an airport for hours or are you a hop, skip, and a jump from home? And most importantly, how on earth do you survive the journey?

Oh the weather outside is frightful... (image from http://www.ehow.com/how_2183752_survive-winter-storm.html)

Many people wax poetic about the romance of the journey itself — it’s more important than the destination, etc., etc. But really, who are they kidding? The journey as its own highlight is true of some sorts of travel, but when you’re just trying to squeeze in as much family time as possible on your last remaining vacation days off of work, the trip is a trial to be endured.

Travel by car: sudden blizzards or freak fog attacks;  miles of tail lights inching their way along the interstate like an ominous red caterpillar; ten bathroom breaks in a 100-mile stretch because you said “yes” when they asked if you wanted to upgrade to a double extra large for just 25 cents more; hours of silence and intermittent static as you search desperately for a radio station that won’t tell you how to get right with God for the low, low price of $20 a month; and the creeping sensation that you are driving in a Twilight Zone that makes you more tired, the trip more lengthy, and the road more icy with every passing minute.

Travel by air: hours staring glassy-eyed at the CNN news ticker in the terminal while clutching your carry-on close, lest a bored security guard declare that luggage suspect and delay your flight even more in order to call in the SWAT team to search it; airplane seats slightly larger than the womb you were grown in and not nearly as comfortable; kids shrieking in an off-key rehearsal for a banshee reunion in the row behind you; an in-flight entertainment choice between a movie about an MPDG saving a young man from his post-collegiate malaise and a frigid middle-aged woman discovering love via consumerist makeover and lowered standards; and after it all, mounting anxiety at the baggage carousel as you realize that the gaping yaw before you is only spitting out luggage from PanAm flights of the ’80s and your suitcase is somewhere over the Pacific with Amelia Earhart.

Almost makes you want to buy out the canned goods section of your grocery store and spend the next couple months at home, doesn’t it?

Probably the worst holiday-related trip I’ve been on was when I was about 8 years old. My mom’s brother was getting married in England on December 28th, and we thought we’d fly on the 25th, have the plane pretty much to ourselves, and show up for late presents at my grandparents’ house. Instead, we found a plane packed with people on their way to India who were taking advantage of the same supposedly low-travel day we were. As soon as the plane was in the air, I was screaming with pain — my ears were clogged up and I couldn’t seem to pop them. The twins were fighting with each other, and we were all exhausted from services the night before and waking up too early to open stockings and presents. My poor parents must have been completely miserable. One of the flight attendants, who wore a Santa hat and a tie with a blinking Rudolph nose, noticed their plight. He brought me a hot water bottle to ease the earache, and he brought my mom a bottle of champagne. I still hurt for the rest of the eight-hour flight, and my parents didn’t catch up on any sleep, but that man made the worst plane ride of our family’s collective existence about ten times more bearable. Wherever you are, I wish you a lifetime of smooth flights and grateful passengers, good sir.

So how about you? Let’s get it all out before we have to do the dreaded deed itself. What are your worst holiday travel horror stories? What are your best? Got any blinking Rudolph tie angels to celebrate? Comments ahoy!

an angel in the skies

Surf’s Up

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Everybody knows the basic advice: Don’t go out in the cold without a hat and mittens. Don’t swim right after eating. And don’t sleep with strangers. Generally that’s all pretty sound, but I suggest we reconsider the last one. Now before you think this blog is about to turn into something it’s not, dearest fellow travelers, let me reassure you I’m talking about sharing someone’s home while on the road — couch surfing.

the map on my wall showing where all my couch surfers are from

The idea behind surfing is that you get to know a place much better from seeing it through the eyes of locals than you do from staying in hotels and sticking to your guidebooks, and that everyone benefits from cultural exchange and sharing a meal. It’s free to sign up for and use CouchSurfing.org, but I must emphasize that this is not a site to visit if you are just looking for a free place to stay. Obviously, we all prefer cheap options, but you are inviting yourself into someone’s home, not crashing on your friend’s friend’s dorm room floor.

And now, for the Safety Talk. Most everyone I talk to about couch surfing says, “But how do you know it’s safe?!” Well, you can’t know for sure, any more than you can know most things for sure. However, the organizers of the site put in several safeguards — there’s a vouching system, in which only people who have met surfers in person can vouch for them, and on your profile page, other surfers can leave recommendations or bad reviews for all other surfers to see. You can verify that you are who you say you are by using the verification process; you fill out your address on the site, they send you a postcard to that address, and you mail it back to them, confirming that you live where you say you live. Finally, you use your own good judgment. You’re not signing a contract when you agree to host or request to surf, and your safety is paramount, so if you arrive at your host’s house and get a bad vibe, or your surfer shows up three sheets to the wind, by all means arrange alternate plans.

I’ve hosted about a dozen times, and almost all of those times were really great. I’ve met people from Albuquerque, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, Minneapolis, England, and Germany, and we’ve spent long nights over bottles of wine and bowls of pasta, chatting about our lives and our homes. I like being able to properly host my surfers. I like to show them some favorite restaurants and music venues, and one day I even did totally touristy stuff like pose by Buckingham Fountain, go to a festival in Grant Park, and stand in line for the Sears Tower.

Couch surfers, as you can imagine, tend to be open-minded folks, laid back, and pretty young. Sometimes I feel very old as I watch people barely out of their teens showing worldly bravura, when really, they’ve still seen and experienced so little. But we all have to start somewhere, don’t we?

I’ve surfed just once so far, with my sister E, in Munich. Our host was fantastic; she made us dinner one night and took us out to a beer hall another night, and she took us to many major tourist sites and negotiated all the German for us. She’s a really interesting person, a surgeon who uses all her time off to do extreme adventuring like dogsledding in the Yukon or horseback riding across the Rockies. We spent hours talking about balancing work and play, living on your own, and American/German differences. Before we surfed with N, I was signed up on CouchSurfing but unsure if I would feel comfortable hosting, but after staying with N, I knew for certain that I wanted to be someone providing this kind of experience — this kind of friendliness and curiosity — to people from all over the world.

In short, if you couch surf, you may end up like this:

E dressed in N's traditional Munich leder hosen, on our very first CouchSurfing adventure

UPDATE: There is video. Oh yes, there is video. For some reason, it’s on its side, but here it is. Please note that we were playing Tom Jones’s “Sex Bomb” in the background for this fashion show. Cultural exchange, what!

Urge for Going

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“I get the urge for going
When the meadow grass is turning brown
Summertime is falling down and winter is closing in”

— “Urge for Going” by Joni Mitchell

Autumn in northern Michigan

Is anyone else feeling the pull of wanderlust this week? I never consciously think of fall as a season for travel; I associate summer with travel because of summer vacations past. But every time I hear Joni Mitchell’s “Urge for Going” I am overcome with a need to shuffle out of town with the rustling leaves. Joni captures so perfectly the melancholy of autumn. She strains to break free of it by up and leaving, physically moving away from lost loves, lost seasons, lost moments, but she also revels in it the way a small child jumps into a pile of leaves, knowing the damp rot is a necessary accompaniment to the sweet smell and ticklish embrace of the swept-up pieces of red and brown.

Autumn is my favorite season, and this year more than any other I’ve heard a lot of people saying the same thing. I think part of that has to do with this particular year for weather, since we had such an abbreviated summer that any sunny and mildly warm day in the fall is greeted with great enthusiasm. But there’s also the excitement of change, the sense that whatever pattern we lulled ourselves into in the heavy heat of summer can now be broken free of. Fall is when school starts up again, which of course was set to coincide with the harvest schedule on farms, so the growing season ends as the learning season starts. I like that we still follow this schedule, even though so many of us are completely removed from the seasonal rhythms of farms, because it recognizes the cyclical nature of the year–one thing ends, another begins, and both are cause for celebration. Even as we’re breaking free of some comfortable summer pattern, it’s not that that pattern was wrong or undesirable. It’s just that its time has come and gone, and now it’s time for another pattern or set of activities.

Ask anyone in my family and they’ll tell you what a hard time I have with change, especially with traditions. One year, my British grandparents were in town for Christmas, and the flurry of activity surrounding their visit somehow didn’t include decorating the tree. No one else was bothered, but the idea of having a Christmas without this part being the same as it was every other year made me want to cry. Finally, it was Christmas Eve, and I was about ready to bury myself in the snow rather than look at that unadorned tree any longer, so between the two church services, we pulled up the heavy wooden box from the basement and hung ornaments until that tree shone. I still get teased for that one.

The Findley Family Christmas Tree, circa 2005

Which is to say that accepting change as a natural and beautiful part of life has not been easy for me. I like making lists, I like things in order, I like knowing where I stand at all times. But autumn is a great reminder that this simply isn’t sustainable. Trees that just days before were full of green life are now thinned with yellow, and soon enough they’ll be waving their bare branches at the sky. If I spend all my time mourning those green leaves, I’ll miss the joy of the yellow ones, and even the stark beauty of the spindly brown branches. Metaphors aside, it’s true in my life as well; I was heartbroken to not marry T, but I became a more interesting person who I’m happy to spend time with because of it. I thought my first job was necessary for my career and didn’t want to leave for the opportunities I thought I’d miss if I did, but when I left I moved to the city and found a good group of friends and a sane job that were more important than succeeding in a dying industry.

I’m not saying everything happens for a reason. I can’t believe that and look at the daily tragedies so many people have to endure. And Zeus strike me down if I sound like a self-help book. But I do think that many changes that I used to fear–probably even the ones I still fear–can yield surprising results. They’re not always even better results, but just as my shadow grows longer with the lengthening of the nights, they are different; change of some sort is as inevitable as summer turning into fall. This is why autumn is my favorite season. I’m reminded every year that the world is in a state of constant flux, and there’s beauty to be found in all those changes.

Of course, those changes do awaken my wanderlust, previously lying sleepy in the long, sunny days of summer. As I walk around Humboldt Park on a crisp afternoon or mix up a cup of cocoa in the evening, part of me is appreciating the sights and sounds of Chicago this time of year, and part of me is wondering what it feels like in Morocco right now. Here’s a change my teenage self would never have believed possible: I can be perfectly content where I am and still long impossibly to be a thousand miles away. For now, like Joni, I “get the urge for going, but I never seem to go,” but you and I both know that soon enough, that too will change.

Guest Post — Tourist/Non-Tourist

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Dearest fellow travelers, it gives me great pleasure to introduce a guest post from Sessily Watt, a good friend and fellow K alum. A few weeks ago, she and I were discussing the comments on the Great Expectations post, and about what it means to live in a different country rather than simply visit it for a short time. Sessily is a writer living in Chicago, and her post reflects on her time spent living in Ecuador in 2005. Enjoy!

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We were standing on a sidewalk between several medical buildings, in the middle of a tour of a small hospital in Ecuador, when the woman approached us. (Or maybe she was our guide through the buildings, and it was at this point that she asked us about who we were. Time has passed. The memories have shifted.) After a flurry of conversation she was under the impression that some or all of us were medical students, and offered for us to come and observe a birth that was happening at that very moment. She led us back through the buildings to the doorway to the delivery room, where it became clear that observing a birth meant all ten of us (nine students and one of our program directors) crowding into the delivery room and its doorway. Four of us had already felt uncomfortable as we approached the room, and our discomfort increased. We waited a moment, but it was soon clear the rest were planning to stay and watch, so we left them there, walked out of the building, through the waiting area where the pregnant woman’s family was waiting, out the front door to a set of benches in front of the building. We sat down.

Out on the benches, we were split again by the cause of our discomfort. Two, male, were personally uncomfortable with watching a woman give birth. Two, female, were uncomfortable that we had been welcomed into that room without permission being asked or granted from the woman who was lying on that table with her legs spread. Our fellow students were back in that room, with their cameras out. We waited.

The nine of us had been together in Ecuador for five months at this point. One of our program directors, who was with us that day, had led us on three previous trips as a group. We had already passed through that stretch of time where we got on each other’s nerves, and now we were a more or less cohesive group. The people who chose to stay in that delivery room and watch the birth were (and are) perfectly nice, lovely people. I enjoyed traveling with them. But I judged them for staying in that room.

Traveling, especially as a tourist to another country, can lead to a sense of entitlement to see anything and everything. In my opinion, the people who stayed in that room were acting out that entitlement. They weren’t medical students. Their presence served no purpose for the woman lying on the table. They were simply there to see what it was like. (In the case of at least two people, who have since gone on to medical school, I can see how this experience was edifying. And, who knows, maybe in some way it will prompt them into actions that improve the delivery of medicine, etc etc, but those benefits move us further and further away from that woman on the table who was not helped by them and who did not give her consent for them to be there.)

A study abroad program like the one in Ecuador is designed to encourage students to take part in society as if they aren’t tourists: we lived with host families, attended an Ecuadorian university, and ended the program with an internship/volunteer position in an Ecuadorian organization. One would hope these experiences would lessen that feeling of entitlement to see everything. To a certain extent, we lived in Ecuador for six and a half months, rather than traveling there. Especially during my last month in the country, volunteering at an organization where I worked with Ecuadorians, Germans, and French, I felt like I had found a niche for myself. I woke up in the morning, rode the bus for eight stops, picked up a copy of El Comercio from the newsstand, and walked three blocks to the corner building where the organization had a series of rooms on the second floor. Sometimes I went to lunch with my coworkers, sometimes I walked to a sandwich place that was nearby. My coworkers and I tutored kids in the afternoon. Some afternoons I was bored, others I was outraged, or sad, or content. In the evening, I visited with my host family for a little while before I went to bed. Some nights I went out. By living in Ecuador I learned that I enjoy large cities, can’t imagine living without public transportation (though I grew up in a small town without it), and when I’ve moved to a new place I feel anxious about leaving home until I get out and walk around, take a bus or two, and maybe get lost. Without living in Ecuador, I may never have considered moving to Chicago.

La Casa Amigos, where I volunteered during my last month in Ecuador

But no matter how well designed, a study abroad program couldn’t make us Ecuadorian, and the trappings and support of the program at times increased the feeling of being a tourist. When we went on the program-designed trips, we traveled in our own bus, a little bubble of pirated American movies and Seinfeld episodes. There were always nine of us to compare to all of them, emphasizing our differences. Like any other tourist, we were there to see the country, to experience those cultural differences we heard about in our pre-trip lectures. Perhaps even to “broaden our horizons.” Yes, there are real benefits to exposing ourselves to differences–not to mention that it can be a lot of fun–but that focus on cultural differences, in combination with other factors, leads to forgetting that those people aren’t there to open themselves up for us to examine.

the bus we traveled around in for our program trips

Every traveler has a different line they draw in how far they will go to experience it all. The other students in my program didn’t feel uncomfortable with their experience in the delivery room. The doctors were fine with their presence. The woman supposedly thanked them after it was all done (cynically, I ask, “Did she even know why they were there?”). As a very private person, I imagine that my line comes much earlier than others. By not staying in that room, I may have missed out on an amazing experience. I’m willing to imagine there are other instances where, if I had been willing to press a little harder, to dig in a little more, I might have had other theoretically amazing experiences. But.

I traveled by myself once while I was in Ecuador, right at the end of my time there. Throughout that trip, I often felt different from the people I was with, and like I didn’t belong. But it was during that trip I felt the least like a tourist. I wasn’t there to see the sites. I wasn’t there to see what life was like in this coastal city. I was there to visit a specific person, because I thought I would regret it if I didn’t visit her. It was in those moments when I was living my life and just happened to be in a country different from the one I grew up in–traveling by myself, volunteering–that I felt like I had the clearest glimpses of Ecuador.

Great Expectations

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And now, dearest fellow travelers, for the flip side of the coin. Last week I talked about how great it is when you go somewhere new and it’s better than expected. I didn’t mean that I go to new places not expecting to like them, but that I sometimes have to overcome some preconceptions to really appreciate them. Also, when you’re visiting a city for the first time, it’s hardly unusual to feel some trepidation at what you might find there, and the nervousness mixes up with the excitement until you have a little knot of energy in your stomach, making you kind of nauseated and kind of buzzed at the same time.

At least, this is what I experience when I’m visiting a new place, and I feel this regardless of whether I’m visiting for a few days or staying for several months. When I physically approach a place that I’ve previously only known through pictures, guidebooks, and secondhand stories, my whole body vibrates with the sensation of moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar and also from the unfamiliar to the familiar — from my home to a new place, but also from not being personally connected to this place to being bodily in and of it. I love that feeling of being on the edge of knowing the unknowable, of reaching out to touch the as-yet-nonexistent with your fingertips, crossing over from plans of the future to realities of the present. This is one of the biggest thrills of travel, and I have yet to tire of it.

Some people, however, freak out at the whole idea. My junior year of college, I lived in Rome for 5 months and studied classical history, archeology, and Renaissance art. I approached those months with a jumble of feelings, but the overriding emotion was excitement. I couldn’t believe I was living in this place, which was simultaneously a living monument to history and a bustling modern city. My roommates, on the other hand, couldn’t believe they were living in this dirty, noisy, badly run city, and they commented on it almost daily.

The Pantheon in Rome, Italy

K College has several very good study abroad programs, but Rome is not one of them. They don’t run it; it’s farmed out to the American University in Rome, which is kept busy bringing in students from a lot of different schools. The 16 of us from K got lost in the shuffle — we lived with each other in small apartments, we didn’t speak any Italian, and we had no class trips or on-site director (unlike programs in most other countries). So we weren’t a cohesive unit by any means, but still, we were all there because we were in the Classics department back home, so that was a kind of place to start.

But it was apparent in the first week alone that I had a very different idea about living in Rome than my roommates did. The five of us weren’t friends before living together, and I don’t think any of us went home very close, so on top of the stress of starting a new school and living in a new country thousands of miles from home, we all added the stress of living in close quarters with virtual strangers. At first, it was like freshman year all over again; we’d go places in groups with the other K kids, who were rooming together in various combinations, and we’d stay up late talking and drinking cheap wine (the difference from freshman year — cheap here meant literally one or two euros). Conversation ranged from the people we’d left behind to the professors and students we were just coming to know, from assignments on ancient sculptures to how to ask for chicken at the supermarket. But somehow conversation always morphed into complaints. I was astonished to learn that my roommates and fellow students of the arts thought Rome was a pit.

They complained about how dirty it was, with graffiti all along the walls of the city and dog poop up and down its sidewalks. They whined about how noisy it was, with nonstop traffic (we lived just up the street from a hospital and became very familiar with the yowl of the Italian ambulance) and inefficient buses. And the buses! Don’t get them started on the buses. They were never on time, they didn’t seem to follow any reliable route, and you practically had to flag them down like a taxi just to get a ride. The people were unfriendly, the clothes were expensive, the streets were labyrinthine, the monuments were rundown, the food wasn’t as good as the Italian places back home… It went on and on and on.

I discovered potato and rosemary pizza when in Rome, and I'm a better person for it (doesn't seem to actually be pictured here, but these Roman style pizzas are also as good as they look)

Why on earth did they go to Rome in the first place? I’m still not entirely sure on that one. When I asked them, they said they wanted to go on study abroad like the rest of our school did, and they thought Rome would be cooler than it turned out to be. Each of them admitted to not really enjoying cities. Did they think Rome was a small, quaint town? It’s been a massive city teeming with life for literally thousands of years.

It seems that their expectations for Rome weren’t founded in fact or forethought, but rather in a vague idea of European cosmopolitanism and romantic stories of blissful honeymoons. This is the key — plan ahead! Now, before you accuse me of being a list maker and not a risk taker, let me say that yes, I tend towards that way, and it does irk me (but that’s a topic for another post). What I mean is that even if you don’t like to laminate an itinerary before heading out on your travels, you should at least do some preliminary research so you have a basic understanding of the place you’re going and the people who live there. I love hearing stories from fellow travelers, but I am always aware that we’re different people with different tastes, and their idea of fun people or good food is possibly not at all the same as mine. I’ll note down the restaurant and sightseeing recommendations and keep them in mind as possibilities, but not must-sees. Guidebooks, too, are written by people with individual tastes, budgets, and travel companions, but at least I can get an idea of the lay of the land and its history. From these, too, I get possibilities. Guidebooks, friends, blog posts, travel sites, library books, maps — I gather it all up and sort through it for my own interests, then head out to the unknown with at least these knowns in reserve.

I do think that you can have a different approach here for simply visiting a place for a few days. When P and I went to Memphis, we knew we were going to Graceland but we didn’t know anything about Beale Street, and we ended up at an all-ages bar watching a riotous rockabilly act. It was even more fun for being something I didn’t know ahead of time, and then we moved on. But if you’re going to be living in a place for more than a couple weeks, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t prepare yourself as best you can for the customs and people of the place you’ll be living.

This is not to say that I adjusted perfectly well and knew all about every Italian custom before moving there — not at all. In fact, the negativity of my roommates really affected me and I found myself in a weekslong funk, simultaneously resenting every nuance in culture between Italy and the States as well as my roommates for pointing out those nuances every damn day. But I did get out of that funk, and managed to make the best of a bad living situation, and it was actually thanks to those very same roommates.

The Italians take siesta, as do all Mediterranean countries, and in Rome, any time between 1 and 4, shops, offices, and restaurants close for a couple hours as all the workers take a nap from the midday sun. It’s a surreal experience, as an American, to walk down an empty street at 2 in the afternoon, passing shuttered shop after shuttered shop. And then at 4 or 5 they’re all back open for business for another couple hours. My roommates complained about this custom; when were they going to go to the grocery store? What if they got hungry? When were they going to buy school supplies? Why did the whole city have to shut down?

I fell into siesta quite easily; what is there to dislike about citywide naptime? The day I realized I could reclaim my own expectations of living in Rome and reject these false ones my roommates had, it was about 1:30pm and I heard the complaints drifting in from the living room as I climbed into bed. I pulled the covers over my head and thought, “Damn, if there is any time for this phrase, it is now: WHEN IN ROME. Good night!”

an approximation of my cot bed in Rome

P.S. Get excited! Comments on last week’s post about the difference between visiting a place and living there inspired this post, and also a forthcoming guest post from my friend S. Witness the power of your I’m-procrastinating-at-work-so-I’ll-comment-on-Lisa’s-blog energies!