Suddenly you are five years old again…
Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you only have the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
–Bill Bryson
My current reading is Vagabonding by Rolf Potts. It’s a fantastic book about long-term world travel, more about shedding your possessions and really experiencing the world than just how to do it cheaply. It’s been ages since I wanted to sightsee, and years ago I spent a month in England with the predefined purposing of getting a taste of my friends’ lives. I told them I wasn’t interested in sightseeing (I’d seen everything in London years before), and they took it in stride. The only thing I couldn’t do was go to work with them - otherwise I went with them to their theatre rehearsals, long walks in the countryside and repeated evenings in the same local pub.
My most treasured memories of that trip was staying in Scunthorpe, a town about an hour and a half from the Scottish border. It’s not a place where tourists go. There’s nothing to see, in terms of traditional sightseeing. But it was a wonderful time because of my friend, Tom Foley (we’ve lost touch and I hope he Googles his name sometime) and his family. They were Irish, and the most warm and welcoming family I’ve ever experienced outside my own. Tom worked part-time and I’d tag along with his Mum to the store or read.
One day she took me visit her mother, who was Algerian and resolutely anti-feminist. She insisted that men and women were different, that men could do things women could not and there was no convincing her otherwise. She was a child during World War II and her story of going to a German school and life at the time was fascinating. We also spent almost every evening at the same pub, The Honest Lawyer, where I became a bit of a regular had plenty of discussions on politics and music with everyone. I have one regret about the experience: I was offered a bartending job there and I did not even take a moment to consider it. I wanted a high-paying corporate job that would lead to an eventual transfer to Europe. Silly me.
I’ve always been curious about the world - my favorite subject in school was Social Studies, when it was about people and cultures, before it turned into a series of boring memorizations and tests called History. I’m not terribly curious about the US - there’s too much familiarity around the corners. But I am absolutely curious about being in a strange land where I don’t speak the language. And in Vagabonding, I found the quote by Bill Bryson (from Neither Here nor There) that summed it up perfectly.
Tags: Scunthorpe, travel, vagabonding, wanderlust
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World travel sounds so fun. I might never grow up past the romantic traveler with nothing more than a backpack and a compass. That book looks good, I’ll ahve to add it to my list. You always have the best finds.
Summer’s last blog post..Isolated Motherhood
Thanks! However, I do leave out of the blog a lot of the less scintillating stuff I read
Vagabonding makes a lot more sense to me than the typical vacation. The paltry two weeks that most Americans are unfettered from their jobs is not enough. At least Europe is more human with 4-6 weeks.
Potts also talks about traveling lightly and keeping things simple, and now I wonder how much more stuff I don’t need. A year in a hut on some far-off beach sounds a lot better than 2 weeks of decompressing and 50 weeks of soul-decaying minutiae.
You’re right. There’s nothing like settling down with the people, rather than running around with a “got to see it” check list. The funny thing is feeling like that five year old when you go back home.
Alison’s last blog post..Time to Reflect
I’m deeper into the book now and there’s a bit on the difference between a tourist and a traveler. The general difference being tourists look at attractions while travelers really see their surroundings. I suppose I had an intuition against just looking at stuff, though one can certainly go check out the popular sites since there’s usually a good reason that people flock to them. Like the La Paz Waterfalls, which we happened onto by chance when driving south from Cuidad Quesada. We weren’t planning on seeing it at all, but damn was it cool. If I looked at from the I’ve already seen Niagara Falls perspective, it was piddly. But just being there and taking it in really made it worthwhile. I think the view from the road was way better than the perch that people pay to be on too.