Been there, but have I really "done" that?

-You saw Hadrian’s Arch in Rome?
-Umm…yes. That’s the arch next to the Colloseum right? There are so many…
-Wow – what an incredible experience. I mean, I’ve never been there, but I took a course in Roman History, and wrote a paper about Hadrian. Did you know he built that arch after [blah blah blah]? But, what do I know. I’ve never been there.
-Well I’d “been” to Rome 4 times before this particular trip. I did a degree in Archaeology and didn’t want to go to Rome before I had the chance to really research the place and dedicate a lot of time and effort to do the experience justice. But eventually, I realised I’m never going to have the time to do the experience justice, so on the fifth trip, I finally dove in and saw Rome. But really, there are a lot of places I’ve been where I honestly believe someone who has read a book about the place has “been” there more than I have.

My last trip to Italy was a two-week holiday with my mother as her retirement wish. When she met me in London to depart for Italy, I was in a sorry mental and physical shape – I was recovering from living in Ghana where I was constantly sick, a month in South Africa where I was in chronic pain from some of my medications, and was experiencing quite a bit of culture shock from re-entering the Western World. Despite all of this, our trip was one of the most enriching trips I’d ever had in Italy. Not so much because of places, but more because of the Italian lifestyle, and getting to share the experience with my excellent, and ever-deserving mother.

When travelling, many of our experiences are defined by how hungry/thirsty we are, by the company of people we find ourselves in, by our mental state, and by how friendly people were our first hour in a country. Perspective is important when trying to mitigate these internal and external effects on our travelling experiences, but really, what is travel if not being internally and externally affected by environmental circumstances?

I’ve written before about how travel and living abroad can be vastly different experiences, largely depending on depth of experience [see “Aspiring to be a piece of meat”]. The more places you tackle in a shorter time, the shallower the layers of the experience can be. In one’s lifetime, they can see a thin version of the entire world, a deeper experience of some few key places, or a profound experience of one place. All these experiences are worth having, as long as we keep the objective of our discoveries in mind: vacation, holidays, travels, or cultural immersion?

All inclusive packages. North Americans work very hard, and when we go on vacation, we want a vacation. Travelling means constant decision-making, and it can be far more relaxing to have someone [presumably] in-the-know make all those decisions for you. Plus it’s often cheaper to get the package than the plane tickets alone. While for me a vacation means going “home”, I can entirely appreciate why some people would want to go to Cuba to have the experience of being in a hot Canada, rather than the experience of Cuba. Mingling with locals, gauging expectations, and being a model citizen while travelling is exhausting work, and often requires a recovery period afterwards – a real vacation. Sit, relax, drink daiquiris from filtered water ice cubes, and be served. Just make sure you say “thank you”, try to patronise more sustainable resorts with proper environmental and labour policies, and remember that you are on vacation – you are not travelling Cuba.

Backpacking. Above anything, backpackers are about hanging out with other backpackers, and can be a hugely entertaining way to see the world. Within minutes of meeting these people from all over the world, you will find you have days worth of things to talk about because, regardless of your geographic origins, you all studied social sciences and come from middle-class families in former British or Spanish colonies. You can spot the rookies by conversations about accents or different words we use in Canada vs. the US vs. Australia vs. England. The Aussies will poke fun at the English, the Kiwis at the Aussies, and the Canadians will swear we don’t sound anything like Americans and promise we can tell the difference.

Some of the best laughs I’ve had in my life was with a group of 6 backpackers – 2 from England, 3 from Australia, and me – whom I had the pleasure of spending 24 hours in relentless company with in Lithuania. I had been to Lithuania 3 times before, but as a Lithuanian where my family picked me up from the airport, toured me around, and dropped me off at the airport. I had never experienced Lithuania as a tourist, and wanted to see how my homeland compared with other European cities I had travelled to.

With these backpackers in Vilnius, we cooked a communal feast together for dinner, toured the city together, everyone offering fun anecdotes about how this place reminded them of ____ in ____, and where to go in ____. We drank beer on a creek side terrasse, got shushed by the locals during a Lithuanian poetry reading that none of us could understand, and we will all remember what a good time we had in Lithuania.

This experience can be repeated all over the world, and if stuck to exclusively can become very tiresome. I swore I’d never backpack again after I saw Indian Dreamcatchers being sold in Thailand, China, Vancouver, Venice, and Paris -- all within a 3-month period. But in smaller doses, backpacking is yet another excellent way to enjoy the world.

Travelling alone. The loneliest birthday of my life was spent in the French Alps in 2002. I was an archaeologist in central France, but took the afternoon off of work to spend the weekend in Annecy – a picturesque ski village about 45 minutes south of Geneva, complete with medieval canals and stone buildings. When I arrived, it was already dark, the hostel staff wasn’t answering their phone, and I didn’t have the address of the hostel. I hitch hiked into town and found a cheap hotel room in an empty building in an empty neighbourhood, and didn’t see another soul for the rest of the evening. Sometimes you just need bodies around you, even if they’re unfamiliar.

The next day, the hostel staff managed to answer their phone, and after a long day of walking around town, I spent the afternoon chatting with the hostel bartender. He and some of the hostel staff were going out that night to celebrate a friend’s birthday that lived on the other side of Lac Annecy, and there was an extra seat in the car. This ended up being one of my most enjoyable evenings while travelling, and would have never been possible if I weren’t travelling alone. I have similar stories about walking from Greece to Macedonia alone, travelling to the Sahara desert alone, and a fun coach to Istanbul alone.

Travelling with friends. I have lot of friends who I don’t think would be very fun to travel with, but I have also had company who have made the best of some pretty dodgy situations. Despite constant obstacles and sickness in Peru, I most remember all the clever banter with Sarah. In Latvia, poor hostel organisation and roommates with grossly different personal boundaries turned out to be a platform for Anastasia’s excellently delivered comedic reactions, even after having to share a bed with a drunk Spanish boy who climbed in with her for 3 hours.

Friends who you meet while travelling alone are great because you instantly have something in common, but equally important are friends with whom you have history. While I have bonded with all sorts of people all over the world, often very quickly because of obvious common interests and personality traits, but there is no substitution time-tested friendships, regardless of how irrelevant you are to each other in contemporary contexts. Human relations are about filling roles, and when we travel we meet people who mutually need someone to fill those familiar roles for the duration of that particular, however temporary, context. Having a lot in common with someone is also really important in friendships and has an important role in terms of familiarity and feeling understood, but old friends have the familiarity of resilience and the comfort of knowing that they can overcome obstacles.

Travelling as a couple. It can be exhausting trying to maintain emotional health by keeping in touch with familiar people back home while building new communities of people along the way. Bringing a partner with you really helps with emotional issues, allows you to share something profound with your partner, and, as a woman, travelling with a man can really help with some of the daily discomforts of being approached by opportunistic men. It’s like you can have your life and travel too. However, travelling with your partner can easily limit how deep your experience is locally, because you don’t need to seek comfort from your environment, and so it’s easier to turn to each other instead. Plus, the only people who want to talk to you are other travelling couples.

Particular knowledge. I live around the world and have friends who live around the world, and visiting them is my favourite introduction to a new place. They understand local customs and some language, can hold your hand through the initial discomforts, tell you the good places to go, and are often excited to use you as a partner in adventure for things they can’t do with their local friends. The benefit of growing up in Canada is that many of my friends are first-generation and have family to visit in other parts of the world. I also enjoy theme travelling -- microbrewery road trips around Cascadia, wine tasting in South Africa, archaeology in the former Roman empire, wildlife viewing – these are activities enriched by developing a particular expertise about one common layer. Or by travelling with someone who holds that particular knowledge.

Expats. There are technical differences between expats and sojourners, but I will combine the two here. Expats are like backpackers who graduated to the next level. Expats vary greatly – in most ex-pat communities, people are some combination of: (1) the expats who only hang out with other expats, whose definition of a good place is based on having cool expats there, who transport their world to different geographical locations around the world; (2) the expats who will have nothing to do with other expats. They do not greet the only other white person in town, they can’t remember the last time they spoke English, they write in their day planners in the local language and only eat non-Western foods; and (3) the expats who have local and expat friends, but whose expat friends are actually enriching their local experience rather than solely being a source of escaping it [also necessary at times].

When I lived in Ghana, there were only really 2 white people who lived in town: Kathryn and me. Kathryn and I didn’t meet until she had been there 4 months, and I had been there 2 months. Kathryn lived with a family, had to learn Twi to get by, worked in a small office where no one drank alcohol, and was living on a much tighter budget than me and therefore ate a lot of street food. I lived with a young Ghanaian woman, my friends were constantly speaking in really fast Twi, I worked in a huge office with all sorts of politicians, private consultants, technocrats, bureaucrats, Community-NGOs, and general members of the public, where the big men would scoff at the idea of street food, but I could cook vegetables at home. I learned more Twi from Kathryn than from any of my Ghanaian friends, learned about taboo subjects like family life and the treatment of children, and ate street food all over Ghana because of her. Kathryn learned about young Ghanaian social life, how Ghanaians drink, how Ghanaians settle a bill, the politics of Ghanaian marriages, and how to tell stories in colourful English to a Ghanaian audience. Our friendship was a necessary escape, but also an enrichment of the Ghanaian experience.

Nomads. I’ve written about nomads a lot. Nomads are everywhere, and yet nowhere, can feel at home anywhere, yet nowhere. Nomads don’t compare how many countries they’ve been to or how long they’ve been on the road. They do normal things in extraordinary settings, have a wide range of insatiable interests, and have gotten really good at letting themselves be in the hands of others. They like to have guest rooms whenever they are temporarily settled, and they know another nomad when they see them.

There are limitless ways of experiencing the world, and while some classify them as being a greyscale of shallow to deep, I think of them more as different axes across a landscape. Depending on an individual’s interests and objectives, they are all experiences worth having, none being necessarily more important than another. While my journey seems to be profoundly geographic, others chose to understand a variety of contexts in one place, or concentrate on their relationships with their partners, or study something like meditation, or yoga. If I didn’t travel so much, I think I’d be a much deeper person.

Revisiting Ghana...via YouTube.

As I prepare to depart for the Persian Gulf, my thoughts are of...Africa? Visiting colleagues from Ghana in Canada, retrieving my Ghanaian music collection, and watching 'Blood Diamonds' has set a tone, I think. Blood Diamonds had some insightful one-liners and introduced the audience to a lot of issues about white people in Africa. But it is still a film intended for a Hollywood audience, and many sacrifices had to me made to cater to the objective of making the film accessible.

My experience in Ghana was nothing like the film's depiction of Sierre Leone -- even when under military dictatorship, Ghana was quite peaceful, and Ghana has been a model democracy for the last 8 years. Though tribalism occurs in Ghana just like everywhere else in Africa, the dominance of the Ashanti, the limited role of colonialism in Ghana at playing tribes against each other [that statement is very debateable], and the cultural priority of having a good time first [though this seems to be a pan-West African cultural trait], seems to have kept Ghanaians loving each other over the last 50 years of independence, unlike most of their neighbours.

Some clips I found on YouTube that help illustrate some of my experiences in Ghana...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st13lz8EmAUhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi_sxqlwRNY
Kumasi's Kejetia station/market. Kumasi's the capital of the Ashanti Kingdom, and Ghana's second largest city, but much older than Accra and therefore actual feels like a city rather than an extended village.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FZj2hoI1f4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyRumEg2_og
These clips belong in my "Cultural Lesson: Taking public transit" post. The first is a shot of being on a tro-tro stuck in traffic, I'm assuming as a result of a car accident. Hawkers quickly fill every crevasse with goods to be sold -- their entrepreneurial spirit never fails to amaze me. Very similar to the experience of waiting for the tro-tro to fill, or of any tro-tro station in Ghana for that matter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bCeBCy0Bm4
A typical Sunday at church. Sometimes these events would go until 4am -- piercing voices over amplifiers and speakers set 5 notches louder than they [or my ears] could stand. Outfits 5 notches too bright for my eyes, and food 5 times too spicy to be enjoyable. But GOD DO I MISS IT!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s07oBh007Jw
Very typical of streets in Accra. The kiosks on the side of the road selling phone units, the concrete 'drinking spots', the drains/open sewers lining the roads, about one third of the buildings being under construction [it seems to take at least 10 years to finish a building] and dust, dust, dust. Though there's a serious lack of laughing in this video -- a key feature of Ghanaian life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBgQO5-VN6Q
Aaah, Accra's busy Kaneshie Market, right next to Accra's largest tro-tro station, Circle. This place was Cheryl [a fellow CIDA intern in Accra]'s idea of hell. Very lively, very claustrophobic.
http://www.ghana50.gov.gh/
The official website of Ghana@50 - the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence. Includes a video of Kwame Nkrumah's famous speech "The battle has ended. And Ghana, your beloved country is free forever". Still looking for the Ghana@50 theme song though...

Prairie Skies.

I have often said that Dave and I became close friends over a pint of beer, and Nancy and I became close friends over a bottle of rum.

A week or two after I moved to Matsuyama, Ehime on Japan’s Shikoku Island, a strong off-shore earthquake hit halfway between Matsuyama and Hiroshima. After I restored our dishes to their original shelf locations from the floor of our apartment, I went to the liquor store where they were having a sale on all the liquor bottles that were soaked in liquor from neighbouring bottles that had broke during the earthquake. Having not yet acquired a taste for non-girlie drinks yet [I didn’t start drinking beer until I was 23], and not recognising the kanji for vodka, wine coolers, or fruit liqueurs, I picked up a huge bottle Meyers’ Extra Dark Rum, remembering that I had loved the rum balls my sister had made for me the month before when I was in Montreal.

In our building lived the four Canadian English teachers who worked at Aiko Kindergarten: from the mountainous coastal city of Vancouver were me, my brother, and Ando; and from the Prairies in Medicine, Alberta, was Nancy. I was already good friends with Ando and my brother, but hadn’t really had the chance to get to know Nancy yet.

- I have a huge bottle of Meyer’s Dark Rum that I don’t exactly know what to do with.
- I love rum. I spent several years with a Chilean man, and we went to Cuba together one year and spent the whole visit drinking Cuban rum.
- I’ve always wanted to go to Cuba, Morocco, and India. Why don’t you swing by the apartment sometime this weekend while everyone’s in Kyoto and we’ll drink rum and you can tell me about Cuba.

By the end of the weekend, my imagination was filled with thoughts of Cuba, stories of growing up in a small town outside of Medicine Hat under the prairie skies, and a headache from all the rum.

Nancy is probably my most free-spirited of free-spirited friends, having her own unique definition of success for herself, who is care-free to societal life checklists. I met Nancy when I had first begun my [apparently ceaseless] world travelling, when I was a soul-searching 21 year-old exploring the world in an effort to understand my most useful role in it. Later on in these formative years, I learned to size people up very quickly, judging whether or not we would have anything in common, and pursuing friendships according to my initial impressions. When you live as a nomad, you have to make meaningful friendships very quickly and not waste too much time with people who you think you won’t have anything in common with, because you are often put into situations where you are forced to be friends with people you wouldn’t normally befriend because of geographical circumstances.

In many ways, Nancy and I have very opposite personalities, and I may have judged our potential to have a friendship differently if I had met her now. Nancy approaches the world as a prairie sky -- a blank canvas where she can trust that everything always works out in the end, and not needing to force time commitments on incremental stages of career-relationship-home ownership-retirement in some overall life plan of 25-30-65 years old. I am much more goal-oriented, climbing peaks to get the best view, organising my time around known boundaries, dividing time into manageable stages towards some imagined goal, only filling the spaces between these planned edges with spontaneity and impulse.

An illustration of Nancy and my calculated boundaries vs. prairie sky approaches:
- I have far too many interests, always wanting to explore every crevasse, every peak. Constantly un-satiated by what I can see, wondering what’s beyond the next corner, around the next mountain, across the sea. I’d hate to put my children through this some day, so I should marry someone who knows exactly what they want all the time, always satisfied that they can already see everything they need to, so that our children end up as normal people.
- I always figured your genes know: if you have good chemistry with someone, you’ll probably produce good babies.

I caught a lift from Vancouver to Calgary last week to catch up with Nancy and her little Zachary en route back home from the Canmore Folk Festival, but we missed each other in Calgary and so I rented a car and drove across the prairies to Medicine Hat instead. On my three hour drive to Medicine Hat, I was annoyed by how boring the road was, by the country music playing on the radio, by the ineptitude of the Canadian Tire staff not being able to find me an iPod converter so that I didn’t have to listen to the country music playing on the radio, and by the fact that Nancy and I hadn't met up in Calgary as planned. I love scenic drives and had just spent 10 hours in the car on the Coquihalla, one of the most beautiful highways in the world that dangerously stretches from BC’s coastal mountains to the Rockies, ooo-ing and awww-ing the whole way at one of nature’s most obvious efforts at sensational beauty. The three hour drive across the prairies was feeling much longer than the ten hour drive through the mountains, mostly because of my perceived monotony of the landscape.

One laugh from my little Zach, and one hug from Nancy, and my annoyance had melted away. I spent the next few days in Medicine Hat with the two of them, peeling off layers of anxiety and stress from my schedule of being in so many cities for the last three months. I was enjoying every minute of my conversion to the prairie lifestyle, however short it was. We accomplished nothing, we never looked at a clock, never had to be anywhere at any time, our day revealing itself as we went along.

Contrary to my journey to Medicine Hat, on the return journey to Calgary I was almost overwhelmed by how beautiful the prairies were. Maybe not beautiful in an exciting and glamorous way, like the Rockies or the Coastal Mountains, but in a more under-stated, subtle but profound way. You could almost see the curve of the globe, the land and sky were so vast, un-interrupted.

Nancy's open-skies attitude and influence have once again defeated my judgmentalism and taught me something about expectations. I rely heavily on my judgments, but sometimes too heavily, and it's always refreshing to be proven wrong and learn something in the process. Thank you Nancy -- you've taught me even more than just an appreciation for rum.