Why Travel

Writing Around Boston

"To travel is to take a journey into yourself." -Dena Kaye

This famous quote, on a wall decoration given to me by my aunt, appears to be all over the Internet.  But, it is certainly true.  Why else would we bother to travel?  But to write is also to take a journey into yourself.

As thousands ran the marathon here in Boston earlier this week, I thought about how the world might be different if that many thousands of people wrote books.  And equally as many people as run 5Ks or other shorter races or ran around their towns for exercise, wrote essays or short stories.  For all I know they do.  I know there are a lot of novels under mattresses in this country.  Not that many people actually run the marathon.  But still, I don't think so.  And certainly, they aren't as visible.

But as I prepare to join hundreds, rather than thousands, at the Muse and the Marketplace conference this weekend, I am encouraged and inspired.  Welcome to Boston, fellow writers!  Or welcome to writing, fellow Bostonians!

If you're like me when you're traveling you're always looking for a good place to sit and write, even if the writing is really just a to do list or trip planning.  Here are a few of my favorites, and I'd love to hear about yours!

Trident Cafe on Newbury Street where you'll find the writers clustered at the far end of the bar (where the outlets are) drinking bottomless coffees or rounds of beers throughout the day and evening.

Cafe Algiers in Harvard Square where you can just feel the creative juices buzzing, and for the best mint tea around.

Boston Common Coffee Company on Salem Street in the North End, formerly known as Beanstock, they have free wi-fi, a great atmosphere, owner and staff, and their iced coffee is especially good which comes in handy when the sun comes out, and you want to head over to the park on the Greenway at the end of the block

Boston Public Library at Copley Square main reading room or courtyard, depending on the weather

Boston Public Gardens obviously depending on weather, but except on the coldest days you will see people on benches or blankets writing, reading, and people watching the day away.

Why Leave the Couch?

Every so often a small change wakes me up and reminds me of larger changes.  I went into CVS the other day and they had, seemingly (or perhaps literally), installed automated checkout machines overnight.  In the middle of a recession when unemployment keeps going up, they suddenly replaced employees with machines.  When I went back a couple of days later, employees were chatting with some customers about how no one wants to use them, and they don't understand why the customers don't want "to help us out" when the line at the one remaining checkout counter grows long.  A guy in  line said, hey it puts the work on us.

Um...that's not the problem.  The problem is, they are replacing employees.  Not only that, but aparently they already aren't hiring employees who are educated or with-it enough to realize they are being replaced.  Or perhaps to even be any better at customer service than a machine.

But what this small change woke me up to was this: CVS is a chain store, a nearly lone outpost of coprorate America in my neighborhood.  I know it is a rare and precious thing in America at this point to actually have any locally owned stores, let alone so many.  Yet over the years shopping at CVS became such a part of my routine that I'd actually not set foot in the locally owned pharmacy in years.  I have no idea how the prices compare, what the hours are like, how knowledgeable, friendly or discreet the employees or owner are, because I haven't even gone.  Now I will.

And I'll just go ahead and bulk order my breakfast cereal from Amazon.com.  I know my UPS delivery guy, he's very friendly, and has not been replaced by a robot. Yet.

Packing Light (or, a vacation from stuff)

I have always been passionate about packing light, ever since my first trip abroad, on a high school exchange when I somehow brought two bags plus a backpack for a 10 day stay in the suburbs of London.  What was all that and what was it for?  Who knows but after that I've done many trips with backpacks sold as "daypacks" as my only luggage for a couple of weeks.

India for 7 weeks, followed by a week in Beijing and a couple of weeks in California was more of a challenge.   One of the best things about traveling in India is that it really teaches you to pack light.  Researching the trip, and then actually going on it, both enforce that you want to have your stuff with you at all times on trains and busses, and directly under your seat, preferably locked to it.  Once you get your stuff down to the minimum, you also don't want to check it on flights because you need this stuff and don't want it to get lost.  So it has to fit in a true carry on bag, and reduce liquids to the one ziplock baggy.

I did some research and enjoyed reading blogs and other advice about packing light.  It's a popular and fun topic.  Some useful ones are:

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree
www.ricksteves.com/plan/tips/packlight.htm
http://www.travelite.org/

Here's what I packed:

REI "desert" travel shirt
Striped pullover shirt
black pants
convertible pants
silk long underwear
rain jacket
fleece jacket
Tilley Hat
winter hat
Hiking boots
black Teeva sandals (with velcro straps)
3 pairs underwear
2 bras
2 pairs socks
Travel sleeping bag
Alarm Clock
Luggage locks
Medicines
Insect Repellent
2 packages travel soap sheets (for shampoo, soap and laundry without carrying liquid)
5 books (Lonely Planet India, 3 novels to read/swap, Top 10 Beijing, and journal)
Camera
Cell phone
Money belt
Book light
Small roll of duct tape
Sewing kit

That includes what I wore.  More than half my backpack was taken up by my medicines (of which I only used the malaria pills, 1 tylenol and 1 immodium) and (tiny) sleeping bag.  I had some room for souvenirs, but did ship them a few weeks into the trip.  I bought local clothes as I went, and was given an extra fleece by another traveler before going up to Darjeeling (where I also bought a wool hat which I wore over my other winter hat, it was that cold.)

The sleeping bag was key, it was the coldest winter in decades in Rajastan and I used it, along with the hotel blankets, almost every night until Mumbai.  Doing a little laundry every night or two really is no big deal, as the travel experts will tell you.  I always cleaned my own underwear, and had my other clothes cleaned by hotels (including my socks).  When you are really packing light, it's important to remember to bring at least one extra set of clothes so that you can have laundry done (or let your other pants dry if you're doing them yourself)!

"We are all taking a year off this year" (so why not travel?)

That's what a friend of a friend at a party said to me Saturday night, refering to the 4 out of 5 people we were chatting with having been laid off, not had their contract renewed, or already starting training for a whole new career.

When I speculated last summer than longer-term travel might continue its long-running upswing in spite of or because of the oil and airfare price spikes of last summer and/or the then bad but relatively normal recession that was getting going, I hadn't really considred what impact the ind of long term, deep, and economy-reshaping recession we turn out to be having might have.

If you've decided, or even considered, spending your involuntary year off, or even just the summer before your career changing graduate school or training program starts, your involuntary move back to your parents house or move across the country to look for work elsewhere... in a place other than the USA, what are some practicalities to consider?  What are some pros and cons.

Here's a pro you might not have thought of.  While most of us are aware that there are lots of places, including many we might have dreamed of visiting for various reasons, where it is possible to live for a lot less than in the US, or at least wherever or however we live now, how many people realize that you could actually live, or even travel, in much of this world AND pay for health insurance that is only available if you are outside the US, for less than most people have to pay for COBRA when their job ends?

Now obviously you are not renting a whole house in Tuscany or spending the year on a train in Europe or in a five star hotel, and these insurance rates do vary by age, don't all cover pre-existing conditions, and may not cover US based care for as long as 6 months from when they start, and I haven't done the analysis to tell you if they are as good as many employer provided plans.  I would doubt they're as good as the best.  But they are certainly better than nothing.

Another practicality that has gone way down in cost each time I've travled or lived abroad is communication.  The first time I live in London, as a study abroad, I spend a pound a minute to use Internet cafes and close to that to call home with a calling card.  I kid you not!  It amounted to a lot, even though I also had my first mobile phone ever issued by my employer on which I could recieve calls for free.

Anyway, the New York Times Frugal Traveler blog comes through with great up to the minute advice on this one:
http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/staying-in-touch-internationally-on-the-cheap/?em

And if you're voluntarilily leaving your job for a year or summer away in the midst of this crazy economy, then you probably want to save as much as you can on accomodations as well.  For the absolute cheapest option, check out Couchsurfing.com .  This web-based social experiment created by students has turned into a full fledged movement, and thousands of people are full time traveling and others making their hospitality available all over the world.  The older-school movement, so well founded everyone forgot it ever was one, hosteling is going strong as well.  Hostelworld.com is not only a great place to book hostels, but has all the advice you need, ratings, and articles on low cost travel as well.

I'll come back to the topic of practicalities as well as why not take this time to travel in the near future, so please visit again soon!

Travel in an age of thrift?

Is travel a luxury irrelevant in tough times?

Travel is a fraught topic in today's newly born carbon-conscious and thrifty world. Whether because it suddenly got expensive again when fuel prices spiked last summer, or because we're all busy measuring our carbon footprint online while we blast our air conditioners, or our savings was lost in the stock market or due to a layoff, the concept of flying half way around the world seems a bit more questionable than it did before. Lots of people don't like traveling, haven't had the opportunity, or haven't tried. But these days, people who've gotten hooked on it are wondering how to keep doing it, and how to justify doing it during these trying times that only seem to be getting worse.

This is where I write about my mother-in-law.  Like many of us, my husband grew up with stories about the Great Depression.  "The only things they can't take away from you are education and travel."  That you've already completed or at least undertaken.  This is what they learned from their mothers stories growing up.  My mother-in-law learned this first hand, when her own mother lost her husband to illness and business to the depression and the siblings had to split up and live with other relatives.  So those were both priorities above all else for my mother-in-law and her sibblings, and were instilled in my husband and his sister growing up as well.

Fewer can afford to travel right now, or will put off long planned journeys, but I hope that as we reconstruct our lives and our economy in a new (and as the president calls for, better) form, we remember these lessons.  We are emerging from an era of things, when storage space ads are still on TV, and many are getting a few pennies on the dollar spent for some of their excess stuff on ebay Craiglist or elsewhere.  I hope that will will invest as nations, and as individuals, in education, and in travel as an important component of education.  I hope we invest in high speed rail, and bring back the ports and passenger ships, and give American workers back credit for their gains in productivity by giving them back some of their time and the healthcare security young (and older) people need to take time when they can afford it to pursue things other than the rat race.

If you want some great tips and reflections on money saving and sanity survival tips for the recession, check out EconoWhiner.  Start with their recent travel post:
http://www.econowhiner.com/2009/02/22/have-imagination-will-travel/

The Many Deaths of Print Media

With such a pile after traveling for three weeks, and getting some additional subscriptions for Christmas gifts, I was contemplating canceling all of our subscriptions.  So I started reading through the magazines to see what I would miss and discovered something interesting: they were contemplating canceling me too, or at least the physical print version I was tripping over.

As one of the chumps who actually *paid* for TimesSelect when the New York Times flirted with charging for online content, I never understood why they canceled instead of expanding that experiment.  But they did, and now all of (print) publishing is supposedly on the brink.  The free online content, supported by advertising is going into the red thanks to plunging ad revenues, thanks to the recession.  Another "problem" is that all English language publications online are now competing, so that the UK Guardian newspaper is now a major news source in the US.

What if we no longer what all the crap that is advertised?  Not just at the moment, but what if our appetite for consumer crap stays way down?  Aparently we couldn't afford it all along, and our appetite could reset at a much lower level.

But what we do seem to want is content: news, analysis, creative words, music, comedy, UTube, Hulu, blogs of all kinds. 

So the new idea is e-readers like the Kindle, which the New York Times is rumored to possibly offer for free with annual subscriptions, or micropayments charging for each article or click. 

How do they work this problem in smaller, more technically advanced places, like Finland? Or Japan?

I Love Blogging

 

I love blogging because it's a way we're not alone.  Not just me, but we.

It's my new radio

my new pen pal

my new zine

my new poetry

my new school days extracurricular activity

and sometimes its my new local bar

It's finally gotten me to read other people's blogs, and learn something about the online world.

It's also a way to write about travel, and share some of my weird ideas with, well, whoever you are! 

If you're reading this, please be my Valentine's and let me know what you think--do you blog? do you travel? If so, why?

Happy Valentine's Day!

This is a response to the Typepad.com I Love Blogging project, click the icon at the top to read more about that.

Bathing Out

One of the themes of our recent travel was luxury bathing.  Not always high end, but always out.  This may explain how we were able to have a relaxing vacation while traveling to rainy places in winter, and traveling such distances in opposite directions.

In Portland, OR we visited the new location of a new age hippie collective hot tub and sauna retreat we had discovered last time we were there, and the outdoor swimming pool-sized hot tub of an amazing place called the Kennedy School.  In Munich we explored everywhere from an Art Deco Spa to the largest water park in Europe with a retractable (in summer), and a municipal outdoor heated olympic sized winter swimming pool with a giant whirlpool in the center.

Bathing out takes many forms and is one of the oldest traditions in the world: Turkey, Russia, Finland, and ancient Rome have notable traditions.  Modern Germany has borrowed from these and other traditions to create an impressive new leisure world of "wellness".

In America, bathing out still exists, but tends to be confined to the West Coast, new age hippies, or the beach, or is often associated with poor immigrants in the past.  At the same time, luxurious bathing in (and investing in both expensive and DIY home improvements towards this end) is very popular.

Enjoying something we as Americans rarely do out, got me thinking about what various cultures (or cultures during different times) do "out" versus "in".  This is an interesting contrast with the Iran described in, Reading Lolita in Tehran, where almost none of life occurs "out" and so much Americans take for granted as part of public life--dining, socializing, music--is in the private sphere of the home.

Munich and London

London was the last stop on our trip, before coming home.  It was wonderful to be there as always, but it felt very different than any time we have been there in the past (including when I was there during tube strikes and Paul was there the day after tube bombings).  The recession has hit hard and fast, and the unusual energy that kept building through all those things seems to have gone out of it, for now anyway.  I am confident that Londoners and the British generally will figure out what to do, pull together and pull through, haveing been through worse in many of their own lifetimes, and that what they build out of this will ultimately be new and different.

Munich was fun and seemed to be doing fine, in contrast.  People were out in force shopping, walking in the parks, lining up for museum exhibits (in January!).  We joined in, in the sun, snow and rain.

friends

Why Travel is back on the road. This time visiting friends in Portland, OR and Seattle, WA before heading over to Germany and London, on another illogical flight pattern. Our original plans to take trains across the USA became economically unfeasible when oil prices dropped and flight prices soon followed, drastically.

Visiting friends is one of the top reasons to travel. Having an old friend, or making a new one when you get somewhere, is the best way to see most places.

Soon after we got here the road, and train tracks, to our next destination Seattle were flooded with snow melt and closed for several days. However, everything is back on line just in time for our departure this morning. We had a week to get up there before our flight out so we weren't worried anyway. It's interesting that Seattle can, and often does, get cut off. America's infrastructure really is out of date!