As the holidays approach, I'm looking forward to travelling a bit around Europe. I've been here a few times before, but only to Paris and London; in the former case, I was on the way to Morocco and in the latter, my plans to travel more widely were thwarted by an explosion and fire in the Channel tunnel, an economic collapse and (maybe I'm projecting here) a plague of locusts with my name on their bellies.
This time, though. This time I'm gonna do it.
My impending tour of Europe notwithstanding, though, a lot of the blush is off the travel rose, at least when we're talking about the less-developed countries favoured by penniless backpackers like me.
I worked for a few years in a travel-accessory store in Montreal and among the items they stocked was the entire Lonely Planet guidebook series. Over the course of three years' worth of slow periods, I read a good chunk of that library and in doing so, was immersed in the modern Traveller's ethos.
The Traveller's ethos proceeds from the notion that "there are tourists, and then there are travellers," that these are two distinct breeds, and that the latter is superior, entitled to a double ration of smugness by virtue of its willingness to immerse itself in local cultures and really get down with the lively carnival of diversity that is the global Benetton ad in which we live.
Conversely, the tourist is pampered and childish, laden with cameras and camcorders, loudly wondering why he can't get a Coors Lite in Islamabad on a Friday afternoon, dragging his giant suitcase across the rutted streets of Phnomh Penh on his way to the killing fields where he will make a beeline to the gift shop.
The traveller knows how to use chopsticks; the tourist doesn't need them for his Big Mac.
That's the idea, anyway.
In reality, in the less-affluent and more exotic places in the world where I've been, I've been gobsmacked to see how everything has been rearranged to cater to Western backpackers, and in particular to Western backpackers who don't want to be reminded that they are being catered to. The desire to be Sir Richard Burton, first white man to penetrate the deepest jungle/desert/Temple of Doom is a lucrative one for those who know how to cater to the illusion. The locals aren't stupid; in their circumstances they don't have the luxury of being stupid. They know there's a billion affluent Westerners who hunger for the authentic, unvarnished globetrotter's experience, and so they are damn well going to manufacture that authenticity.
So, in Morocco, I was approached every thirty paces by a guide offering to show me some local attraction, with the first words out of his mouth being, "It's not touristic." He didn't know me from Adam but he knew what I was after.
In Cambodia, just a year after that country had been removed from Robert Young Pelton's "five skulls" category of lethality, I was met at the mini-bus depot by a horde of moto drivers who got into a minor riot in order to be the one to take me where I was going.
In Thailand I saw guesthouses that played Hollywood movies all day, including the decidedly postmodern spectacle of young Western backpackers spending all day watching movies like The Beach, a Leonardo DiCaprio movie about a bunch of young Western backpackers who go to Thailand and are disappointed that Thailand is full of young Western backpackers who sit around at guesthouses watching Leonardo DiCaprio movies all day.
Now, I can hear some of you saying, "Well if you don't like travelling, then don't travel. You're very privileged to have that option. Quit your bitching." Okay, it's not that I don't like travelling, and I am acutely aware of how fortunate I am to live in a time and place where "polio" and "aerial bombardment" are just words, let alone having the option to travel all over the globe. So I'm not bitching. I've won the historical, geographical, ethnic and gender lottery.
What I'm saying is, a lot of us have this idea that by travelling around the world, we're gathering some kind of authentic experience and engaging in some transformative ritual that will make us come out the other end a better, wiser, more enlightened person. I've had the sadly humorous experience of watching two seasoned travellers try to one-up each other with their travel stories, like two nth-degree black belts in a kung fu movie, determined to prove once and for all who has the most killer move. Anywhere you've been, I've been somewhere more remote, more beautiful, more untouched, more authentic--a lot like the place you went, before people like me and you started going there by the planeload.
There's a whole publishing industry devoted to the frantic checking off of life experiences. The Ur-example is "1001 Unforgettable Places To Visit Before You Die." What a desperate, frantic, joyless pursuit of notches that implies! Hurry up, half your life is over and you're only at #207! At this rate you'll never finish by the time you're done.
Oil, gold, forests and bison are scarce resources on a finite planet. So are authentically untouched places, or even moderately untrampled ones. Telling ourselves otherwise is to pretend that Space Mountain is a real rocketship ride, or that the call girl is doing it 'cause she loves us, and not for the discreet envelope we have left on the mantelpiece.
It's fun to pretend. Sometimes we have to, just to stay sane.
But when it comes to authentic travel, be careful what you wish for. The world is a very different place compared to when Cartier and Cabot, Lewis and Clark, Stanley and Livingstone, even Jones and Ravenwood did their stomping around. The population of this big round theme park has nearly doubled in my lifetime and that cracking sound you hear is the joists of the boardwalk in the first stages of Malthusian collapse. For most of the people in most of the places you're likely to go, the authentic experience is hunger and desperation, blotted out with pirated Britney Spears recordings, seasoned with diesel fumes and oceans of discarded plastic water bottles.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
Space Madness
Aalborg is located at just over 57 degrees north latitude. At this latitude, the length of the night in winter (and the day in summer) becomes rather extreme; on the solstice, I am told, the sun will rise at around 10am and set around 3pm, with much of the intervening five hours of daylight being a sort of long twilight.
This, combined with being in school and especially a project-based phase of that schooling (i.e. no classes or structured events this late in the semester) creates an odd sense of timelessness and limbo that is not entirely unpleasant. It will be interesting to see what it's like in summer when the sun is out almost all the time.
But as it is now, I inhabit an odd sort of science-fiction space colony existence. This is underscored by the institutional kollegium where I live, with a tiny shared kitchen (a galley, really) and very small individual quarters. I get up in what the clock assures me is the morning and get to work, spending hours doing brainy science stuff with a computer, with very little in the way of external signals as to what time it is. Outside, it is dark, flecked with pretty lights.
To make it even more science-fictiony--I didn't plan it this way--I'm listening to an online archive of old radio shows that were broadcast in the 1980's and early 1990's. I have basically parked my spaceship twenty light years away from Earth so I can listen to signals sent out decades ago, which are just getting there now.
Of course, in many ways this place is far less lunar than back home. The temperature doesn't go much below zero, and the landscape of North America--shopping malls, parking lots, individual houses separated by unbridgeable distances--is much more like the denatured futurist world of bubble cities and rocketship landing pads that seemed so exciting to Hugo Gernsback but that turns out (in my experience) to produce a chronic quiet desperation beyond Thoreau's wildest imaginings.
Here, I can ride my bike to where I want to go, should I choose to go out at all. That's more than I can say for somewhere like Orleans, Ontario in December, which (this time last year) had the added hassle of a public transit strike which drove home the inherent isolation of suburbia in winter.
The darkness was getting to me for awhile but I think I've adjusted. The new crewmen always need a bit of time to adjust to their surroundings. After awhile the daily routine of demagnetizing the fraculator, sideloading the balonium plant and cleaning tribbles out of the air ducts becomes a pleasantly monastic existence. At least until one of my shipmates comes back from EVA with an alien organism in her chest and inadvertently looses it on the crew.
This, combined with being in school and especially a project-based phase of that schooling (i.e. no classes or structured events this late in the semester) creates an odd sense of timelessness and limbo that is not entirely unpleasant. It will be interesting to see what it's like in summer when the sun is out almost all the time.
But as it is now, I inhabit an odd sort of science-fiction space colony existence. This is underscored by the institutional kollegium where I live, with a tiny shared kitchen (a galley, really) and very small individual quarters. I get up in what the clock assures me is the morning and get to work, spending hours doing brainy science stuff with a computer, with very little in the way of external signals as to what time it is. Outside, it is dark, flecked with pretty lights.
To make it even more science-fictiony--I didn't plan it this way--I'm listening to an online archive of old radio shows that were broadcast in the 1980's and early 1990's. I have basically parked my spaceship twenty light years away from Earth so I can listen to signals sent out decades ago, which are just getting there now.
Of course, in many ways this place is far less lunar than back home. The temperature doesn't go much below zero, and the landscape of North America--shopping malls, parking lots, individual houses separated by unbridgeable distances--is much more like the denatured futurist world of bubble cities and rocketship landing pads that seemed so exciting to Hugo Gernsback but that turns out (in my experience) to produce a chronic quiet desperation beyond Thoreau's wildest imaginings.
Here, I can ride my bike to where I want to go, should I choose to go out at all. That's more than I can say for somewhere like Orleans, Ontario in December, which (this time last year) had the added hassle of a public transit strike which drove home the inherent isolation of suburbia in winter.
The darkness was getting to me for awhile but I think I've adjusted. The new crewmen always need a bit of time to adjust to their surroundings. After awhile the daily routine of demagnetizing the fraculator, sideloading the balonium plant and cleaning tribbles out of the air ducts becomes a pleasantly monastic existence. At least until one of my shipmates comes back from EVA with an alien organism in her chest and inadvertently looses it on the crew.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Coffee and half-chewed Danish.
I've been living here in Denmark for three months now but I haven't done a lot of posting about it because (a) I've been kinda busy, (b) I've been crazy busy, or (c) some combination of (a) and (b).
It's an interesting place, occasionally dull, but dull in that way that extremely civilized countries can be. No bracing road duels with hillbillies in Hummers while riding your bike; no crazy people in the streets, cut loose by a shredded social safety net; and, unlike in North America, nearly everyone is trim, healthy and dressed like adults all with like dignity 'n' stuff.
The biggest challenge so far is that I can't understand a word anyone is saying, at least when they're speaking Danish. Now, that sounds kind of trivially obvious, Danish being a foreign language to me and all. So let me clarify. It's not that I don't know the meaning of the words that people are saying in this foreign language (though that too); it's that I can't understand what the hell they said. I could not take what someone says and transliterate it into a string of letters and then look up that string of letters in a Danish-English dictionary and determine the meaning of the word.
Danish stands out among languages for not being pronounced anything like how it is spelled. Consonants and syllables get smooshed together into this indistinct paste. The other day, one of my housemates asked another for the kitchen roll (i.e. paper towels.) The Danish word for this item is kokkenruller--superficially, four syllables, including a distinct k, n, r and l sound.
In fact, the word is pronounced with one and a half syllables: "kughghruh."
The closest analogy I can think of in English is where words like "worcestershire" get pronounced "wooster." Imagine that that rule applies to every word in the language and you start to understand the principle of Danish.
Actually, the "o" in kokkenruller is that Scandinavian o-like thing with a slash through it. Not only do they not pronounce their consonants, apparently they had to make up a bunch of new vowels that look a lot like existing vowels but make different sounds and--just to make things interesting--lie at the end of the alphabet. So o-with-a-slash, a-e dipthong, and a-with-an-orange-on-its-head all come after z, with evident implications for someone trying to look up a word.
I'll keep trying to learn the language. But if I need to wipe up a spill in a hurry, I'm liable to fall back on English.
It's an interesting place, occasionally dull, but dull in that way that extremely civilized countries can be. No bracing road duels with hillbillies in Hummers while riding your bike; no crazy people in the streets, cut loose by a shredded social safety net; and, unlike in North America, nearly everyone is trim, healthy and dressed like adults all with like dignity 'n' stuff.
The biggest challenge so far is that I can't understand a word anyone is saying, at least when they're speaking Danish. Now, that sounds kind of trivially obvious, Danish being a foreign language to me and all. So let me clarify. It's not that I don't know the meaning of the words that people are saying in this foreign language (though that too); it's that I can't understand what the hell they said. I could not take what someone says and transliterate it into a string of letters and then look up that string of letters in a Danish-English dictionary and determine the meaning of the word.
Danish stands out among languages for not being pronounced anything like how it is spelled. Consonants and syllables get smooshed together into this indistinct paste. The other day, one of my housemates asked another for the kitchen roll (i.e. paper towels.) The Danish word for this item is kokkenruller--superficially, four syllables, including a distinct k, n, r and l sound.
In fact, the word is pronounced with one and a half syllables: "kughghruh."
The closest analogy I can think of in English is where words like "worcestershire" get pronounced "wooster." Imagine that that rule applies to every word in the language and you start to understand the principle of Danish.
Actually, the "o" in kokkenruller is that Scandinavian o-like thing with a slash through it. Not only do they not pronounce their consonants, apparently they had to make up a bunch of new vowels that look a lot like existing vowels but make different sounds and--just to make things interesting--lie at the end of the alphabet. So o-with-a-slash, a-e dipthong, and a-with-an-orange-on-its-head all come after z, with evident implications for someone trying to look up a word.
I'll keep trying to learn the language. But if I need to wipe up a spill in a hurry, I'm liable to fall back on English.
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