“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
Cesare Pavese
When I started traveling I noticed that everything was much more different than I imagined.
I wasn't really expecting anything, I did not even know what to expect, but everything was so different from the way I use to see things, understand logic, life, way of life, habits, well, all of it. And this, kind of surprised me.
This is when involuntary I started judging.
I felt the need to share so I started to write and describe for my friends (with an assumed subjective point of view) the misfortunes that I was running into during the travelings.
What I was telling them seemed to made them laugh, the things that went wrong, the unexpected, the misunderstandings, my claiming that others should act this way or the other.
Soon I found out that the common sense while traveling is not to expect the people, the country you are visiting, to change habits in order to make you feel "at home", but that you are the one who should adapt and accept whatever the way of life or the logic of the place might be; which eventually I did.
"Travelers never think that they are the foreigners."
Mason Cooley
(Nevertheless I still want to make the world better and I still think that things could or should be improved here and there... I can't see with good eyes poverty and I appreciate more profoundly the chance that I got not to be born or live in some of the places I've seen.)
So, what I am trying to say, is that I am not complaining about the "bad things" that happened and I am not blaming nor being condescending regarding the people or the places I've been, I am just trying to make fun, exaggerate maybe, and keep a proudly-subjective-point-of-view about the way I lived and I have seen these things.
I just wrote about the stuff that I would like reading about (sorry, selfish) because I think that for the historical events or landscapes descriptions, there are others that can do or have done it, much better.
So do not take it all "mot à mot" , literally, I am not trying to convince you not to go some place, and I certainly enjoyed a lot being there, in spite of the noise, horns, humidity, whatever !
Every place deserve to be seen.
Just that personally, I see no interest in telling you about the two inches thick carpet I was walking on in some five star hotels (yes, we did enjoyed some of those too), or about the king size beds with silk sheets, or the shops and shoppings I've done...
I like making a stop on the things I didn't quite enjoy at the time or better said, the things that surprised me by their difference and left a mark on my scar tissue of my mind.
I write about the potholes on the road but I certainly do not forget to enjoy the journey.
"The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see."
G.K. Chesterton
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
St. Augustine
And more:
“Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.” - Mohammed
“When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.” - Edward Dahlberg
No one realizes how beautiful is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow." - Lin Yutang
“People don’t take trips - trips take people.” - John Steinbeck
“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.” -Robert Louis Stevenson
“Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels.” - Nikos Kazantzakis.
