Skip to main content

The Pleasures of Travelling


People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, 
the kind of people they ignore at home. 

                                                                                                           -Dagobert D. Runes

Much has been said about travelling, about how it exposes us to a new culture, reveals endlessly a series of bright and beautiful sights that one could never find at home, how it reawakens in us a sense of childish curiosity and awe and reignites the explorer in our soul. And so it goes on and on.

The atmosphere these thoughts create is in itself extremely exciting. One can probably go delirious deciding where to go and what to do there, even before one has already been there. And when we finally arrive at our destination, the novelty of it all culminates in a visual orgasm, one after the other. “Waah, so nice!” is heard for the umpteenth time. Out comes the camera and the building is photographed from all 360 degrees and uploaded onto Facebook for the pleasure of the deprived at home. And before our eyes truly settle on the sight, we are off again, to our next destination. Our behaviour strangely resembles camels drinking huge amounts of water in face of an extended period without it. We gulp as many places as we can, because once home, travelling is too expensive, or assumed to be so. Therefore cramming so many places within a short period allows us to draw on the bliss of memory at some later boring point in our lives.

Besides, there is nothing much to explore or learn back home. Just a bunch of multi-coloured people with their occasionally noisy festivals and practises that we are used to by now. The museums and parks, well, that’s more for the tourists and the retired. Besides why care? I have been to Paris, I have been to Amsterdam, I have been to Berlin. What is ‘thank you’ in German? Well, it does not matter; the Germans understand English. Why are there the ‘xxx’ signs all across Amsterdam? Probably has to do something with all the sex and the porn around. And the Italians who were living with me in my dorm, well, they seemed nice, but I did not have any time to talk to them.

Because you see, I am a traveller.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sparing the Rod

 She gave me a look of deep displeasure, not very atypical of the look most members of the opposite gender gave me. “You know you can’t do that in Germany?”, she asserted with the same authority my mother used to tell me about not messing around in her kitchen.  “Yes I am aware”, I meekly responded, knowing well that any kind of argument about this would not end well, so it was better to close off the topic quietly and unlike the kitchen, I could not afford to get kicked out of Germany. She was not the first to respond with such hostility to what seemed like the most natural of things in my experience. The last one who told me the same was a teacher I had met at a party. When she sounded shocked that I was ok with it and said it was not right, I (with some alcoholic courage) had retorted, “How would you discipline them then if they do something wrong?” “I would tell them I am very disappointed with them”. I almost laughed. However, that was very much the theory of my new frien...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Eye for an Eye

"Something that three or four years ago you told me was one of the touchstones of maturity: being nice to people even when they’re not nice to you…" - William Styron It was an plan that came out of nowhere. Perhaps half depressed by the winter and half depressed by the inactivity at work, there was sufficient turmoil in the mind to create these type of plans and then let it fester, until something that started off with a what-if turned into a why-not. It would have been the perfect revenge for the past hurt and humiliation that was yet to completely heal.  The circumstances were similar. On one side, an eager visitor who had traveled far to say "Hello" and on the other side, a host, bewildered and surprised by this visit. In the first case, the host would not receive the visitor, who would turn back humiliated and vowing never again. Now the roles were reversed and I was the host. What if I agreed to receive? What if in reality I did not plan to receive? ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Passage to Vietnam : Part 2 - The Food

Imagine your friend passes you a fully boiled egg, garnished in onion and sauce. You use your chopsticks, lift it up to your mouth and bite of half the egg. It does not tear away as easily as you thought it would. And it tastes queer. Then while chewing away at that half, you look down at the other half on your plate and you see tiny grey feathers and a tiny leg bone staring back at you. My exact feeling at that moment was like I was making love to a woman and she suddenly reveals in the middle that she used to be a man. In short, I wanted to puke. I am not a big fan of Vietnamese cuisine. During my 18 days stay there, my Viet friends were kind enough to bring me around and let me taste about every kind of street food and drink, from snails to sticky rice to Viet baguettes to local alcohol. Other than certain items here and there, I generally thought the food lacked any kind of strong flavour to it. Plus, for some reason, I could not understand why the Viets went to the extent of ea...
Post a Comment
Read more