Slow Travel

A common criticism I’ve encountered of American travellers to the UK and Europe is that they have a pronounced tendency to rush around and try to ‘do’ (their verb of choice) everything, without really ‘seeing’ anything.  In part I think this is a somewhat unfair charge to lay at some of my fellow Americans’ door.  For many people from the United States an extended trip across the Atlantic is a once in the lifetime experience and their hurry is the fruit not of insensitivity but of a very genuine, nearly desperate desire to make the most of an encounter with the old world.  It’s also the case that some of the non-Americans I have met who were most critical of American check-list style tourism then proceeded to recount tales of their own visits to the United States that involved itineraries covering vast distances in what, to most Americans, would seem a ludicrously short amount of time.  The fact is that when you live in or near a place your ideas of sensible distances to be covered and time passed is very different stemming as it does from a greater degree of intimacy than that possessed by someone who has just flown 6,000 miles on a jet.

I’m not, however, absolving all Americans (or anyone else for that matter) of the charge of rushing around like headless chickens with Lonely Planet implants to guide them.  I’ve known more than my fair share of people from the United States who seem to treat travelling more as some combination of a chore to be got through and consumable to gobbled up with the packaging left strewn at the side of the road.  Not infrequently I’ve even come into contact with people that would clearly have been much happier had they never left confines of some American Main Street.  When I studied abroad as an undergraduate there was a boy from the South who would only eat at MacDonald’s because he couldn’t cook and wouldn’t trust ‘foreign’ restaurants.  He would only eat the chicken products though because he was convinced that British beef was universally infected with BSE.  I’ve met more than one New Yorker who has taken great delight in loudly expounding on the fact that, in their eyes, the more reserved manners and more considerate social deference that is often to be encountered in European capitals belies a spinelessness and lack of imagination that any one from their city is proud to deny through behaviour that the uninitiated might consider somewhat aggressive as well as flat rude.  Once I even met someone who had moved to Italy for a year.  This person hated tomatoes unless they were on a pizza.  Pizza was defined as coming from Pizza Hut and that which originated elsewhere was some sort of ersatz by-product of poison production no allowed to touch the lips let alone pass through the gullet.  I could go on, but my point really isn’t to attack others.

I’ve certainly been guilty of misbehaving through cultural ignorance and not taking proper notice of my surroundings or the people in them.  Some of my transgressions I still don’t understand like why it’s unacceptable when I’m waiting in queue at my bank branch to touch my toes when I have a stiff back.  I did that once and while I didn’t waggle my ass in anyone’s face or break wind or do anything I thought obtrusive it’s not an experiment I’ll ever repeat.  When I’m at the pub with friends and I have little money I still haven’t worked out how to withhold my participation from the practice of buying rounds in turn.  Instead I have to state flatly and in a way that is clumsy if not vulgar that ‘I can’t afford to buy more than 3 drinks tonight.  There are five of us here.  I will not accept drinks from anyone nor will I buy them for anyone else.”  Friends who’ve grown up in this country seem to be able to extricate themselves from this predicament without embarrassing themselves the way I do and, in situations like these, I return to being the confused, over-earnest American I was when I first visited this country.

It’s even the case that, while I never rushed from site to site, landmark to landmark the way I’ve seen some do, that it took me a long time to learn how to slow my pace of travel in situations where it was appropriate and beneficial to do so.  I was never completely mindless, but my own personality and sense that I should be on the move often led me to a freneticism that, in retrospect, prevented more beneficial reflection.  Then, in 2004 I began keeping a travel journal.

I don’t use it every time I go some place; a long weekend away for example doesn’t really offer fruitful opportunities for writing in my brown leather volume.  I’m also not about to make any claims that my journal contains any great insights or startling revelations.  Instead it’s partly a record of where I’ve been and what I’ve seen, often an account of what I cooked and/or ate.  It includes any little observations or questions that my have struck me in the course of the previous day or two and I like to glue postcards, maps and other little mementos to the pages.  My travel journal is a book written entirely for myself and that would be the case even if my handwriting wasn’t 92% indecipherable to any eye but my own.

So what value does it really have?  Well, when I look back through it months or years after I’ve made an entry or series of entries I’m able to re-enter my mental and emotional state of the time in a way I’ve never found possible on my own or with the aid of photographs.  Once I’ve written them down it’s not uncommon for me to return to the reflections and questions I had on visiting a certain monument, museum or hiking up some French foothill.  In this sense my travel journal helps me keep something of the curiosity and open-minded wonder that I think is so central to good travelling alive even when the only place I’ve been in a week is the corner shop.

More important, however, is the fact that when I keep my journal I’m forced to stop and think about what I’ve been seeing or doing, to really reflect on where I’ve been.  It’s not uncommon for me to feel reluctant before starting an entry, especially if my companions are doing something noisier and possibly more interesting.  Often I’ll write early in the mornings or later in the evenings, finding a quiet place to put pen to paper relatively undisturbed.  Never once have I finished an entry without being glad I’d taken the time to write it.  That’s where the greatest value of keeping this journal lies, in the writing while travelling.  When I take the time out to scribble some lines I’m forced to think and see and be glad, humble and confused and recognise that I’m all those things and more in a way that’s enjoyable and instructive.  Travelling at its best is, I think, just as much about a mental journey as about distance covered and site seen.  Ideally the two are integral parts of the same whole and writing my entries helps me bring those two parts closer together.

Forget American Express. . .  I’m not leaving home without my little brown book.

Whose Apples?

In September of 2007 I found myself in Avignon, France in good company at the end of a week-long visit to Provence.  My companions and I had spent most of our time in the region based in Châteauneuf-du-Pape but were closing off our visit with two nights in Avignon.  It had been a very good trip and one that I was much in need of.  I was a fortnight off the submission deadline for my PhD dissertation.  My supervisor had signed the forms allowing me to submit it and apart from adding a few commas here and there and some slight rephrasing it was in the form in which I would be examined on.  Had I been at home I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from tinkering with it in a way that would have been pointless, but that would have extended the stressful period of intense revision I’d been engaged in for nearly two months.  The southern French sun, the places we visited, the wine and food all helped me to breath again and actually relax.

We’d passed a very full day in Avignon strolling around soaking up the atmosphere, visiting the well known bridge and Le Palais des Papes.  I’d been particularly excited by the latter as I knew Dickens had visited the place.  He wrote about his tour of the former Papal palace in Pictures From Italy and the vivid imaginings it had inspired in him regarding the torturing of heretics when the place was still in use making some strong criticisms of the Catholic ‘brand’ of Christianity in the process.  I’d written about the technical aspects of these passages at some length and it was nice to feel that I was walking in a place where one of my favourite authors once stopped and reflected.  It also reminded me that there was some connection between the real world and the realm of intellectual analysis of texts that I’d isolated myself in to such a great extent of late.

After our peregrinations about town we were all ready for a fine supper.  We spent a good deal of time strolling side streets reading the menus of the smaller venues that were relatively full.  We almost ate at a Couscousery.  In the end we all agreed on a very intimate place serving traditional French cuisine.  It wasn’t haute cuisine nor was it entirely bistro food.  The place was very nicely decorated in a way that was tasteful even if the taste wasn’t ours.  It wasn’t.   There were small crystal chandeliers, plush carpet that looked like it was probably replaced rather than hoovered when dirty and a very efficient and friendly staff.  The table cloths, cut from a cream coloured fabric were heavy and fine.  Overseeing all of this with a mixture of pride and concern on her face was the proprietress who stood quietly in a corner and directed her staff with hand gestures and soft noises often anticipating her patrons desires before they themselves were conscious of them.  Her dress appeared to be cut from the same cloth as the table cloths.

My French is non-existent.  Growing up in California I took years of Spanish lessons.  Then I moved to England and I’ve spent more time in French-speaking places that in those where Spanish is spoken.  One of the few things I can manage to make some headway with are French menus.  Because I’m food obsessed I can remember what food terms I’ve seen elsewhere on other menus and get a decent idea of what’s on offer.  I was happily perusing the French menu I’d been provided with when She-of-the-table-cloth-dress appeared by my side and handed me an English translation of that day’s menu.  Clearly she was  proud of it and I thought one or two my companions might it want so I accepted the proffered paper.

For the most part the translation was fine.  It had clearly been done by someone with a working knowledge of English rather than a professional a fact that I found rather charming.  It did the job of explaining what the dishes were without pretending to some sort of grandiose usage of adjectives of the type I’ve seen on other translated menus.  This establishment was clearly happy to let the food, once served, speak for itself.  In the event the food spoke eloquently and could not have had a finer advocate than the marriage of flavours it provided.

That being said there was one little mistake, perhaps the result of some confusion over idiomatic expressions, that made me laugh out loud at the time.  I still chuckle when I think about it.  If the proud and proper woman who was running the fantastic restaurant I found myself in had known the error her translated menu contained I’m sure she would have been mortified.  She may have told me to grow up and get my juvenile mind out of the gutter.  One of the starters was a dish built around scallops removed from their shells.  It sounded fantastic and it didn’t disappoint.  Had I not known the French term for scallop meat, noix de Saint Jacques, I doubt I would have ordered it.  You see, the English menu didn’t translate noix de Saint Jacques, as scallops.  Instead it called them ‘Saint Jack’s Knob Apples.’

I’m a very adventurous diner, but even at a place serving delicious French food I think the images conjured by that phrase would have led me to conclude that poor Jack’s Apples were one delicacy I’d refrain from trying.