Travel

There are 3 posts filed in Travel (this is page 1 of 1).

Splish sploosh I was having a boosh

I did most of my reading yesterday in the bathtub. I’m an avid bath reader to begin with, but I’ve got a case of the flu that keeps giving me the chills, so I’ve been making a bunch of bubble baths to help raise my body temperature.

The last couple of weeks have been tough on my physical health. I had some kind of stomach bug last Wednesday (“stomach bugs” are almost always food-borne illness) and this week a flu has literally decimated my school. I’m staying hydrated, eating saltines, and bathing more than that chick from Splash.

(I know her name is Daryl Hannah. Every guy my age knows her name is Daryl Hannah, but I thought it’d be cooler if I seemed nonchalant about it.)

Marco Polo has just crossed the Gobi desert and relayed the tale of a village where husbands let their wives sleep with visitors who pass through. (It’s called “being a good host.”) The government told the people of the village to stop it because that was weird, but the villagers wrote a letter saying, “Please, please, please let our spouses sleep with strangers; it’s tradition!” and the government responded by saying, “Oh, alright. Fine. You guys can keep boning vagrants. Who are we to stand in the way of tradition?”

The Travels of Marco Polo makes me think about travel, naturally, but particularly the way most Americans tend to blast through their trips like they’re trying to speed-run Paris. For us, travel is full of maps and time tables and lists of all the things we have to do and see and eat. A lot of us come back from vacation more exhausted than we were when we left.

This wasn’t the case for Marco Polo, though. Marco Polo traveled around the Silk Road and China for about 24 years. That’s about a third of his life, and he wasn’t living it all go, go, GO! He would stay in one place for quite some time, and it’s not easy to understand what that is like.

In one scene, Marco Polo talks about these hills that are so pleasant and beautiful and bountiful that people go up there when they’re sick and are (as if by magic) healed. Marco attests to the healing properties of the area by saying that he’d been sick for about a year but got better once he saw how cool those hills were.

Sick. For a year.

More so than the magic of that particular hillside, the interesting thing to take from this is that Marco Polo didn’t see what he was doing as some kind of trip or vacation. It was just life. He wasn’t rushing around trying to knock the Taj Mahal off his checklist; he was more akin to a nomad. His home was the road.

And what a lifestyle! I don’t know if I’m jealous of him — he was ill for a whole year of this journey, after all — but it’s fun to imagine what life would be like if you just … didn’t have a permanent residence.

Are there still people in the world who live like that? Other than, like, you know, homeless people?

I prefer cotton it’s more durable

The Old Boy informs me that I spend too much time talking about school, and that when I talk about school I sound like I’m complaining. “Nobody will read that because nobody wants to hear teachers whinge,” his notes said. “That’s the entire basis of America’s education system.”

I wish they’d never showed him how to send text messages, but he has a point. School is insidious; it seeps into too many aspects of my daily life and I shouldn’t let it.

Anywho. Let’s talk about the Silk Road.

Pictured above, the Silk Road is one of the most famous trade routes ever and has been utilized in one form or another for several centuries. Connecting Europe with the Middle East and Asia, you can tell by looking that the Silk Road goes through all sorts of fun places where you aren’t at all likely to get kidnapped or murdered. The Silk Road is also well known for passing through areas of tremendous political stability where there are hardly any wars at all and everyone gets along pretty well. It is such a chill part of the world that most travelers choose to go down the Silk Road on recumbent bikes, their only real complaint that they wished there were more lemonade stands along the way.

In all seriousness, before sea routes became more practical, the Silk Road was one of the only ways to spread wealth and culture between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It may not be safe, but it is an exciting road that connected a whole slew of ancient empires. If you were a trader or a merchant, this is where the action was.

In the year 1271, a guy named Marco Polo traveled down the Silk Road causing a ruckus and making all sorts of new pals, and news of his exploits were one of the things that sparked a tremendous European interest in the dealings of China.

If this sounds familiar, it should. We all studied it in 6th grade (but forgot most of it by 9th).

Anywho. In the 1980s, after a couple hundred years of the Silk Road being impassable due to wars and closed borders and stuff, a Scottish historian and traveler named William Dalrymple realized that, with the right visas and a little planning, it might be possible to travel the whole lengthy of the Silk Road again. He decided to give it a try, and this book is the result:

It’s pretty good so far. I do worry that it’s going to pan out to be something spiritual, that the author is going to somehow channel Marco Polo or something and experience a profound awakening by sleeping in the same ditch where Polo once relieved himself.

I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally spiritual about traveling, and it bugs me when travel writrts pretend there is. Can it be spiritual? Sure, but I tend to think of it on an (auto)mechanical level. You can think of yourself as a Datsun pick-up truck, and your spirit as, perhaps, a carburetor. If you travel around long enough, you’re eventually going to realize that your carburetor needs replacing. Same for the tires and the windshield wipers and the oil and eventually the whole transmission’ll needs work. It doesn’t matter where you are when it happens; all that you need in order to make these realizations is to keep moving.

Traveling changes you no matter where you go. You learn empathy, you learn patience, you learn humility. (All very, very spiritual.) But you could be driving across Alaska when you learn these things, or on a boat in Indonesia, or hanging out on a beach in Brazil.

My point is that following the path of Marco Polo might seem cool, but there’s nothing inherently better about it than any other road you may travel. The author certainly will garner no better understanding of the actual Marco Polo than he would if he were swimming through the canals of Venice playing a game of Marco Polo with the citizenry.

Still, it was probably a wild trip and I’m excited to hear about it.

Blog: Food Over My Head, Roof in My Belly

Last week was an odd one. There was meeting on top of meeting at school, with one whole day given over to “Professional Development.” This is when everybody in the English department gets together to listen to presentations about textbooks and online resources.

Classes for teachers, basically.

I get the feeling that, because teachers are teaching classes all the time, they really want to believe that more classes is always a good thing. Sort of like if there were a meeting of gastroenterologists and they all went to get colonoscopies, thinking, “This is what regular people do!” It’s fine enough in theory, and everyone can do with a good flushing out, but sometimes all you want is a chance to sit down and do your goddamned work.

Plus, most of these “Professional Development” sessions are led by textbook salesmen. Shills, in other words.

After such a long week, I was really hoping to unwind. Sarah and I do this by just sort of existing at home. We don’t go out too much and aren’t all that adventurous. Sarah knits and reads. I read and write. The cat vacillates between her lap and mine and we make a real time of it.

We had to go places, though, on Friday. My dad asked us to drive to where he lives so we could visit a Brazilian steakhouse. It was only a 45-minute drive and we honestly haven’t been visiting…anybody as often a we should, so we hopped on down and made a night of it.

The pseudo-Brazilians kept coming around with meat on skewers and all of us had…too much. (The salted pork was particularly delicious.)

The next day, my older brother came to town for a sports thing and brought a whole bunch of beef for us to take home, so now our freezer is full. This is a thing that happens often in Nebraska — a friend or relative kills a whole cow and spreads the beef around. Like Jesus except with red meat instead of fish.

A part of me wishes we were the adventurous people we used to be — not all that long ago we were living in Indonesia, eating shakshuka on the beach, driving a scooter through rice paddies and forests where monkeys steal cell phones. I spend too much time these days wondering, “What changed?”

When did we become a couple of chumps who just sit at home in Nebraska of all places?

It happened, as many other things did, during the pandemic. I feel like we haven’t been able to “recover” since then, as if the world has been getting slowly and inexorably worse in every measurable way. Our health, both mental and physical, haven’t been great. Everything financial is pretty much f*cked. Everyone is divided, storms are destroying everything, and it turns out Joker 2 probably won’t be very good.

As often happens when I’m in this kind of mood (I’m sick today with some kind of flu and feeling blue about it), I tend to blame myself for things that are going on.

Things aren’t even really that bad. We have food and a roof over our head. We’re getting older and maybe want to settle down a bit. I’ve got to practice gratitude. Even though I’m not all that good at it.

Still. I look around where I live, look at what’s going on in America, and I think, “Why in the hell is everyone working so hard to maintain….THIS?” We’re like people on the Titanic hanging up “ICEBERG 2024” signs and complaining about all the immigrants locked up below decks. Who would want to shovel coal in that scenario?

I don’t have an answer. But grading papers in which students write that Elon Musk INVENTED the goddamned ELECTRIC CAR to HELP HUMANITY makes me wonder what in the hell I’m losing sleep over.

Sigh. Food over my head. Roof in my belly. This is my mantra.