Slow Down, You Move Too Fast

 Today’s article is written for the Reach To Teach Teach Abroad Blog Carnival, a monthly series that focuses on providing helpful tips and advice to ESL teachers around the globe. The host for this month is Heather Richards, here you can find other similar articles. I’ll be posting a new ESL related article to this blog on the 5th of every month. Check back for more articles, and if you’d like to contribute to next month’s Blog Carnival, please get in touch with Dean at dean@reachtoteachrecruiting.com, and he’ll let you know how you can start participating!

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Slow travel is the best travel to me. It's hard to come by, and I think any travel is better than none, but to me, a quick week in Istanbul or a few days in Athens is so unsatisfactory. I'm left with some good times, great photos, and a yearning to learn so much more. 

Slow travel gives you a chance to be acquainted. You get a favorite little shop, and routes that you walk. You get a routine. If you are volunteering or teaching, you have responsibilities and deadlines and a work schedule. This might sound like the opposite of travel - all of the terrible daily regular life stuff that you were running from. But in a new country these little slices of "regular" life feel fresh and different. You name all your favorite stray animals. You know which store sells the cheapest eggs or which restaurant won't make you sick. 

 I travel to know the culture just as much as to see the sights. To me, coming away with an experience with local culture is far more important than a selfie in front of Big Ben (though I've definitely done that and I am not ashamed at all).

 A week in a place teaches nothing cultural except perhaps how people react to lost tourists. (Unofficial Observations: Yerevan is really friendly, but they don't usually speak English. In the Dominican Republic they will help you and then make you pay them by using guilt or persistence.) 

I think my love of slow travel is connected to the anthropologist in me. (Full disclosure: I'm in graduate school for anthropology right now!) Anthropologists have to spend two years in a different community and get at least one disease. They stay for around two years so they may see situations repeated - New Year's Celebrations, birthday parties, harvest rituals. They get a disease so they can have bragging rights. (Check!)  They study traditions and religion, local economies and kinship, gender relations and agriculture. The point is that the anthropologist, while always an outsider, should be so familiar to everyone as to be almost invisible. A part of the landscape. This familiarity allows them to understand and have access to the culture in a way which would not be possible for a tourist or distinguished guest.

The familiarity of schedule can do the same. It is only through routine and repetition that you as the traveler start to see patterns. I learned when my neighbors burned trash and when the preachers led revivals. I literally timed my evening walks by when the cows came home (have you tried to take a walk through a herd of cows? It's not pleasant). 

The benefit of slow travel is that you come away knowing something. You don't come away with just a fun story and a new profile picture, you don't come away with just a whirlwind idea of old churches and sweeping landscapes, you come away with knowledge, knowledge that changes you and your perceptions.

 Maybe the knowledge changes you because you've realized that how you do things isn't "normal" or "natural", it's cultural. Maybe the great scope of a history and people that you never knew about humbles you. Maybe knowing your neighbor's story shifts your priorities. Maybe you discover new passions from learning of art or music you never knew about. Maybe your heart breaks a little, and maybe it rejoices. 

My professor once told me a story about how World Bank officials, who make huge decisions about foreign aid, will be sent to stay in the place they may be allocating aid to. The length of that stay? Usually around three days. Three days.

In three days, you might be able to pick up several new facts and five new misconceptions about the people you are staying with. In three months, all of your preconceived notions and outsider biased misconceptions are shattered (hopefully) and through experience and relationship and study, you actually know a little about what that place and that community is about

Why I love anthropology is because it is firmly against outsider arrogance. Anthropologists don't claim to know a place until they have been there for years. And even after years, they would never presume to truly understand what living in that culture means. They are always aware of outsider bias.

We praise travel as a means to destroy prejudice, but "quick" travel can build it as well as destroy it. What does someone who spends a week in Port-au-Prince, Haiti actually know about the Haitian lived experience? What do they know from a week spent in museums Paris or Shanghai about the culture and values? Nothing probably, but now they think they know something.

 Assumed knowledge is more dangerous than self-aware ignorance.

(It's also just obnoxious. I know. I was almost that person.) 

I could give examples of times when assumed knowledge was dangerous -  from historical colonial rule or anthropology or recent international development, but then you would be depressed. 

I lived for six months in Peru, four months in Georgia and another four in the Dominican Republic. I do not presume to fully know the lived experience of being Peruvian or Georgian or Dominican. But through study, reading, immersion, and really just time, time spent in long, slow days sitting on stoops and around kitchen tables, I did come away with knowledge that changed me. The sense of healing from violence and connections with the land in Peru, the ancient depth of history and pride in Georgia, the constant hustle and social intensity in the Dominican Republic. I don't know much, but I know something. And I know far more than from my whirlwind trips through Istanbul, the Greek isles and Armenia.

Quick travel can be amazing. It can be fun and life changing. It can be a needed escape or relaxation or mind-shift. It can raise questions about what you are seeing and experiencing, but remember, you aren't always getting answers. You aren't always getting depth of knowledge. I'll always choose quick travel if the alternative is no travel, and often those are the choices. But slow travel memories are my favorites. Slow travel is what made me who I am. 

Maybe you don't care about cultural insights, or culture at all. Maybe you really do just want to see sights and nothing more. Well, I think you are entirely missing the point and also missing out on a lot of fun, embarrassing stories, friendships and changes to grow. But you probably think I'm an overly academic weirdo who probably made up their field (anthropology, what??), so I guess we're even. 

Maybe you would love to experience slow travel and gain cultural insights, but don't have the time. Often, life is too fast for slow travel - or even slow travel might not feel like enough time. How do we slow our travel down enough to garner meaningful cultural insights and come away with some local knowledge?

Some slowness tips:

1. Read. Get a novel or an in-depth non-fiction account about the place you are visiting. NOT a travel guide - those are well and good, but I'm talking about an in-depth cultural study. Get something by a local author if possible. Or maybe the book that every school kid is required to read while there, whatever the locals find essential reading. Read it before you go if you can, as it will open your eyes to phenomenon you otherwise might overlook.  I read Bread and Ashes while in Georgia, and In the Time of the Butterflies and Feast of the Goat  after my time in the Dominican Republic (I couldn't find them in country - but after is better than nothing!). 

2. Have a free day. If you are only passing through, but have a little extra time, build in a non-scheduled day. If you are there for a few months but are kept super busy, clear your calendar for a day. Don't sight see, don't go on a tour, don't call home. Just wander. Sit in the square. Take a walk. Talk to vendors. Read that book in a plaza. Run a few small errands. 

3. Study the language. This is touted all of the time, and it's true that you cannot understand a culture without understanding a language. Study before you go and while you are there. Even just a few phrases will help. Slow down by having a slow, stilted, grammatically erroneous conversation with a local. 

4. Ask a local AND do the tourist stuff. Sometimes, locals never get around to their own tourist sights (I've done that...), but they might know the very best little pub. Tourists sights are usually popular for a reason and bring insights of their own (here's looking at you Hagia Sophia - you blew my mind.) Try to do both. 

So take it slow. Sip your tea. Chat with your neighbor if that's culturally appropriate. Read books. Be open to change.

And maybe study a little anthropology while you're at it. 

Once Upon a Hostel

Today’s article is written for the Reach To Teach Teach Abroad Blog Carnival, a monthly series that focuses on providing helpful tips and advice to ESL teachers around the globe. I'll be posting a new ESL related article on my blog on the 5th of every month. Check back for more articles, and if you'd like to contribute to next month'sBlog Carnival, please get in touch with me in the comments, and I'll let you know how you can start participating! 



I spent Christmas in Istanbul, which is weird. The only signs that much of the world was currently celebrating were some lights and a lot of very creepy Santa robots. Christmas Eve my friends and I found a mass in Turkish, English and Italian. We exchanged gifts on Christmas day and ran around the city looking for peppermint, which we never found...not even in Turkish Delight. It was my first ever Christmas away from home and I was a little disappointed, missing my family, and sad about the upcoming goodbye from my then boyfriend. 

We decided to go to bed early as we all had buses to catch the next day. We met our hostel roommates, a West African, a Frenchman and an American who was The Hostel Guy (every hostel has one...a guy who came and just never left so now they work there). In our rickety metal bunks we all tried to shut out the bar music and settle in to our over-heated room. 

Around 3 am we were rudely woken up by a returning resident - he loudly and drunkenly slammed into his bed, fell over, finally climbed up to his top bunk and collapsed. We tried to still our startled hearts and return to sleep. 

Fifteen minutes later we heard the sound of a chainsaw being used within the sticky mud of a swamp. And by this I mean the drunk man was loudly, moistly snoring. He would pause for a few moments and then reach deep into his chest and pull a loud rumble through his mucus filled sinuses and deliver it to us all. Then he would seem to stop breathing for much longer than anyone should, until he hacked his way back to the land of the living with a grunt that shook the walls. Five minutes into this and my bunk-mate was giggling. Five minutes more and we were all becoming worried that the next snore would be his last. "Maybe we should turn him over?" I suggested.

The Hostel Guy, who was in the bunk under him, stood up in only his undies, rake-thin and bearded, and nudged Drunk Guy. "What the bloody 'ell?" Drunk Guy pontificated. "Uhm...you're snoring a lot dude..." "Yeh, well, ok."

Ten minutes later we were all wishing the man would just snort up his nasal passages and be done with it. Instead Hostel Guy skipped the waking up part and just flipped Drunk Guy on his back so we could all stop worrying about him choking to death. This made absolutely no change. My Travel Buddy nudged his feet a few times to wake him back up. He muttered some curses. Nothing we were trying worked and in the sort of telepathic conferences that sometimes happen when random groups of people meet in dire circumstances, we all came to the consensus that we wouldn't be sleeping that night unless Something Was Done. 

"Maybe we could just move his mattress out into the hall?" Someone suggested. I don't remember who, but it wasn't me. My Travel Buddy spearheaded the effort - "lets just all pick up his mattress and move it! Come on!" She carefully climbed down from her bunk. The Hostel Guy was in. Frenchman stood up, also only in white-tighties, but no one was complaining about his near nudity at the moment (or probably at any other moment, in fact). My then boyfriend (fully clothed) climbed down to help. The West African refused to get involved, stating that he thought it was a bad idea, and I stood by as witness.

Now, moving a sleeping/drunk man without his consent is probably a bad idea. However, you take people that are frustrated and sleep-deprived enough and they will find a solution to a noise problem, no matter how ethically ambiguous it is.  The Intrepid Problem Solvers placed themselves around the mattress, their shoulders just coming to the bunk bed frame. They slowly eased the mattress from the frame, pausing when Drunk Guy snorted particularly loud. Finally it was off the bed frame - I snapped a photo and almost died of asphyxiation from trying not to laugh. The Problem Solvers carried the still sleeping man and the mattress to the doorway and realized - it wouldn't fit. They slowly lowered it to the floor and stared down at the Man. Now what? 

Suddenly, the Manager arrived.
"What is going on here?!" He whisper-yelled. The Problem Solvers looked like kids caught stealing. "Uhmmm..." French guy spoke up, "He was snoring so loud and we thought..."

The full weight of how bad of an idea this was fell on all of us.

"Would you like it if someone did this to you!?" The manager actually yelled. Drunk Guy woke up. "Waazzz happening?" 

"You tell him!" The manager glared at the group. The most awkward silence I have ever encountered followed.

"Hey man," Hostel Guy took one for the team. "You were snoring really loudly and we thought you could just...sleep somewhere else...so we thought we could move you..."

"Yeah ok." Drunk Guy got up. 

"How would you feel if someone did this to you?" The manager asked us again, glaring. Then he left, the Drunk Guy swaying after him. 

All was quiet. And in our shared crime, our diverse little group had bonded and we went on to traipse across EurAsia together. Well, not the last part, but there was a real bond.

If you enjoyed this bit of frivolity, check out other stories from the Reach to Teach series by following this link here!

How Living Abroad Makes You a Better Person

Today’s article is written for the Reach To Teach Teach Abroad Blog Carnival, a monthly series that focuses on providing helpful tips and advice to ESL teachers around the globe. I'll be posting a new ESL related article on my blog on the 5th of every month. Check back for more articles, and if you'd like to contribute to next month's Blog Carnival, please get in touch with me at dingleym@gmail.com, and I'll let you know how you can start participating! 



"What is my life?"

I asked myself that a lot when I was abroad - not in an existential "meaning of life" sort of way but in a "how did I end up riding in a purple van down a country road in Eastern Europe with a bunch of drunk and singing locals at 2 am on a Wednesday" sort of way. The happy, the awful, the ridiculous, it all piled together into bright colors and voices and the smells of city streets, cow poop, homemade wine, ocean breeze, coca tea. I wondered what my life was, and how I would tell these stories. I didn't wonder, not nearly as often as I should have, who I was. Who I was becoming, the person I was creating by choosing this life of travel. But it has shaped me, for better or worse, and I think mostly better. 

I am a huge advocate of travel, for everyone. Whether it be the next town over or the next continent, travel teaches us about humanity. Not to pull an "AP essay trick" but I'm about to quote a famous but mostly noncontroversial American author-  Mark Twain once said:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

More specifically than just traveling, bopping around through hostels or booking a vacation once a year, living abroad can truly change you. Some people say it's not living abroad unless you are there for a year. I think it's being anywhere for a month or more where it's not vacation - somewhere you have a job, get a paycheck, have responsibilities, habits, daily schedules, connections. When you budget down to your very last peso to make it until your next payday and know exactly which colmado has the cheapest black beans, when you pick which path to take back from school depending on whether or not the cows are being herded yet or you spotted that crazy neighbor on her porch. Certainly, the longer you stay the more living you did. But living isn't only counted in time.

I've gained a number of strange quirks from traveling, and I certainly have not exorcised all my bad habits (like talking about myself too much - oh wait, I have a blog...helpful redirection or indulgence?) but I believe I have become a better person by living abroad, and I'm sure many other travelers would back that up. Some ways that I believe living abroad makes us all better - 

1. Humility 

When you are in a culture you don't fully understand, speaking a language not your own (or not speaking it), you might as well be five years old. It's humbling (and sometimes humiliating) to be spoken to like a toddler, left out of decisions because you won't understand, depending on the goodness of others for even the smallest of tasks. This came out the most when I lived with host families, first in Peru, then in the country of Georgia. They held my hand to cross the street, did all the talking for me, told me to change clothes when it was cold and chuckled at my attempts to assert my maturity. It's worse in places where you don't speak the language, you can't argue your point, defend or explain yourself or give any retort when they look at you with a face of condescension and pity. 

Even harder though was having things that were respected back home get nothing but a shrug. Did my neighbors in the Dominican Republic care that I had traveled, did well in university, held competitive internships? Nope. They just looked down on me for not being able to cook traditional Dominican food, not growing out my hair and not having a man. Feminism, independence, degrees and my tricky swing dance moves that got me invites to parties back home meant nothing to them. 

The most humbling was when I argued with my host family in Georgia about being sick. They didn't believe in germs, didn't listen to my warnings about spreading my throat infection, told me it was due to me showering at night, thought I was ridiculous for missing a party when I was shaking with fever and ignored my attempt at "I told you so" when they got sick from sharing unwashed water glasses. So even my elementary grasp of basic science leads to nothing but derision? How's a girl to get respect around here other than marrying the next door neighbor who wears Bill Cosby sweaters and making lots of Georgian babies?

 But it isn't all frustrating cultural stories - staring up at snow-capped mountains, wandering in perfectly built ancient cities, feeling lost in the majesty of the Hagia Sophia or in the midst of chanting in a tiny chapel - this is humbling. Realizing the plethora of music, poetry, art that I have never even heard of, the great stories I have never known. My stories, culture, childhood is just another among billions – nothing says that more than a foreign country, proud in its ancient history of conquests and kingdoms, that can’t care less that you do things differently. Opening up to their story is humbling in a healthy way. We are one of many, and many have gone before. 

2. Resourcefulness

Living abroad, whether it's in a posh apartment in Paris or in a hut in South America, draws on your resourcefulness. You must be resourceful in communicating, in doing all that pesky visa paperwork, in making new friends cross-culturally. I spent a lot of time in Georgia communicating via broken Georgian, hand-motions, google translate, photographs and random Italian and Spanish words. Long conversations were exhausting. 

Throw in a developing economy and somewhat shaky infrastructure and resourcefulness multiplies. We built a "sofa" in the DR out of mattresses and old sheets. One of my culinary creations was from Ramen noodles, onion, and beef jerky snacks someone gave me. (When you are on a budget...) (The Haitian kids I taught were even more amazing - creating toys out of discarded suitcases, old tin cans, scraps of wood.) Living abroad draws on sources of creativity that you never had to tap into before. 

3. Independence

Living abroad, especially at first, you are often totally dependent on the goodwill of those around you. But at times you must strike out on your own without the support system you are used to, often without the language you are used to, the cultural standards you are used to and definitely not the traffic rules you are used to. Living abroad helps you be independent in many ways, and figuring out transportation, whether to cross borders or just get across town, required the most independence I've ever had to muster. By the time I could use the Tbilisi metro without checking the map fifty times I was so proud I could burst. (Don't worry, I was humble again when I realized I had been taking the wrong marshutka, the one that required me to walk half an hour home, for a month. I could have been dropped off nearly at my door). Figuring out Peruvian micros and mototaxis, Georgian marshutkas, Dominican carritos - it all took a huge leap of faith, and a lot of getting lost and asking total strangers for help. But now, as I have just moved to a new city I feel confident enough to drive around, get lost, attempt the buses, explore. Public transportation isn't for the faint of heart, especially when you can't even fully pronounce your destinations name, but it will breed in you a feeling of freedom and independence like no other. If you can figure out how to get around, then you're free. You can come and go as you like and no matter how much of a child you feel in your Georgian village, a wide world awaits you and no one can stop you from going. 

Living abroad forces independence on you, taking you far from your support system and throwing you straight into the jungle. And that independence has to hold too - the support network may be waiting back home, but they will never truly understand your experiences when you return a different person. And to me the first step to independence is getting on that grimy, half-broken piece of machinery they call a bus and taking it where you will. 

5. Skills

Maybe you would say skills don't make you a better person - then I would say, ok, but if you were stuck on a desert island who would be the better person, the really nice guy or the guy who knew how to make fish hooks out of his toenails? Who would be saving the lives then, huh? While you might not learn life saving techniques abroad, you will pick up skills, some that you might have never known you needed. The skills I can add to my Resume of Life (which is waaaay more interesting than my Resume of Work) are Traditional Georgian dancing, cooking rice the Haitian way, hand washing bedding in a bucket, rejecting men in various cultural contexts, chasing away dogs, chickens and (gently) children, drinking wine out of a ram's horn and looking good without much opportunity to bathe. And if nothing else, you pick up great stories to tell at parties.

 But seriously, living abroad gives you many skills, such as language skills and, really just as important, the ability to perceive cross-culturally, to live in multiple perspectives. The history of the world is littered with tragedies from interactions in which different perspectives and cultures were cast aside like so much garbage. And I'm not just talking that whole "we don't believe entire continents have a legitimate culture" tragedy from our sordid past, but more recently, when swaths of my own country can't speak to each other, or even about each other, without being spitting mad because no one can sit down, stew for a bit in a culture different from there's, pick up some new rhetoric and perspective, and start a different sort of conversation. 

Being able to live cross-culturally is something that many people come across the hard way, perhaps growing up on the move, or being children of immigrants - "third culture kids" feeling like they don't entirely belong. But they are also blessed, as we all can be, by the ability to lift themselves out of one culture and into another, the ability to be on the inside or on the outside and to understand multiple viewpoints. That can make better people of us all. 

4. Courage

We could all use an extra dose of bravery - to intervene in that awkward situation, to stand up to that intimidating person, to speak out from a place of vulnerability. I know I gained most of any courage I do have from living abroad. Because it's scary. Danger scary, like riding in careening marshutkas or hiking down a Peruvian canyon in the night in a thunderstorm. Socially scary, standing up in front a bunch of kids who you can't understand and they can't understand you. Coming down to try to talk to your host family when you would rather hide in your room. Reaching out to people who may not want to befriend you because of your foreign accent. Taking a risk. Getting up to dance. Stepping on that plane.  

I returned home from the Dominican Republic shell-shocked. I had been very sick, and I retreated inside myself into a small space where I felt forced to go from the stares, the shouts from strange men, the poverty I felt helpless against, the sickness I couldn't stop. I went long days without talking. I avoided crowded areas. I was pushed back out of my shell when I went to my summer job in Texas and I found that I wasn't so scared as I once had been, no matter the situation my demanding job often threw me in. I have ten minutes to come up with an activity for a group of forty kids to last two hours? Hey, at least they speak English – bring it on. And now, facing a new life in New Orleans, feeling like I've bitten off a bit much, I'm not afraid. The end is never really the end, and when I feel scared I remember being lost in Istanbul, stranded by the road in Greece, shaking in a Dominican hospital, in a wrong mototaxi in the wrong side of town in the most violent city in Peru. I'm not saying those were places where I showed remarkable courage, but I learnt courage. Those were places where the kindness of people and, I believe, the kindness of God, kept me safe. Strangers pointed me in the right direction, gave me rides, fed me soup. 

Yes, I can say, when the going is tough "I survived x event, so I can survive this!" and nothing is wrong with taking courage from memories of my own tenacity. But I can also say that there is great kindness in the world. And these both give me courage, and that serves me well every day. 

So go. Travel. Live abroad - for a summer, a season, a year. Work odd jobs and be bad at them. Work great jobs and be fabulous. Live with intensity, but also just live - with bills and habits and routine. When I felt bored and restless in Lima was when I really knew I lived there. Live with friends whose language you once barely spoke and who now you can guess their next words. Live with a favorite corner store and bus drivers you recognize. 

Live so that when you are ancient, you remember a hushed afternoon buried in winter's first snow up in the Caucuses and it fills you with peace. Peace and courage and humility and all of the bits and pieces of other places and people you have picked up. So go. 

First Year Out

"August arrives, hot and breathless and full of all the things you held on to too tightly. and all the places that defined summer start to melt together, the sand that got stuck in your hair, and the bug bites you picked at too much, and the taste of every sunset that slipped through the open car window. somehow each summer is its own lifetime, we love and eat; and the sun will spin around us without fail." 

I have no idea who wrote that quote. I've searched, and I just keep coming up with anonymous. So, dear anonymous (who, according to Virginia Woolf, was a woman) thanks for that. 

Each summer has always felt like it's own lifetime. I have always defined my life in summers - "what year was that? Oh that was the summer I went to nerd camp/theater camp/New York social justice program/Oxford film program/DC internship/was a camp counselor/studied abroad".  During high school, anything exciting that ever happened to me happened in summer, usually at one of the myriad of programs I went to. Summer meant travel and learning and adventure and a summer crush. The end of summer left me nostalgic and a little bit heartbroken for the new friends I left behind.  In college, summer was a welcome respite, but I wasn't quite so sad when it ended - leaving behind huts in the woods for my air-conditioned university apartment wasn't the most difficult transition after months of bug bites, porta-potties and screaming children.  

August now doesn't mark just the end of summer, it marks the end of the craziest year of my life.  I spent this year in the rolling hills of the country of Georgia in Eastern Europe, on the beaches of the Dominican Republic, in the heat of Texas and sleeping it all off in my home state of Georgia. In one year I have been to five different countries (six, if you count Texas...). I have ridden buses and boats and airplanes and marshutkas and carritos and donkey carts.  I have jumped into cold mountain pools and been carried across flooded mountain roads. I have fallen in and out of love. I have slept in terrible hostel beds and taken bucket showers and used outhouses and made friends with lizards and spiders and Georgian grandmothers who hit me with their canes. I have sang '90s karaoke at a bar filled with smoke and cowboy hats and Texas two-stepping.  I have walked through blizzards, burned myself on motorcycles, and prayed in tiny mountain chapels, large city mosques, and dangerously foggy roads. I have felt rich and luxurious as I ate delicious meals in Greece, and hungry and poor as I found yet another can of beans full of maggots in the Dominican. 

I have been lazy and bitter and discouraged and scared. At times I have not acted, not connected, not reached out.  I've been humbled and I've been humiliated. I've been blissfully happy. I have learned the art of silence. I have relearned the art of dancing with new friends. I have counted people as friends, real friends, when all we could use was my few words of Georgian or Haitian Creole, dancing feet and smiles.  I have been very sick and maybe near death. I have had family members pass away. I have marveled in the rain and in the sunset and at the ocean and the mountains and at the grape harvest and at my students all full of the glory and wonder of the Creator.  And I have wondered, while holding a skinny, bruised child, at the plans of the Creator.  

I have been humbled by the kindness of strangers and felt unworthy and it was true and right to know I was unworthy and to accept the kindness anyway. I have been very angry. And it was sometimes pride and cultural differences, and it was sometimes valid, raw anger.

I have had more awkward moments then should be allowed in anyone's lifetime. 

This was my first year out - outside of an institution, outside of the protection of family or school system or university. And what a year it was. 

There is an image in my mind, more like a five second movie clip, of a little boy in the Dominican, my neighbor, four years old, wearing nothing but dirty yellow undies, running down the street with his arms spread like wings in the sunshine, laughing his head off.  And for some reason when I try to package my past year this clip always comes to mind.

 I have not done anything terribly different (a lot of new graduates teach abroad) and I have not done anything terribly conventional. But somehow I know, after all the great times and the hard times and the awkward times, that I did what I was meant to do. There were things I needed to learn and to see and to live. 

And so August arrives. And so August goes, and in My Personal Calender it is the start of another year. 

The Fearful Traveler

I read Pico Iyer's insightful essay on why we travel (you can find it here) and was determined to write a happy article about why I travel, why my friends travel, why you should travel. One quote that struck me from the article was this:

"This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear”—disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide."

I readily agreed. Everything I'm proud of having done abroad, everything I've learned from and a lot of what I have enjoyed deeply were things that were scary at first, things that were disruptive to my idea of what was normal, or challenged what I thought I was capable of. Teaching 20 adults basic English, using my broken Spanish or Georgian to strike up a conversation, dancing at a village feast in front of a crowd, or bussing across borders alone.  Before you delve into the rest of this blog entry, think about that quote, which stands alone so well. 

I was thinking about that type of fear, of disruption, of nerves conquered. But then I stumbled upon this article, about a female tourist who was brutally raped in Brazil. She was traveling with her boyfriend, who was badly beaten and handcuffed, and afterwards they were robbed.

I was stopped in my tracks. I different type of fear entered my mind. I recently spent a few months traveling, sometimes solo, more often with my then-boyfriend, other times with a girl friend. And I suddenly had a horrible image of me and my then-boyfriend, traveling on one of the innumerable little buses we took, him beaten, me...

It was very unlikely to happen where we traveled, as the numbers for violent crime against foreigners were quite low. Thankfully, we were never even pick-pocketed.  But it could have happened. The statistics for violent attacks against women are 1 in 3 worldwide (I write more about that here). So sorry for the personal and somewhat graphic imagery, but it could have happened. To me. To you. To your friends.

And then I read about the foreign tourist raped, also with a traveling companion, in India. (Warning: all of these articles are upsetting.) And of course, we've all heard about the student in Delhi, and then this women, who her fellow travelers didn't help as she was under siege in her room.  Visits to India are down after these news stories, especially among females.

So, why do we still travel?

I hate to, if ever so vaguely, link Iyer's wonderful essay with my thoughts on danger traveling. For the record, it is only happenstance that I read these news stories after the essay. I agree with all that Iyer says, and I'm sure he is very aware of the problems and dangers in traveling - that they weren't included in his essay was only because the scope and focus of his essay was different. Still, if I can't put my happenstance frightened little thoughts out here, where can I?

The world is a dangerous place. I was in a lot more danger when I lived in downtown DC than when I lived in rural Eastern Europe. It is statistically speaking more dangerous for me to drive a car through my home city of Atlanta than to fly to Istanbul. When travelers crossed the oceans on wooden boats, and faced sicknesses with no cure and hostile natives with spears travel was much more dangerous. And women are, unfortunately, raped everywhere, and more often than not by someone they know, someone in their own neighborhood (check out RAINN for the stats).

I think these stories frighten me so much because this is violence specifically against women, and anyone who is unfortunate enough to be traveling with them. I think it frightens me not just because rape is frightening, but because in these stories it occurs in the unknown, off in the wilds of a new country, which only compounds the fear. We don't, we cannot, walk around every day imagining that some man in our office, in our coffee shop, in the library is going to rape us. We can't live our lives that way, even though that is more likely than a stranger in an ally way raping us. But it is easy for us, for me, to imagine this horror in an "exotic" location where "anything" can happen.

Why do we still travel? Apparently, a lot of us don't, or at least, not to the same places.

There is some fear that needs to be overcome when traveling, fear that is a healthy part of the experience of the unknown. But there is also terrible, sickening, nightmarish fear. This fear is real. I live in the Dominican Republic, and while I do not fear rape here (I have friends and neighbors in my small town looking out for me!) the stares and cat-calls do make me very uncomfortable and sometimes, a little nervous.

It makes me very angry that women need to be afraid anywhere. It makes me personally angry, as a female that aspires to travel to every corner of the globe, that women travelers, and often their male companions, must travel in fear. I should not have to take precautions, I should not have to think about what I wear. But I do, and I will.

I will also continue to travel, because I love it. Because it transforms me. Because a life without travel, to me, is no life at all. But I will travel with more baggage than a backpack - I'll travel with some real fear, some deep anger, and a heart breaking for the women who have found that travel changed their lives in the most brutal and violent way possible.

Greece

I was in Greece about 2 and 1/2 months ago.

 I can't believe it was that recent - a life of hostels, delicious seafood and ancient ruins seems so completely different from my current reality. 

As I type this I'm sitting in the kitchen, where my roommate is playing cards with four little Dominican girls from the neighborhood, while one of their mothers is cooking lunch for our visiting volunteers. 

My life consists of Haitian children, lots of them - breaking up their fights, blowing on their booboos, holding them in my lap, attempting to teach them some math.

My life is hot, sweaty, and smells like cooking empanadas,

so very far from the cool ocean breezes of the Greek islands.

But I really was there, because I distinctly remember the acute embarrassment of 

arriving in Athens to realize we had no euros (only Turkish lira and Georgian lari) and there was no money changer within walking distance of our bus stop

 and we stood around looking and feeling very foolish

until we were rescued by a nice Greek couple who walked us to the bus

and generously gave us some euros and probably walked away wandering

why Americans can't plan well. 

After that Dickens-length sentence, some photos of Greece!

Oh hey Acropolis! Just wanted to drop by with my shaggy hair 

and Christmas scarf from Kurdistan!

The Parthenon felt unreal - was I actually seeing this? 

I think I was. 

View of Athens (and Jamie!) 

We like ruins

and cool murals

I remember being so happy on the ferry ride to the islands.

 I think the amazing cup of coffee I was sipping on had a lot to do with it. 

A sunset on Santorini! 

The island was mostly abandoned because of the season, 

which was sometimes nice and sometimes creepy. 

Que bonita! 

Then a water spout almost sucked up this couple!

(Not really but it could have!) 

A seafood lunch

View from our second hostel in Athens, where we returned for New Years Eve

I loved this cool lamp street! 

We took an overnight ferry back from Santorini, spent New Years Eve out on the town, on New Years day I got on a bus for 15 hours, a second bus in Istanbul for 27, 

slept a night in Tbilisi and then took three planes to get home. 

By the 2nd plane, I was hallucinating due to my sleepless state and aching bum.

But what can you do? The price of being a cash-strapped traveler.

When I am an rich old woman I will return to Turkey and Greece and eat expensive meals and stay in nice hotels and take First Class plane rides. 

But at least the cheap way makes for some great stories - 

or at least a great way to shut down the kid that complains of their flight to France. 

Istanbul

I was enamored with Istanbul. All I had ever heard was how fabulous it was, this ancient city, capital of multiple empires, and I was so excited to be there. I was only there a week, but I missed it when I left. As my friend said, "its the type of place that you miss".

It's a hard to describe place, and I don't even know how 

to explain why I liked it so much.

So, as my generation does, I googled some quotes to see if other people know how to describe this city.

Some quotes:

If the earth was a single state, Istanbul would be its capital. 

Napoleon Bonaparte

• Istanbul, a universal beauty where poet and archeologist, diplomat and merchant, princess and sailor, northerner and westerner screams with same admiration. The whole world thinks that this city is the most beautiful place on earth.
  Edmondo De Amicis
• Holy Istanbul! Your name is the most enchanting one of all names which enchants me.
  Pierre Loti
• 
  

Of course, these could all be entirely made up, since I just found them on this man's blog . Sorry that I won't be fact checking for this blog post, I have crafts to make for the letter R for my pre-school class...

But they are well said, these hopefully real quotes, the name Istanbul IS an enchanting one. I arrived in a snow storm, and Istanbul to me will always be strong, hot tea, cold winds, and the sounds of the call to prayer. Also, creepy Santa robots, because I was there over Christmas. 

But enough of my hopeless word-smithing - some photos!

A mosque at night 

The Blue Mosque in the snow

Ceiling of the Blue Mosque

This cat was unsure about letting us shop in his store.

I was obsessed with these beautiful lamps in the Grand Bazaar. 

Fishermen were out in force, even in the cold!

We went to an island of 102 cats. 

Sunset ferry ride on the Bosphorus 

Some sunshine!

Blue Mosque

Grand Bazaar

Hagia Sophia

He danced and sang!

The Shadier Side of Living Abroad

"Sounds fun! And a little miserable at the same time!"

This text sums up a lot of my "Random Inexplicable Georgian Experiences". Supras can be really fun - until your stomach starts cramping from the food, and you can't get up to pee because you are on a long bench surrounded by grandmothers, and then they force you up to make you dance for the 5th time...

Living abroad is never easy. At least, not if you are doing it right. If you are actually getting to know local traditions, people, and culture there are going to be aspects that are strange and uncomfortable. Sometimes you will get used to them. Sometimes you won't. I present to you some texts from Georgia that were sent during the bad days, the days when you haven't spoken English in awhile and you are fed that dish you hate and forcibly given chacha (homemade vodka) and there is no hot water or electricity....the texts when you are at the end of your rope, and even the beautiful landscape is nothing compared to your desire for a hot bath, someone who believes in germs and an American style pizza (meaning, sans tons of mayonnaise). 

These texts were sent by friends of mine, but I'm sure the feelings they express were felt by all of our fellow teachers (and certainly by myself!) at one point or another. Read them and remember that I loved my time in Georgia and I'm glad I went. But some times, I contemplated running away to Armenia. 

Texts from bad days:

"This country is like Mars to me"

"I can't escape the chacha"

"The drunk lady who wants me to marry her son keeps kissing me and saying I have beautiful eyes. At least someone in this country loves me."

"Surprise supra! Try to call later. We're using a chainsaw now."

"Tmrw is better. I've been kidnapped'

"Just had 5 grown men pull their eyes into squints when I said I was going to Korea. 10 more days"

"Feel like crap. I was laying in my comfy bed and now I'm at a supra"

"I hate people today. Being patronized by school staff again"

"Omg everyone freaked out on me when I came in the kitchen to look for napkins. Couldn't find them and didn't know the word for it. Kept saying nevermind but they were like no! Call Ana so she can translate! Finally I found half a tissue in my pocket. Talk about making a mountain out of a mole hill"

"My whole fam is sick. I wanna be like maybe you shouldn't share a water glass!

"At my aunts. Liver for dinner. I think all they ever eat here is liver"

"Georgia mystery. Why do the teachers check each others blood pressure in the staff room? And its always a different person checking. Do they all really know how?"

"Just saw the class pic for the first grade. Looks like they all have depression."
Editor's Note: Georgians don't smile in photos. I was at a supra and while taking a photo of a group of Georgians, their digital camera actually said "searching for smile" while an erratic little square bounced around the screen. No one understood why I was laughing.

"I just realized that I look like I'm pregnant"
"Who's the father?"
"Khachapuri"

"Back to the Sagarejo post office tomorrow to try to send a fax. They're gonna love me waltzing in again with my broken georgian and weird requests"

"3 weeks from today I will be leaving my host family forever! Yay!'

"8 Am -host sister gave birth to son, me tipsy by 9am bc of supra. Then, fellow teachers bday party at 2pm - I remain faded till 6pm. Just got to hostel in Kutaisi, host gives me chacha, day destroyed!"

"Just had to change my tampon in a bathroom with no doors on the stalls. Hate this country."

"We had nasty cow parts for supper so I just ate bread and potato salad. My vp's son texted me and said "my mother gave me your number for future relationship' Haha I was trying not to laugh at the dinner table when I got that"

"... love how in Georgia children get yelled at for not having the tv turned on"