Archive for August 2011

How to remember and share your travels

You’re lucky. You had the opportunity to travel, to see a new culture from the inside. Regardless of how your experience actually unravelled, you were one of the few that had a unique chance to live somewhere new, to meet new people and ultimately, to accumulate a lot of knowledge about a topic previously new to you. But what is the point of this knowledge? How are you supposed to store it, share it, use it, apply it?

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges of travellers, of digital nomads and of those who adopt travelling as a lifestyle is that of sharing content, of sharing insights and impressions, of sharing a story about the effect of a journey. When you’re on the road, you feel as if you’re going to remember every single detail, every smell and every flavour, and you will have the perfect words to describe it to your friends or loved ones. However, this might not be the case. As new experiences go, travelling is definitely an overload, a layering of novel sensations and perceptions, and can be overwhelming. Remembering it in detail is thus naturally, even more overwhelming.

In my view, the most important aspect a story needs is detail – passionate, accurate and lively detail. So what can you do to be able to remember?

• Write it down. It is impossible to stress this enough. Whether it is in the form of a paper journal, an online blog, a series of pictures on which you write on, buying postcards from every place you visit and jotting down some remarks – whatever it is that works for you, find it and do it. While it might sound tedious, and you might feel like you don’t have enough time to do so, you won’t regret it once your experience is over. These little paragraphs ( not necessarily coherent or grammatically correct – although points to you if you are able to write poetry after a day of walking around!) will jot your memory like nothing else, and bring your experience to life whenever you feel like taking a stroll down memory lane.
• Get souvenirs. And here, I don’t mean buying something from the over-priced, tourist-fabricated little shop at the end of the road. I mean getting a sea shell from a beach ( granted you’ve checked and you’re allowed to transport it over the border), a rock, a leaf, anything that will prove to be a visual aid when trying to re-create a landscape or a scenery. Whether you want to keep a couple of beer labels or you want to take back a piece of a banana tree leaf is your choice, but you’ll remember it fondly.
• Talk to people. You’ll find out so much more this way. Of course, make sure first that you are in a safe environment. Don’t approach strangers unless you are absolutely sure you will be safe doing so. But once you do, you are bound to find tidbits of history, local intrigue and opinions that are unlikely to be forgotten. One cab-driver in Malaysia was able to recount the entire history of the rubber industry of his country during a 45 minute cab ride to the air-port. I still remember what he told us.
• Make sure you take the time to look around. Perhaps this sounds superfluous, or even silly. But I promise you it’s not. Taking the time to really observe some of the social dynamics around you will lead you to ask lots of questions, feeding your curiosity.

How to share once you’re back is just as tricky. A lot of the time, I found that friends and family will have their own set of expectations about what your time abroad consisted of. Sometimes, it can go something like this:

“Oh my gosh, you must have had such an amazing time in Singapore”

“Well…yes, it was really fun, but it was not always fun and there were a lot of things that were challenging”

By no means does this imply that the person travelling is not grateful for the opportunity given. It does not mean they did not learn from it, and it does not mean they do not appreciate the chance they had to travel. But experiences are never completely one sided, so in order to fully capture the complexity of time spent away, one will have to share both positive and negative.

Happy travels!

What is home?

Home – What does it mean?

Going abroad is an exciting experience, with the constant change in scenery, encountering cultures, sights, sounds and tastes and the escape from day to day routine. It is, by all means, a positive experience. But there are definitely moments that are overwhelming – when the constant change, the distance from home and family and the lack of familiarity start to be too much. ‘Homesickness’ is something that many travellers experience. As one of the girls doing a solo yearlong world trip I met at a hostel in Malaysia told me, being away from home and those who are looking out for you no matter what, can be very difficult, especially at some times. She described to me how sickness when you’re completely alone in a hostel full of strangers can be incredibly lonely and brings those pangs of homesickness.  All she wanted was to be in her room, with her mom or her friends helping to nurse her back to health. She missed home – in her case, home was Paris. It was in those moments that she wanted to be back there. But is there a way to get rid of this homesickness without necessarily going home? How do we recreate those comfortable feelings that we naturally associate with home?

My last piece was about what it was like to come home – home to Canada. In the most traditional sense, Canada would be considered my home. I was born there, I went to school there, most of my family lives there – there is no reason that I shouldn’t consider it to be home for me. But, in the past year, home became a flexible term to me. Initially, the last place I had felt truly grounded and settled in became my new definition of home. While my house on Rue de Vauban in the small French town of Arras seemed like home to me when I was returning from a longer trip to London or Bordeaux on my days off from work when living in France last fall, I would often feel ‘homesick’ for my life in Canada. But, while I was living in Singapore, I spent my first month feeling profoundly homesick for France – a country that I had only spent four months in but that I had grown to love.

By the end of my time in Singapore and upon my return to Canada, I realized that I couldn’t really associate ‘home’ with a place anymore. In the past 16 months, I hadn’t stayed in one place for longer than 4 months at a time. I started to look for comfort in familiar feelings, familiar experiences, familiar people instead of familiar places. Home became the drawn out Skype conversations with my closest friends who were scattered around France, Canada or Brazil.  Home became playing the guitar – something that I always loved doing and that didn’t change regardless of my location. Home became a note, a letter or a postcard that brought back positive memories.

So what’s the solution to homesickness? Maybe it’s approaching homesickness not as missing a given place, but missing the feelings you associate with it. A familiar activity, a phone call to a loved one, an object that brings back positive feelings can all bring you the comfort you associate with being home. Feeling homesick doesn’t necessarily just missing the physical place – it’s nostalgia for a positive feeling that you associate with that place. In that sense, home truly is where the heart is.

Joanna Plucinska, Political Studies 2012

Help new International Students – Volunteer to be a temporary host

VOLUNTEER HOSTS NEEDED!

Are you interested in connecting

with people from overseas?

Would you like to meet and help

a newly arrived international student?

…become a volunteer host this Fall!

Please contact quic@queensu.ca

Hosts offer 1 to 3 nights stay to newly arrived international students and scholars, so they have a place to stay while searching for long-term housing.

The accommodation can be as simple as a couch; hosts should be friendly individuals with interest in providing welcoming and secure housing.

Visit: http://quic.queensu.ca/resource/howtobecomeavolunteerhost.asp for more info!

If you’re wondering what the experience is like, Carolyn & Brian, Kingston residents and QUIC Volunteer Hosts since 2009 have shared some of their insights so far!

“Our experiences hosting students several times and being a guaranteed landing spot for others

Become a Volunteer Host!

have been tremendously rewarding. We were inspired to participate in the host program by the personal experience of travelling long distances where the knowledge of having a place to rest and a friendly face when arriving tired and jet-lagged brings such comfort. By hosting, we witnessed the excitement of moving to another country to pursue school and saw our city, our university, and our world in a new light. A few of the students we have hosted have kept in touch after finding their own place to live; I run into them on campus occasionally and it is like reconnecting with old friends. Some have also joined the potluck gatherings with friends at our place throughout the year, while others continue their academic journey without us crossing paths again.  For those considering the program when coming to Queen’s, we and other hosts look forward to providing you a comfortable place to rest and keep your belongings as you make connections, confirm lodging, and learn more about our community. You are most welcome and we look forward to meeting you.”

Want to read more? Here is an article about how volunteer hosts help ease the transition for international students.

If you have a space to spare for a few nights, we highly encourage you to welcome someone at the beginning of their academic adventure at Queen’s and provide a friendly space for our newest community members.  Please contact quic@queensu.ca if you are able to host an international student this fall.

Do you have the travel bug? What does that mean for you?

“The travel bug”: one of those idioms that has slowly entered our lexicon without much thought or analysis. Its popularity, however, seems to be soaring, especially among digital nomads, students and youth, as well as the adventurous.

Where does the travel bug come from and what exactly is it though? How is this different from a passion for adventure?

Where to?

In my view, the travel bug can mean a variety of things. It can be taking a year off between your steps in an academic career, a break between employment, time to learn a new skill or language, the desire to know different cultures, people and customs, or simply the desire to leave behind everything you know for the open road.

This is however, not a new concept. Literature and history alike inform us of men and women who have travelled continents and oceans in order to do the exact same. Their desire to know more of the world, to explore and gain knowledge led them to be explorers, researchers, intellectuals and thinkers. But they had no time limit on their travels. They did not need to fit their lives into any particular mould, and in most cases, they continued travelling, or in fact, never returned to their original location. These are not the people we imagine when we think about the concept of the travel bug. Instead, we call them migrants, and we do not see their journeys as motivated by the same motif as those who ascribe to the travel bug syndrome.

One possible definition for this spirit of adventure, in the words of Che Guevara: ( cliche, I realize, but I just recently watched The Motorcycle Diaries)  

What we had in common – our restlessness, our impassioned spirits, and a love for the open road. 

What used to be a state of mind, a conception of the world and the way you want to engage with it, has been transformed into a syndrome, a condition that one can simply deal with, and be over with soon after. The meaning of adventure has been concentrated and simplified into this idea of a travel bug, which not only minimizes its scope but downplays its impact as well. Whereas travelling for the sake of travelling, for the pursuit of knowledge and learning, used to be a goal into itself, the way in which our society conceptualizes of the travel bug is as a defined, short period of time in which one has to tackle one’s sense of restlessness and more often than not, attempt to get it ouf of one’s system. The travel bug, a seemingly harmless ideas, has a more complex undertone than we think, and speaks of larger societal misconceptions about those unable or unwilling to settle down, to become responsible members of society, to contribute in one particular way. The desire to adventure has become an ill of society, a sign that one is unable to function in a certain prescribed way, and the travel bug scenario has become the patchy, band-aid solution to it. Those who refuse or simply cannot give up their desire to continue travelling are labelled as nomads, unfit to receive the same benefits from the state as those who contribute on a regular basis.

Why have we abandoned the appreciation we once had for those restless enough and passionate enough as to explore the farthest corners of the planet, the most remote areas of civilization? Why do we box in experiences in such a way as to remove their originality and potential for unique characteristics? The travel bug, in my view, is just another expression of this attempt to take an experience that was once organic, natural and valued, and replace it with a pre-determined itinerary.