Even as a child, when my grandparents would shuttle me around tourist destinations, I felt overwhelmed. Days spent in coach buses, hours spent in lines. 3 AM mornings in petrol stations, brusing my teeth and washing the sleep out of my eyes (and how can I forget the French Toilettes aka ‘squatting piss holes’
Ah Memories!
But the things I remember most are not the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, or climbing the eiffel tower, or seeing the Roman colosseum, but the sense of adventure all these things lacked. Sure, with my childhood imagination I would fantasize the histories behind these landmarks, or weave narratives of the people who built/painted/sculpted/made/lived in the things I saw, but much of my international travels as a child were very planned, calculated, itinerarized. Without spontaneity.
In essence, perhaps it was perfect for a child, to be told what to do, where to go, what to see….however, there were just as many times where I had wished we spent the afternoon eating in bistros, munching on rich food, watching the Dutch ride by on their bicycles, or wandering into shops (that sentiment probably facilitated by my childhood greed for ‘things’ and ‘presents’), spending the day picnicing on the green grass that surrounds the Basilique du Sacre Coeur de Montmatre, or wandering into alleys and stumbling into places that aren’t in some tourist guidebook. My grandparents and I also travelled in a bubble, we never really interacted with anyone else aside from our fellow travellers that shared the same language or country, and I found that sad, that even after experiencing different culture and histories, we were only left with momentos, photographs and video recordings, rather than deep, long lasting sacred memories and friendships.
After all that running around, this time, I want to travel…slower, give myself time to actually enjoy the scenes.
I want to travel more radically, where I go out of my way to interact with native Frenchies, Icelanders, WHATEVER! When I hitch-hiked to California, I lived out of a backpack and relied on my own wits, resourcefullness and the kindness of strangers, and surprisingly, it went really fucking well. And there was no rush, I could spend however much time I wanted anywhere, I didnt have to pay for anything because I didn’t feel like it, there was no schedule to follow and it felt revolutionary and liberating.
When the idea of our European jaunt began just to manifest in Mike’s brain, I had stumbled on this passage in the book Expect Resistance, A Crime think manual to radical and alternative living. It expressed many ideas that I had been gestating in my mind cogs over the years about travel, especially about how the rich travel and I found many correlations between my childhood travels and manifesto written in this book.
Anna
- Clicky for full read! Click me! Learn about Anarchist travel!
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