How to travel better, and how to write about my travels better are among two of my “goals” for 2024. Goals is in inverted quotes because I’m very good at not meeting them.
What do I mean when I say travel better? Travel more, for one. But more importantly, it is to observe more, and observe better, while traveling. Observe what, exactly? Everything! And I do mean everything, ranging from how the Vietnamese use their footpaths, to the fact that raspberries are called “himbeer” in German (a berry that grows when it is snowing, get it?)- and everything in between.
What do I mean when I say write about my travels better? Observing better while traveling is just the start. Writing about my travels and my observations helps me make connections between what I have learnt, observed, seen and experienced at home, and while traveling. In other words, I understand my world better when I travel, and when I make connections between what is familiar, and what isn’t.
Take tirphal, for example, a spice familiar to most people in Western Maharashtra. Turns out this is likely a close cousin (if not kind of the same thing) of Sichuanese peppercorns!
“Learn how to build bridges for yourself between your home and the rest of the world” is one way of putting it, and like I said, I would like to get better at it.
Lots of examples come to mind when I talk about writing about travel better. There’s Tim Ferris talking about entire families in Japan taking a both together. There’s David Perell talking about Austin. There’s Devon Zuegel talking about what sometimes feels like the whole wide world. There’s Derek Sivers on Japan, and what a lovely little story this is. And that’s just short from content – books are a whole other story.
But for the purpose of this post, and this year for me personally, I want to get better at observing, and creating notes when it comes to travel. And an excellent example of the kind of notes I have in mind is Ben Casnocha’s notes from his travels in Japan.
For example:
On one of my first days in our private office in Tokyo, some light jazz music suddenly began playing out of a speaker built into the ceiling. I couldn’t figure out how or why the music started. 30 mins later, the music hadn’t stopped, and I grew concerned that what was supposed to be a quiet, private office in a coworking space actually was subject to some building-wide music system steered by a jazz aficionado building manager. (Hey, it could have been a worse genre of background music.)
I pulled out Google Translate and typed English sentences: “There is jazz music playing in my office. I did not turn it on. Why is it playing? Can you turn it off?” Google Translate spit out out the Japanese version and, clutching my iPhone, I swung open the door to my office to stomp to the front desk and inquire.
As it happens, two men were already standing outside my office in official, erect poses. What luck. I clicked “Play” in Google Translate to ask my pre-loaded question in Japanese. They micro head bowed as they listened — the micro bow where your head drops ever so slightly in rapid succession: the most common type of bow in Japan.
Then they spoke back into my phone: “Deep apologies,” Google’s translation’s said back to me. “The jazz music means the fire alarm system is working. We are conducting a test of the fire alarms in the building. The jazz music plays if the alarm is working. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.” They proceeded to deeply bow and walked off. Only then did I notice they were wearing fire department helmets.
It had never occurred to me that a fire alarm building test could be anything other than bone-tinglingly loud.
https://casnocha.com/2024/01/impressions-from-a-longer-stay-in-tokyo-2023.html
I’ve never traveled to Japan, alas, but I have traveled to Japan twice in the recent past. Once by reading Ben’s post, and once by reading a book about a lady who works as a concierge in Paris. To cut a long story short, the protagonist uses the washroom in a Japanese gentleman’s home in Paris, and is embarrassed beyond belief when the flush, in addition to doing its job, also plays Mozart’s Requiem at full volume (The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barberry, if you were wondering about the book).
And so if and when I travel to Japan, I run the risk of being surprised and disappointed if flushes and fire alarms don’t play music.
But you see what I mean about traveling better, and observing better, don’t you?
Anyway, all of this is to tell you that Ben’s post is, to me, a great example of traveling well, and writing well about having traveled well. I hope you like it, and I hope you get to do a fair bit of traveling yourself!
EconForEverybody 