Trains, Planes and Automobiles

“Have you ever seen a real Eskimo?”

A couple weeks ago, I was up in a small city called Northampton. From London, it is no more than 45 minutes by train and I’ll admit, not as bad a town as one might expect. It has a nice little market in the town centre, they have a nice four level mall, plenty of small and franchised businesses and they even have a few McDonald’s locations. I DO understand that things cost less in a small town and maybe people don’t like the hustle and bustle of the big city. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with living in a town. After all, everyone needs a little place to call their own. Northamptonites, like residents of any other city in the world, take pride in their city. Nothing surprising. What I found absolutely outstanding, however, something that still blows my mind whenever I think about it, was the fact that many people had never been outside of the city. I’ll admit that it was my first time outside the greater London area since I had arrived, but I’ll reassure you that my own curiosity and sense of adventure was eating me up inside.

So, without any further adieu, this week’s English cultural topic:

TRAVEL

The british, I suppose are just like any other country’s people, the upbringing is to accept a multicultural society, they learn about the same world’s historic events and often when you go traveling, you’ll meet one. This is why it was so difficult for me to grasp the fact that people from a town less than an hour from London had never even been to London.
London is a HUGE. History, fashion, sites, sounds, big city life! It’s beyond me how people wouldn’t at least go in for the afternoon or something, especially with the reputation the brits have earned as world travelers. On the plane today, it’s about a 50/50 split between English and others. I guess there at least a few curious ones left after all.

Today is Sunday. Sure, I’m going home for a couple weeks. Sure, the party I went to last night was freekin unbelievable. No, I didn’t get to sleep in after a big night out. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t absolutely exhausted right now, but do you know what keeps me going?
I will have traveled over 8000 km today and I’m going to have seen the sunset in two different countries. As I write this sentence, I am somewhere over the atlantic chasing the daylight. When we took off from the airport in Glasgow, the sun was just going down, later on tonight, I’ll get to see it again.


Now, I’m not going to lie, traveling with a laptop does definitely makes life a great deal more enjoyable on the airplane, but the point of my bringing it along was not to complain about things that could have been better. But that’s kind of lame. Sure, maybe hospitality class is not all as hospitable as one might like, but don’t worry about it. That goes for life as well. I’m living my life. It seems like whenever I take a flight I just get the unceasing urge to write about the airplane, or air travel, or how packed it is, or how today I actually got a pretty decent window seat that doesn’t have the view obstructed by the wing, or how someone on the plane is wearing too much perfume, or whatever. I try to make clever comments based on the slogan of the airline, or complain about how much transfers to the airport cost, how slow the connection was in Scotland, how expensive the headsets are and how I’m always forced to buy a new one because I’m too stupid to just remember the many that I have at home. But I’ve pretty much covered it all in the past two sentences, so I’ll spare you the details.

The coolest part about travel for me is that I’m the one doing it. There is so much to learn in the world, but there is only so much you can learn from reading about it. So obviously for me, the value in traveling is learning. The difference is between actually experiencing something, rather than being told about it. In my travels, there have been cynics; there have been people who told me to stay in Canada figure things out and then head off, but there’s not adventure in that for me. My goal now, is to fill up my passport before it expires. I think most people get really bogged down in the routine, which, don’t get me wrong, can be nice. I’ve probably talked about this before, but I’m at a point in my life where everyone is getting settled into their lives and mine is still up in the air. Literally.

So no, I have never actually met an Eskimo face to face, but the fact is there is so much to see, so much to experience and so much to learn. Just remember that when you see a photo, someone had to be there with their camera.

I want to be that someone.