chatarra
All posts tagged "travel"
“But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
Lo que decía. Añado que la tipa exhibe una obsesión por lo oral que no es ni medio normal. No me quejo, lo oral es una cosa de la que estoy muy a favor.
Things that are common some places, but seem completely crazy to outsiders »
Ask mefi question:
I’m curious to know about other … occurances that, to an outsider, seem completely crazy but are common in daily life in certain places in the world.Many interesting answers, such as:
More than once in the middle of downtown Mexico City (a 10-million person, high-tech metropolis) I’ve walked out of a glass-and-steel skyscraper and almost collided with a donkey.When I was in Tokyo many years ago, I wondered at the audacity of their crows. I saw a few of them using a drinking fountain, with one of them holding down the button and the other drinking from it, then switch and again. But that was minor compared to what Japanese crows are reputed to do… steal food from open windows, outwit the crow patrols trying to prevent them from nesting on electric lines and shorting out the grid, even exploiting crosswalks and car traffic to open nuts for them. To quote from the NYTImes article, one expert believes “We are not sure sometimes who is smarter, us or the crows.” I find this all totally crazy, and yet totally magical.When I was living in rural-ish Spain, leaving the dog’s bowl out on the porch overnight during the winter would result in an army of tiny field mice bivouacked behind the porch sofa. When we went to the local Everything Store (part gas can dealer, part local bar, part supermarket, part butcher shop) to pick up some mousetraps, the little old lady proprietress laughed and said, in the local dialect, what amounted to “mousetraps? pshaw, those are for the tourists!”
She gave us a kitten instead. It was the most bizarre retail experience of my entire life. But when I mentioned it to a couple of friends & neighbors, they thought only notable part of the whole story was that I’d got the kitten for free.
When I lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia, my host father took me to the family’s Dacha (summer cottage), a tiny, dingy little house with no electricity outside the city. After dinner, we went into the Banya, stripped naked, and then he told me to lie down on a bench in the sweltering heat. I was terrified of this man, by the way. He started whacking me aggressively with birch leaves stringed together, whacking me everywhere to “open up the pores.” Then, he laid down and asked me to whack him. It was thus that I ended up whacking a Russian police captain, naked, with birch leaves.
Which is a totally normal thing in Russia.
In Thailand they have an official National Elephant Day. City officials fill the streets with buffets of bananas and other assorted fruits for the elephants to feast on. What you would see if you happened upon in would be a bunch of decked-out elephants perching elephant-style on the ground with their trunks in a mountain of fruit! And it’s not just one or two cursory elephant feasts, no; it happens all over the country!I’m sure there are many things around here that must seem really strange or stupid or wonderful to strangers, but, not being an outsider, I can’t really picture what they might be. I know many tourists find road signs with moose warnings so wonderful that they occasionally steal them off their poles. I can’t imagine how exotic it must seen to them, but I suppose it does.
Last year, vacationing in Croatia, we rented a car for a day. I don’t know if it was local custom or a personal quirk on the part of the owner of the car rental agency, but they had taken the time and effort to remove the seat belts in the back seat. I’m so used to seat belts that even the thought of not wearing them seems odd to me (why would you not, it takes two seconds to put them on and increases your safety tenfold), but to spend extra effort to make it impossible to wear them? I can’t even imagine a bad reason why someone would do that.
Those two quirks are pretty lame compared to the examples from metafilter, though. What’s totally normal where you live, but must seem very strange to outsiders?
Hasta la semana que viene
“Uno de enero, dos de febrero,
tres de marzo, cuatro de abril,
cinco de mayo, seis de junio,
siete de julio, ¡SAN FERMÍN!
A Pamplona hemos de ir,
por la fiesta, por la fiesta
a Pamplona hemos de ir
por la fiesta y un buen botín.”
“One Russian blogger has paid a visit to the modern Russian nuclear plant. Normally it is forbidden to take photos there, but they have made an exception for him. So now we have a rare chance to see what’s inside of the Russian most modern power plant.”
Gracias, Guillermo. Habrá un hueco para ti en mi hogar, durante una noche de tormenta, cuando el mundo se caiga a pedazos.
(Y si traes a Delia contigo, además sacaré el vino.)
Turismo
“Tal como yo lo veo, al alma probablemente le siente bien ser turista, aunque sea sólo muy de vez en cuando. No digo que le siente bien de una forma refrescante o iluminadora, sino más bien de una forma sombría, severa, estilo “Miremos los hechos con franqueza y encontremos una forma de abordarlos”. Mi experiencia personal no me ha demostrado nunca que viajar por el país amplíe mis horizontes o resulte relajante, ni que los cambios radicales de lugar y de contexto tengan un efecto saludable, sino más bien que el turismo dentro del país resulta radicalmente constrictivo, y humillante de la peor forma: hostil a mi fantasía de ser un verdadero individuo, de vivir de alguna forma fuera y por encima de todo. Ser un turista de masas, para mí, equivale a convertirse en un puro americano de los tiempos que corren: foráneo, ignorante, codicioso de algo que nunca se puede tener y decepcionado de una forma que nunca se puede admitir. Implica estropear, en virtud de la pura ontología, la misma cosa no estropeada que uno ha ido a experimentar. Implica imponerse a uno mismo sobre lugares que en todos los sentidos menos el económico serían mejores y más reales si uno no estuviera. Implica, en las colas y los atascos y las transacciones sin fin, afrontar una dimensión de uno mismo que resulta tan ineludible como dolorosa: en tanto que turista, te vuelves económicamente significativo, pero existencialmente aborrecible, como un insecto posado sobre algo muerto.”
—David Foster Wallace, en las notas al pie de “Hablemos de Langostas”. No he encontrado el artículo en castellano, pero hay una versión en inglés (en PDF) aquí.
“As winter begins to wind down, we are still in the middle of sled dog racing season. The Iditarod in Alaska had its ceremonial start in Anchorage last Saturday (the 7th), the Yukon Quest race from Canada’s Yukon Territory to Alaska took place back in mid-February, and the Can-Am Crown races were held in Maine only a couple of weeks ago. The most well-known of the races, the Iditarod Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, covers 1,868 km (1,161 mi), and takes anywhere from 8 to 12 days for mushers and their teams of 16 dogs to complete.”(Yeah, i know.)
“Siempre podéis decir que ha sido idea nuestra, que somos unos hijos de puta y que os enteráisteis de que ella no iba al viaje cuando estábamos repartiendo los asientos en el avión. Se llama “el argumento McCallister” por Kevin McCallister, el niño de Solo en Casa a quien su familia dejó olvidado sin querer.”
Virgin: the world's best passenger complaint letter? »
So lets peel back the tin-foil on the main dish and see what’s on offer.
I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.
Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing.
Instant fucking classic.
The Whale Hunt: A Storytelling Experiment
“3. At least one member of your party should be minimally efficient in handling a gun. If no one can, a guide should be hired who agrees to stay with your party at all times, even when a whale has been struck and is being pursued or harvested. The guide should teach all members of the party the basics of loading and firing the rifle as well as the basics of firearm safety. A loaded rifle should always be kept ready and available while on the ice.
[…]
8a. Attempt to frighten the bear using loud noises. Sometimes yelling, swinging your arms, or throwing ice chunks at the bear is effective.”
— Extract from the Ice Safety Guidelines (section “Polar bears”) of the Barrow Whaling Captains Association Press Packet. Jonathan Harris and the photographer Andrew Moore had to carefully read these before embarking in their thrilling journey to Alaska to document the eskimo whale hunt season. You can see the whole endeavor, displayed in all its disturbing beauty, in this unique website.
It always surprises people when they are told that Patagonia is the world’s third-biggest desert, after the Sahara and the Gobi. It doesn’t look like traditional desert but the vast steppe is dry, barren and bare, in its way. Out of the car window, I could see the scrub of tough grasses, sturdy little bushes barely moving despite the incessant and forceful westerlies and not a single tree between me and the horizon. The Ruta 40 is a comfort zone in this bleak terrain, giving you a taste of the end of the world, but with the option of driving on to the next cosy town.
On the road to the end of the world, an excellent Guardian article on Ruta 40, Argentina’s answer to Route 66 through 5000 kilometers of desert.
