Olen saanut paljon kysymyksiä siitä, miksi matkustan mihin matkustan tai mikä matkustamisessa niin koukuttaa. Mielestäni Elisabeth Gilbert tiivistää sen niin kauniisti, että se voisi olla omasta suustani.
"Truthfully, I'm not the best traveler in the world. I know this because I've traveled a lot and I've met travellers who are so physically sturdy they could drunk a shoebox of water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick. People who can pick up new language where others of us might only pick up infectious diseases. People who know how to stand down a threatening border guard or cajole an unco-operative bureaucrat at the visa office. People who are the right height and complexion that they kind of look halfway normal where ever they go. I dont have these qualities. First of all, i dont blend. I am short and blonde and pink-complexioned, i am less a chameleon than a flamingo. Everywhere I go but germany, I stand out garishly. When I was in China, women used to come up to me on the street and point me out to their children as though I were some escaped zoo animal. And their children -who had never seen anything quite like this pink-faced phantom person -would often burst into tears at the sight of me. I really hated that about China.
I am bad (or, rather, lazy) at researching a place before I travel, tending just to show up and see what happens. When you travel this way, what typically "happens" is that you end up spending a lot of time standing in the middle of the train station feeling confused. My shaky sense of direction and geography means I have explored four continents in my life with only vaguest idea of where i am any given time. Aside my cockeyed internal compass, I also have a shortage of personal coolness, which can be a liability in travel. I have never learned how to arrange my face into that blank expression of competent invisibility that is so usefull when traveling in dangerous, foreign places. You know -that super-relaxed, totally-in-charge expression which makes you look you belong there, anuwhere, everywhere. Oh, no. When I dont know what I am doing, I look like I dont know what I am doing. When I am excited or nervous, I look excited or nervous. And when I am lost, which is frequently, I look lost. My face is a transmitter of my every thought. As my friend once put it, "You have the opposite of poker face. You have, like... miniature golf face"
Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to England with my saved-up money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless new born baby - I just dont care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it is mine. It can barf all over me if it wants to -I just dont care. "
"Truthfully, I'm not the best traveler in the world. I know this because I've traveled a lot and I've met travellers who are so physically sturdy they could drunk a shoebox of water from a Calcutta gutter and never get sick. People who can pick up new language where others of us might only pick up infectious diseases. People who know how to stand down a threatening border guard or cajole an unco-operative bureaucrat at the visa office. People who are the right height and complexion that they kind of look halfway normal where ever they go. I dont have these qualities. First of all, i dont blend. I am short and blonde and pink-complexioned, i am less a chameleon than a flamingo. Everywhere I go but germany, I stand out garishly. When I was in China, women used to come up to me on the street and point me out to their children as though I were some escaped zoo animal. And their children -who had never seen anything quite like this pink-faced phantom person -would often burst into tears at the sight of me. I really hated that about China.
I am bad (or, rather, lazy) at researching a place before I travel, tending just to show up and see what happens. When you travel this way, what typically "happens" is that you end up spending a lot of time standing in the middle of the train station feeling confused. My shaky sense of direction and geography means I have explored four continents in my life with only vaguest idea of where i am any given time. Aside my cockeyed internal compass, I also have a shortage of personal coolness, which can be a liability in travel. I have never learned how to arrange my face into that blank expression of competent invisibility that is so usefull when traveling in dangerous, foreign places. You know -that super-relaxed, totally-in-charge expression which makes you look you belong there, anuwhere, everywhere. Oh, no. When I dont know what I am doing, I look like I dont know what I am doing. When I am excited or nervous, I look excited or nervous. And when I am lost, which is frequently, I look lost. My face is a transmitter of my every thought. As my friend once put it, "You have the opposite of poker face. You have, like... miniature golf face"
Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to England with my saved-up money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless new born baby - I just dont care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it is mine. It can barf all over me if it wants to -I just dont care. "
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