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My Traveling Light column this week at Yahoo! News deals with the perils of “going native” with your wardrobe as your travel. In addition to my own story of inadvertently “going native” in Burma, I give some pointers on how to ‘go native’ (in the fashion sense, at least) and still keep your dignity:
1) Spend some time in the country first
Guatemalan villagers may look sharp in their colorful threads, but this doesn’t mean you should blow half your quetzals on Chichicastenango peasant smocks 36 hours off the plane from Oakland. Get to know the culture — and the significance of its fashions — before you try to emulate it.
2) Seek function before fashion
A colorful Bolivian alpaca sweater and a Korean silk hanbok might both seem equally appealing hanging in the market stalls of their respective countries, but remember how local people use them. Hanbok are used for family and ceremonial functions, whereas alpaca sweaters are used to keep warm. Since weather fluctuations more likely to be a factor than unexpected wedding ceremonies (and since most cultures won’t expect you to wear traditional garb to their festivities anyway), the sweater is a more sensible buy than a hanbok.
Thus, if a given item of local clothing is going help keep you cool, warm, dry, shaded or modest, it’s probably a worthwhile purchase. If you’re just buying it because you think it looks cool, you might consider if it’s really worth the space it takes up in your bag (and whether or not you’ll really wear it when you get home).
3) Beware of going native with your souvenirs
Indian women might look graceful in their brightly colored saris, but that doesn’t mean that a souvenir sari is going to look good on your Aunt Mabel. Similarly, a gown-like galabiyya might look adorable when worn by second-grade boys in Cairo, but buying one for your eight-year-old nephew is likely to cause him emotional trauma on the playground. Remember that your friends and family are less likely to understand the cultural context that inspired your souvenir purchases — and thus less likely to actually wear the exotic fashions you bring them.
Full article online here.
Our friends over at World Hum recently hosted an interview with Michael Hess of Albuquerque, NM who—beginning last May—reread Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, and combined his love for literature, maps, and programming to reproduce Sal Paradise’s iconic journey across America via an impressive Google Maps mashup.
Each location throughout the book is represented as a waypoint on Google Maps, which, when clicked, links to a corresponding blog post offering up “a quote, some personal reflections, and some additional information,” about that particular section of Kerouac’s journey—beginning in Paterson, NJ.
You can read World Hum’s interview with Michael Hess in full here, or jump straight to the map here.
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How can you possibly maintain fluency in two foreign languages — let alone five or six — if the opportunities to use them are months or years apart?
Few topics provoke more anxiety and depression in independent language learners than the prospect of irretrievably losing a hard-learned new language. After you return to your English-dominated homeland, how do you maintain your new-found skills, which might seem to have an expiration date? Having juggled close to a dozen languages and suffered the interference that goes with it, my answer now is simple: you don’t.
It is easier, and much more time-efficient, to catch up versus keep up.
Why struggle to maintain a foreign tongue in the US, for example, when you most often gain nothing more than bad habits? If you acquire the language in a native environment and attain an intermediate or advanced level of
fluency, you can reactivate your language skills in four weeks or less when approached methodically. Would you rather spend four hours per week on your new language, only to see it get sick and bloated with a distinctly foreign-sounding twang, or spend two hours per day for 1-3 weeks and be right back at your fluency level from years prior?
Later this week, I will depart for Japan, where I will attend a traditional Japanese wedding and then live with my former host family for a month. The problem? I haven’t spoken Japanese in more than seven years.
I began reactivation just over a week ago and can already hold a decent conversation with the Japanese coffee store manager down the street. This is not a testament to my ability, but to the efficacy of a process that begins with massive passive exposure and avoids time-consuming review from square one:
1. Days 1-7: Japanese films with English subtitles for at least two hours each evening for one week.
2. Days 3+: 10-20 pages of dialogue-rich manga (Japanese comics that can be ordered in your target-language from comic stores in your target country) for 30 minutes each morning and prior to bed.
3. On the plane: Read a phrasebook in its entirety for active recall practice of common phrases (45 minutes of study alternated with 15 minutes of rest – this takes advantage of what is called the “primacy and recency effect”).
4. Upon arrival: Continue with manga and grammar reference checks as needed, using an electronic dictionary to reactivate vocabulary from conversation that is familiar but not understood.
5. Weeks 2-3: Thirty to sixty Vis-Ed flashcards daily. This seems like a lot, but most will have been covered in steps 1-3 – using active recall (English to Japanese). Vis-Ed (www.vis-ed.com) compiles its sets of flashcards from word frequency lists and includes sample phrases for usage. I begin flashcards after three or four days in-country.
The sooner you decide to reactivate languages when needed, instead of maintaining them for an unspecified time in the future, the more leisure time you will have and the less diluted your language abilities will be when you need them.
Don’t fear losing languages if you’ve attained real fluency. They’re just in temporary storage with the covers pulled over them.
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Tim Ferriss is fluent in five languages, has studied more than 15, and has spent the last 12 years analyzing the world’s best language learners. He has lived in more than 25 countries, designed curricula worldwide for Berlitz®, and studied East Asian Studies and Neuroscience at Princeton University. He can be reached at timferriss@gmail.com with questions, feedback, and topic suggestions.
An interesting travel blog (as we’ve discussed before) combines intelligent writing, a clean, readable design, and plenty of media to keep you busy traveling vicariously through its author(s). Lee and Sachi’s The World is Not Flat is, quite simply put, one of those.
Lee and Sachi are about three-quarters of the way through their round-the-world trip, currently traveling across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Their gadget-heavy adventure began in New Zealand and has taken them across Australia, Southeast Asia, India, China, and Russia on their way westward.
The site (TwinF for short) is well designed, easy on the eyes, and functional. It features almost-daily updates (Internet connection permitting) along with an extensive collection of photos, and even videos—something you don’t see quite as often on homegrown travel blogs. One particularly unique feature was designed to collect reader reccomendations on the destinations Lee and Sachi planned on visiting.
“As we started to tell people about the trip, they would always say ‘Oh,
you must go here and do that’ and we would write it down on a handy piece of paper and promptly lose it.”
The section has since morphed into a sort of catch-all for collecting and organizing first-hand travel tips from all over world. Anyone can register and post their own submission–whether it’s travel advice for Lee and Sachi, or an interesting story from your latest trip.
If you’re thinking of blogging your next journey, The World is Not Flat is a great choice for inspiration.
I have short pieces appearing in two new books from Travelers’ Tales — “Mandu Rolf Bap,” a food sidebar appearing in Susan Brady’s The World Is a Kitchen: Cooking Your Way Through Culture; and “Embracing Unpredictability,” a travel tip section in Tim Leffel’s Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune: The Contrarian Traveler’s Guide to Getting More for Less.
For more information on both of these new travel releases, visit the Travelers’ Tales website here.
[Above: Rolf poses with students and teachers from the 2006 Creative Writing Workshop at the Paris American Academy.]
I’ve been so busy with travel this summer (journeying through Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and the Czech Republic) that I never properly reported on the creative writing classes I taught at the Paris American Academy in July. We had a small but lively nonfiction class this year, with students from the United States and Australia developing impressive memoirs, travel stories, and experimental essays.
One of the most interesting projects to come from the creative nonfiction class was Marlene Nichols’s performance monologue based (in part) on her visit to the Paris Catacombs — and I’m proud to announce that she’ll be performing this piece with the storytelling group MOUTHPIECE in Park Slope, Brooklyn next Monday, September 25th. Entrance is just $8, and the show also includes performances by Andy Christie, Albert Stern and James Braly, so if you’re in the New York area, do go and check out her monologue next Monday! More information online here.
Marlene will also be performing her monologues as part of the Culture Project’s Impact Festival in the show “Voices From the Storm,” (responses to Hurricane Katrina, and a benefit for rebuilding efforts in Hancock County), and every Wednesday in October she’ll be handing over four of her monologues to various actors who’ll be performing them at Stage Left Studios’ “What’s Happening” nights for works in progress.
A few months back I asked the masses over at Metafilter to list off their favorite travel-oriented songs – from any genre - that evoke the spirit of independent, vagabonding travel.
User OmieWise suggested the wonderfully unique Mountain Goats – “one of the best songwriters in the world [who] has a series of songs about travelling all over the place for reasons as diverse as contract killing, love affairs, and nostalgia.”
A trip to their website includes many free, downloadable mp3s along with a complete song database, most of which include lyrics such as these from a track titled Going to Bolivia:
I cut myself a two-foot switch from some tropical hardwood nearby.
and the sounds of a carnival drifted miraculously
through the air from a thousand miles away.
the monkeys jumped from tree to tree.
it sent a deathly chill through me
in bolivia
Here are a few highlights of the many suggestions my question received (links go directly to lyric sites which may contain popups and annoying ads – you’ve be warned!):
A13 Trunk Road To the Sea - Billy Bragg
Two of Us - The Beatles
Get Out the Map - Indigo Girls
I’ve Been Everywhere - Johnny Cash
On the Road Again - Willie Nelson
The World at Large - Modest Mouse
Highway Chile - Jimi Hendrix
King of the Road - Roger Miller
The Way - Fastball
Another Travelin’ Song - Bright Eyes
For the entire list of suggestions, click here.
Do you have a favorite aritst or song that’s missing from the list? Feel free to share your suggestions in the comment section below.
My sister, Kristin Van Tassel, has reviewed some new travel books for World Hum in recent weeks, including Mark Twain: On Travel, edited by Terry Mort; Mark Twain’s Helpful Hints for Good Living: A Handbook for the Damned Human Race, from the University of California Press; and J. Maarten Troost’s Getting Stoned With Savages.
Kristin shares a similar opinion to mine regarding the Troost book: It’s funny, but not quite up to the level of this first book about the tropical Pacific, The Sex Lives of Cannibals:
“Cannibals” established Troost as a hootingly funny travel writer. His sequel is similarly amusing — complete with his trademark, third-person “abstracts” at the beginning of each chapter. …But certain events covered in “Getting Stoned With Savages,” including the birth of Troost’s first child about three-quarters of the way into the narrative, as well as 9/11, the bane of every humor writer, do not fit as successfully into the lighthearted tone, making the narrative feel awkward in places.
Troost does a particularly good job of integrating history into his contemporary travel tale, offering interesting information about a region in the world few readers know well. The usefulness of the history, however, does not fully compensate for the absence of a strong story. “Stoned” does not have the coherence of Troost’s first book, possibly because Vanuatu and Fiji lack both the relentless idiosyncrasies and profound solitude of Kiribati—essential elements in holding together Troost’s earlier narrative.
Kristin’s review of the Twain books is online here; Troost review online here.
Scottish born author William Dalrymple has written a short introduction to travel writing for the BBC’s special writing feature The Craft. A lot has changed, he says, since “authors such as Theroux or Eric Newby were able to simply jump on a train and, on their return, after a quick reworking of their diaries, could reasonably expect to have a major serialisation and a crop of rave reviews.”
Countless travelers since then have followed suit, traversing the globe and reporting back. “The Climate,” Dalrymple says, “has changed from enthusiasm to one of undisguised boredom.”
This is not meant to discourage, however. The article offers up sound advice to those looking to improve their note-taking, writing, and marketability in the world of travel writing. “… if you have talent, persistence and, above all, a good tale to tell, there will still be a place for you in what is now a very crowded and competitive marketplace.”
Check out the article in full here.
I was pleased to learn recently that Vagabonding is included among the influential books mentioned in the newly released You’ve GOT to Read This Book!: 55 People Tell the Story of the Book That Changed Their Life.
Edited by Chicken Soup for the Soul guru Jack Canfield, You’ve Got to Read This Book! explores the potential books have to change people’s lives. In the collection, humorist Dave Barry writes about Robert Benchley’s Inside Benchley; actress Catherine Oxenberg writes about Bryce Courtenay’s The Power of One; craigslist’s Craig Newmark writes about The Cluetrain Manifesto; activist Doris “Granny D” Haddock writes about Peace Pilgrim; musician Kenny Loggins writes about Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha; congresswoman Lois Capps writes about Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Povery.
Vagabonding gets a nod from accelerated-learning researcher and linguist Tim Ferriss, who (in addition to writing about language for this blog) holds national titles in Chinese kickboxing, is the first American to hold a Guinness world record in tango, and has worked with more than 80 world-champion athletes as director of research at BrainQUICKEN LLC Research and Technologies.
For Tim, who came to helm a successful business at a very young age — but had no time to enjoy this life — Vagabonding provided perspective on the need to balance work with one’s deeper dreams:
…I found a book that made me look at my life, work, and goals in an entirely new way—Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, by Rolf Potts. …His idea that you don’t have to wait for retirement to start doing what you’ve always dreamed just made sense. I’d finally found another person who thought the way I did.
But more than that, Vagabonding presents a philosophy about travel which Potts says isn’t about escaping ordinary life for a period of time but about discovering your life. It’s a lifestyle choice that may require a major shift in one’s priorities. I found Potts’s concept of voluntary poverty and simplification very interesting. It made me realize how much stuff I had accumulated that I just didn’t need—so many things I had were just taking up space on my “mental plate.” I ended up going through all of my earthly belongings and getting rid of 80% of them. As soon as I did that, it became easier to prioritize everything I did and enjoy everything I had. This process of simplifying my life was exhilarating— but was still only a warm-up for the big experiment.
In 2003, taking only a small backpack—with Potts’s book in it—I bought a one-way ticket to Europe and left with no timetable for my return and no clear itinerary beyond my first stop: a friend’s apartment in London. …Removing myself from my deeply engrained work habit forced me to take a long look at my values and priorities. Although I’d always worked, I’d never stopped to ask myself what I was working for: How much money did I need? What was I trying to accomplish? With this new opportunity to reflect on these questions, it became clear that (1) I hadn’t defined my goals clearly, (2) I often worked out of guilt—so I wouldn’t appear “unproductive” to others, and (3) I had actually become overly regimented and fearful of the unknown. My habits, designed to help me succeed by brute force, were killing me spiritually and emotionally.
Over the course of the trip, living life as a vagabond helped me to tackle all these issues and jump directly into self-knowledge and self-development without the distraction of working for work’s sake. At first, I acted the part of tourist because I didn’t know what else to do—visiting museums, parks, landmarks—but it got boring quickly. Everything changed when I shifted from “seeing” things—simply logging away memories—to doing things and learning things. By the time I left London, the trip had taken on a life of its own. I had figured I’d be gone for 8 weeks, but I ended up visiting 16 countries over the course of almost 18 months.
The trip was a rediscovery process—working the way I had up until then, I’d let nearly all of my passions and interests atrophy. Traveling, I was able to revive old interests and create new ones: I trained with champion fighters in Oslo, learned to tango in Argentina, and snorkeled in Panama. What enabled me to do all of this was applying the principles in Vagabonding.
More information about You’ve Got to Read This Book! can be found here or here.
As for Tim Ferriss, he and his Argentine dancing partner recently broke a world record in tango spins on Live With Regis and Kelly. Video clip online here.
