Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary

Someone I follow on the Twitter web service is traveling in Greece right now and posted an interesting "tweet" earlier today: "looking for a laundromat... the mundane stuff is what makes travel feel real."

Not only is this exactly the sort of thing that makes Twitter so interesting -- mundanity recast -- it's also something that most travel writing overlooks: when you're traveling even the ordinary can become extraordinary.

Part of what makes travel interesting is that it pulls us out of our sometimes mundane daily lives and provides a heightened sense of engagement. That's the part of travel we tell our friends about when we get home.

But another part of travel turns the seemly mundane into something more interesting and that's the part that really makes traveling worthwhile.

For instance, while I don't talk about it much, my favorite memories of Bangkok are not the temple wanderings or wacky street food adventures, but the two weeks I spent working in the city. I'll admit that I wasn't thrilled about it at the time, but in hindsight those two weeks are the ones that stick out -- the ones where I got see Bangkok much closer to the way its inhabitants see it.

Of course the natural question is, why don't we feel that way about our mundane tasks when we aren't traveling? Why does it take a radical shift in environment to make laundry seem like something fun, an adventure even? I suspect part of lies in something a friend of mine likes to point out: familiarity breeds contempt. When we get rid of familiar we're suddenly more open to the unusual. It's not that the unusual is more common when we're traveling, it's that we're more receptive to it.

Mundane tasks, like laundry or work probably aren't what motivate you get out of your routine and travel the world, but they often end up being the most memorable, and sometimes, "what makes travel feel real."