Saturday, December 8, 2007

Rome, Holland, and coming home

Damn. I can't belive it's Sunday and I''m coming home in three more days. I've been anxious and ready to get home for a while now because it seemed so close, but now I can't believe its over. Travel isn't something I'd reccomend for everybody, you really have to feel up to it, and you also have to feel you can handle almost anything that will come up. Theres definitely no way you can be prepared for it all, you just have to know you can handle it.

I think the real point of the whole thing is the actual travelling, just covering all that ground. Its really a trip to switch back and forth between languages, customs, and such on an almost daily basis, it can be confusing. I get a massive personal satisfaction from knowing I have covered all the ground from one place on a map to another. A friend and I made it to Amsterdam from Rome in 22 hours, and looking at the map afterwards we were pretty pleased with ourselves knowing we had ridden that massive distance on a train, straight over the ground that whole time.

I'm in Amsterdam again, and I've gotten pretty familiar with this place. I can tell my hostel friends what trams to take where, when, and why you would want to go to the Rokerij over the GreenHouse. After a while you start to feel the energy of a place, and get in the rhythm of life. This happens everywhere, but it takes a different rhythm to help you realize there was a rhythm in the first place. After a while, you just know where to go, and thats the next thing I want to talk about.

The most important part of traveling (and other good travelers agree) is to pay attention to yourself and your own reactions to what you see. I call it 'reading omens' in a goofy metaphysical way, but there are actually omens there. So after you get into a mode where you are ready to sense a deep energy, you have to start getting in tune with how your body vibrates with that energy. If you see a street that strikes a chord with you and you feel good about it, you have to go down that street! This is so important to how I travel. Too many times I have met people who just want to 'see' what else there is... and they never just appreciate where they already are. This is not the way to travel. Your feelings are there to help you, listen to them.

Finally the story of the camera man. Once upon a time there was a traveler. All the people who knew him called him Tourist because he lived his whole life never really seeing, at least not for himself. He knew he could'nt really see because whenever he saw something really special, he had to take a picture to save it and look at it later. Maybe he would show it to his friends because they might see something he didn't. Even they realized that what they were seeing wasn't anything at all, it was just a well rendered 2 dimensional copy, so they didn't really see it either. One fateful day, the Tourist's camera was stolen, and since it was everything to him, he simply froze on the spot like a statue. It was if his whole life was gone because he hadn't figured out his pictures and now they were gone. So he was frozen, looking at the ground; after all the great things he had seen in his life he was forced to watch a single scurrying ant. At first it bored him, he was about to see the Grand Chapel of Colisseum Greatness and this was nothing compared to that. Then he just watched the ant go about its business and soon enough it began to interest him how the ant walked. Soon he was fascinated. He wanted to study ants forever. He wanted to find out all he could, and when he decided this about what once bored him, he was unfrozen. He spent the rest of the day just looking at all the wonders of the ground, and then slowly, day by day he knew he could really see, and he looked at the world with different eyes.

Someone told me this story and I don't think I'll ever be a tourist again.

So I'm off to do some shopping and find a decent tattoo shop. Be back soon.

Love,
Forrest