Tag Archives: museums

Brooklynites for a week

by jose

 

“I hadn’t even mentioned Airbnb because I thought you already knew, what with you two being globe-trotters and all!”

Liza had been unable to host us, but had looked into a number of alternatives to help us, although without success. Fortunately, Madleina, Ladina’s cousin whom we had visited two weeks earlier in the Silicon Valley, had told us about Airbnb, a community-based platform for subletting and subrenting everything from a bed to a villa. We had ended up finding the cheapest bed we could possibly hope for, given New York’s crazy accomodation prices.

Liza (Elisabeth by her real name, but it’s damn too long!) was another old friend of mine, who happened to be in New York at the same time as us. She was greatly enjoying her stay, and, as an art lover, loved the fact that she was able to go to all the museums of the city for her work. We took the opportunity to spend a fabulous evening and make a few cultural visits together.

“So now you’re staying in Brooklyn?”

We were, de facto, Brooklynites for a week.

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Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

by jose

“So how did you find Canberra?”
“Err…”
“Dead, uninteresting, nothing happens?”
“I was gonna say ‘soulless’, but that’s pretty much it”
(Conversation with Nadia, traveler from Canberra, on the W trail in Torres del Paine)

For those who do not know, Canberra has been entirely built out of the blue to serve as a capital city. And the first impression I had when I discovered the desert, still city, with its topography in concentric circles (alright, it is more interesting than the usual square grid, but still not good) is this one: this is a dream from Le Corbusier.

And it is not a compliment.

But it does not mean Canberra is to be avoided at all costs. The museums over there (perhaps built in order to give a boost to the stagnant culture of the city) are very good – I come to wonder now if the only thing I enjoy while traveling in cities is the art and culture I find there. I am undoubtedly getting tired of partying – really, I did not go on the other side of the world to burn my money on alcohol (again) and have to withstand overplayed commercial ‘music’ (and again). I can do that at home.

“But you’ve got awesome museums there!”
“Ahhh, I hate museums.”
“Alright, change city”

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Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

by jose

I love CouchSurfing. I have probably already said it, but I love CouchSurfing. For everything it brought to my trip – locals’ recommendations, discovering cultures from the inside, meeting great people, sharing joys and, most importantly, making amazing friends – I am eternally grateful, and in debt to all the CouchSurfers around the world. They will be most welcome at my place, when – or rather every time – I will be settled down somewhere.

Nevertheless, despite all the qualities of the CouchSurfing project, it does have one major drawback. It needs the Internet.

I am not talking about the problem of accessing the Internet, though. Travelers can find, nowadays, an access to the Internet – may it be a Wi-Fi hot-spot or a cybercafe – relatively easily (thank you McDonald’s and Burger King, aka Hungry Jack’s for our Australian friends); as for the hosts, it is obvious that CouchSurfing cannot expand to the regions of the world that are not reached by this powerful medium. This is something that will improve with time; and after all, on the other hand, it is sometimes a relief to find that you can be impossible to reach in some parts of this world. Yes. It is.

I am, actually, talking about the fact that CouchSurfing needs messages between the host and the surfer if they are to organize the latter’s stay. Such a conversation, obviously necessary, takes at least a week, if not several. Which means the traveler needs to know a week in advance where he is going. CouchSurfing is an amazing project, but it restrains the sheer freedom of travelers, especially those, like me, who are always on the move, always on the road, and only following the wind.

This is what I realized, the night before I reached Sydney, after a phone call to Kevin, a CouchSurfer that I thought would be able to host me when I would arrive there. In the silence of Newcastle’s train station, the fact that CouchSurfing was, after all, also a social act, implying social rules and roles, became all but too obvious to me.

After all, one of the reasons why I am traveling is to escape the constant demands of the society.

Maybe such a thing is impossible.

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Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

by jose

My last post about Malaysia was silent. I thought silence was a good way to express my grief about the hundreds of people dieing a few kilometers from me, trapped in the rubble of the Christchurch earthquake.

And then I thought I could do that as well for the next posts to save me the trouble and time of writing and laying out the page. I found myself choosing pictures.

And I told myself I had so much to say about them, about my travel, that pictures cannot express alone.

Words cannot either, but they help.

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Udaipur, Rajasthan, India

by jose

General laugh in the bus. I turn to Sajjad (Qatar) and stare at him inquiringly. He calms down, catches his breath and finally translates.

She just said: ‘You’re young, why are you wearing shoes?’

Er well… I come from a country where kids wear shoes. Parents buy small shoes to their children – and they need new ones after every few months, obviously – so that their feet are always protected from the clean floor of the developed countries, and that they never are wounded, never feel the ground, never learn to get stronger. So that when they become adults, they still are unable to walk without that piece of equipment, even only on a flat ground, because they still have babies’ feet and soft skins.

Yeah, well, I have no idea why either, Isu.

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