What did we ever do before the internet? Well, the same thing we did without VCRs (and now DVRs), mobile phones, and microwaves. We went to the library and looked things up in the encyclopedia and we watched less TV and we called people when we got home. We lived like normal and we were just fine.
And before I had this blog, I still traveled. Up to now I have been to about 43 of the US States and about 45 countries. I have decided to post some of these trips here so I can basically have a more complete list of my travels all in one place…and also so people can stop asking why I haven’t gone to Greece or Japan, when in fact I have, it was just B.B. (before blog).
My First Trip Abroad
In 1996, I met my college friend Katie in Europe for my very first trip abroad. For 3 weeks, we backpacked from Paris to Rome, Florence, Venice, and Pompeii, to Zermatt and Lucerne in Switzerland and finished in London. It was quite a whirlwind. I was amazed, awed, scared, anxious, shocked, and simply delighted. I remember our very first night we had already befriended another traveler (a solo girl from San Diego) and drank a bottle of wine literally on a Parisian rooftop (we climbed out our tiny hotel room window). It was amazing and exciting and yet I remember feeling scared and homesick. What was I doing? Why was I here? It’s hard to believe now as I look back how far I have come and all the traveling I have done since that first night when I felt so very far away.
I was definitely out of my comfort zone and not exactly sure what I was in for. But, just like now, I realized I just needed a day to acclimate and then, boom! I fell in love. The streets of Paris amazed me. The history everywhere you looked; the luscious architecture; the cafe life; the fresh breads and pastries. My first European train ride through the French countryside literally reminded me of “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron.” The animated countryside of rolling green hills dotted with stone farmhouses and cypress trees was right here before me in real life. I couldn’t get over the buildings of ancient Rome – narrow lanes of old buildings and shops, then BAM, you turn a corner and your jaw drops as the huge Pantheon reveals itself. Or you come face-to-face with the Colosseum still standing after nearly 2000 years. It is still mind-boggling to me to this day. I remember seeing Mt. Vesuvius and the ancient city of Pompeii. It was amazing and a much bigger town than I even imagined; shops, homes, and people wiped out in an instant.
Switzerland dazzled me with its perfectly quaint alpine homes decked with flower boxes bursting with hardy, chromatic petunias. I was in love with its efficiency, cleanliness, and perfection – a stark contrast to Italy’s craziness, bustle, and messy passion. I liked a little of both and figured my dream home would be somewhere near Lake Como and the alps of northern Italy, not far from the Switzerland border…the best of both worlds.
London was our final stop and, at the time, the least interesting. Perhaps it was because I was exhausted. Perhaps it was because everyone spoke English and it was like being back home. About ten years later I would be back in London for a month and would come to love it much more and get to know its great neighborhoods and fun, charming people.
After my trip, I made a new life goal – to go abroad somewhere every year during my vacation time. And I did just that.
1998 – Return to Italy with Joe (Siena, Rome, Sorrento/Amalfi Coast)
1999 – Germany & France with Susan (Heidelberg, Rothenberg, Munich, Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, Strasbourg, Paris)
2000 – Ireland with David & Shannon
2001 – Europe Trip with Mark – 3 weeks and my first time traveling alone for just half the time (Barcelona, Nice, Cinque Terre, Lake Como, Bolzano, Salzburg, Innsbruck, Prague)
2002 – Canada Road Trip with Andy (Toronto, Niagara Falls, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec)
2003 – Greece with Andy (Athens, Santorini, Mykonos)
2004 – Croatia with Andy & his mom (Zagreb, Split, Brac, Dubrovnik, quick wrong turn into Bosnia)
I handed over my stamp-laden passport, the immigration officer stamped it without much more than a precursory glance, looked up at me and said, “Welcome home.”
That’s it?? I’d been out of the country for fifteen months, been to about 35 countries and that’s all I got? No red, flashing lights went off on his computer. No hour-long interrogations?
I made my way to the train and into the heart of Manhattan. I was in a bit of a daze and overwhelmed. Lights flashed, diverse masses scurried about in a semi-orderly fashion on the sidewalk, and noise was all around me, noise I couldn’t drown out, because I understood it all – the noise of English being spoken. I was home.
We often hear about the post partum depression for women who’ve just given birth, well what if you’ve give birth to this huge trip and turned your world upside down by seeing the world?
You go off seeking adventure and that’s just what you get. Your daily life involves hiking mountains, trying new foods, being challenged to be understood in a world of foreign languages and turning strangers into friends. It can be tiring, but consistently rewarding. It’s a natural high thanks to the constant newness that completely contrasts the routine drudgery of what constitutes a ‘normal life’ in today’s society.
Life is also totally under your control. You want to hang out in Berlin for a few more weeks, you certainly can. There is no idiotic co-worker driving you crazy. There are no annoying bills in your mailbox. Everyday you wake up to a new adventure and can do whatever you want.
So what happens when you return? How do you downshift back to reality? Or do you downshift at all?
They say the hardest part is returning – it’s the biggest culture shock of all – coming back home to this other reality, to boredom, to being on auto-pilot just coasting through life, to constant marketing and materialism. Don’t get me wrong, I have things and like some things, but even before traveling I never got caught up in this blitz. And, now more than ever, I see how much we are bombarded with advertising and how wasteful we are as a society in general. We buy and throw away without a second thought. From paper towels to computers…we consume and throw away, fill up our landfills, rinse and repeat.
I have felt all these aspects of the reverse culture shock – perhaps not all at once because I tried to ‘stay away’ or kept ‘going away’ even when I returned. In fact I am still living out of a bag, what’s left of my belongings are still in storage, and I have not completely settled down yet. Perhaps this is my way of slowly coming back to reality or never really coming back to the same reality ever again. And I am just fine with that. Life is too short to do the same thing and then die. No thanks.
So what do you do to help PTD?
Things to avoid:
Getting sucked in to watching too much TV. For about 3 years I barely watched TV at all let alone even had it in the room or hotel I was staying in. It can be enjoyable at times and a distraction from other life issues, but there are so many better things we can be doing.
Feeling the ‘need’ to follow too much media about senseless issues (ie Jon & Kate? Who are these people and why do I care?). Being aware of world events and news is good; surmising if Jennifer and Brad will ever get back together is ridiculous.
Eating too much – We eat so much more in this country than we need to AND so much of that is barely real food. Strive to continue to eat as fresh as you were when traveling.
I went for years without a cell phone. I still sometimes forget mine at home now and ONLY have a prepaid phone – no bill, no contracts, just pay-as-you-go and I like it. I don’t NEED to chat endlessly on the phone just because everyone around me is. I still prefer face to face meetings something that was impressed upon me from my time in Istanbul.
Try to not jump right back in the rat race. If you can, spend time with family and friends, travel around your home state and country and see it all in a whole new light.
Things to do:
Stay in touch with new friends from travels. With email and Facebook this is so easy and fun.
Keep the ‘learning’ going…if you loved salsa dancing in Latin America – find a salsa class at home. Miss the tasty spring rolls in Vietnam? Seek out a cooking class. If you miss the challenge of chatting with locals in another language…take a language class. I just received Rosetta Stone’s French Lessons in the mail. Go to museums, check local magazines and newspapers for other cultural meeting and groups.
Meet new friends back home. In larger cities there are expat groups or other travel groups (meetup.com and Couchsurfing.com) that give you the opportunity to get together for a drink or coffee with like-minded people.
Couchsurfing – Sign up to be a host. You can meet and show others from abroad around your town. Return the favor for the hospitality you received while traveling.
Volunteer with travelers/tourists: Contact your local tourism department to see what’s going on. Free services like Chicago Greeter and Big Apple Greeter are always looking for volunteers to give visitors a taste of your city from a local’s perspective.
Volunteer at your local Youth Hostel to meet travelers from all over the world and live vicariously through them.
Let yourself feel sad or different. What you just did and saw was BIG…don’t try to ‘get over it.’
Reminisce – look at your photos, think about your trip, share stories with those who really are interested.
Share – You’ve learned so much while traveling. Hold on to this. Share it with others. Maybe your experiences will teach and/or inspire others, maybe not to travel, but just to be more aware of the world around them.
FINAL POINT: start planning your next trip! Just because the BIG one is over (for now), that doesn’t mean the traveling is over. Keep traveling when and where you can! There’s a big world out there to see. Get going.
“If slaughter houses all had glass walls, we’d all be vegetarians.”
~Linda McCartney
Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. I am not a vegetarian. I have never been. It’s a specific label that I don’t need to define myself with. I also don’t think it has to be an all-or-nothing mentality. I think that is what scares off many people who think if they can’t quit cold turkey, literally, then they can’t do anything. This is simply not true. There is a whole spectrum in between. I myself am eating less and less meat (meaning cow, chicken, and pig—notice how even this sounds strange since we have renamed most of these into ‘edible’ names. We don’t eat pig, we eat pork) as time goes on…especially when I am cooking and shopping for myself.
I love food. There’s no question about it. The more I get out and the more I discover, the more foods I enjoy. And I don’t just mean stuffing my face. I enjoy the story of food and mostly the culture of food and it’s importance to basically every society around the globe. Through my television producing career (producing a ‘lifestyles’ show ‘weighted’ heavily in the restaurant scene in Chicago) and just my proximity to so many dining options and authentic ethnic eateries, I’ve become quite fascinated with the restaurant and food industry. And throughout my travels I try nearly everything on offer and at the same time have witnessed the closer relationship people in many developing nations have with what they consume. There seems to be a much shorter distance from field to plate and it made me realize how far removed most of us in the Western World (myself wholly included) are from the reality of the food chain. And how industrialized the food supply in the U.S. is, that to answer the above question: ‘where does our food come from,’ most would answer, ‘the supermarket.’ Drumsticks, NY Strip Steaks, and Pork Tenderloin wrapped in plastic or frozen chickentenders and beanie weenies in a can barely resemble the animals they once were, let alone even share the same name.
I recently saw the documentary, Food Inc., and read a book that opened my eyes and taught me a lot about the food I eat every day. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, journalist Michael Pollan meticulously and intriguingly breaks down our food industry kernel by kernel and tells us just how ‘industrialized’ it has all become. From factory farming techniques that reveal the unscrupulously inhumane treatment of animals, to the use of chemicals, pesticides, and antibiotics to ward off the very diseases that these overcrowded ‘factories’ create by their own design, Pollan says the chronic diseases that kill most of us can be traced directly to the industrialization of our food over the last several decades.
His fascinating book takes us through the changes our nation has endured over the 20th century in the processing (and over processing) of what we eat, especially the surplus of government-subsidized corn and how it has found its way into practically everything we ingest (corn fed beef as opposed to natural grass consuming cows, the replacement of natural sugar with addictive high fructose corn syrup in sodas, candy, and even ketchup, mustard, and bread).
High Fructose Corn Syrup is cheaper than sugar and consumers don’t seem to notice the difference, but the true difference has been seen in our belt size – in our nation’s health and overall weight. American’s rising obesity rates have been traced to the 1970s when America’s average daily caloric intake jumped up more than 10%. In simple terms, by human nature, when food is cheap and abundant people will eat more and get fat (relating to our hunter/gatherer roots—stocking up to store fat in case of a famine…which nowadays never comes). And in recent years, mega-companies like McDonald’s began ‘supersizing’ their portions thanks to cheaper ingredients from more subsidized and industrialized practices in turn making us even fatter. Humans have inherited a sweet tooth and an inclination towards energy-dense foods like sugar and fats, yet in nature we don’t encounter the over-concentrated amounts of these substances like we do now in processed foods—case-in-point—a soda contains way more fructose that any fruit that exists in nature.
Many people in this country get upset when they hear about dogs being killed for food in other countries like I saw firsthand in Vietnam. But we don’t seem at all bothered about what is happening to the animals right here in our own backyard. People know dogs and cats…they are part of the family. But perhaps if they got to know cows and pigs and chickens, they’d be just as upset about the way they are inhumanely treated and then slaughtered. It has been shown that cows have personalities and respond well to human interaction just like any animal does. And according to studies done at Penn State University, pigs can be just as smart and loving as dogs.
With the help of hormones and other treatments, the farming industry has managed to create fast growing cows and chickens that now live for just about 30 days before slaughter. Many of these animals grow so unnaturally fast that their little, young legs can not support the weight of their abnormally large bodies and they can’t even stand up. Not only do they suffer, many of these animals become sick or diseased and have to be killed and never even used as food anyway.
There are some new organic farms out there trying to do the right thing for the animals and in turn us. Polyface Farms in Virginia has what they call complete ‘transparent’ practices. They don’t hide their slaughter process; they do it out in the open. In fact, if you buy a chicken from Polyface, you are more than welcome to come to the farm early to pick it up and witness its sad yet humane demise. Either way, you have to pick it up – they do not ship food anywhere, thus helping to not contribute more environmental problems, pollution, and fuel usage that long-haul shipping causes. Maybe what I’m writing sounds so ‘in your face’, but I now really can’t believe how in the dark we are (or try to keep ourselves) from what we put in our bodies and where it truly comes from. Many informed consumers in the US are trying to buy locally from farmers’ markets and stores that supply local farmers’ foods. You may have heard this phrase before: Think globally, act locally. By going to the supermarket or better yet a local farmers’ market, and buying your tomatoes from local farmers in your own state and not, say, Costa Rica, you are helping cut back on fuel costs and emissions caused by such long-distance hauling.
Most people also don’t realize that farm animals are the greatest source of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet. The livestock industry produces more gases than the transportation industry. It’s also one of the top contributors to other problems like land degradation, water degradation and pollution, and loss of biodiversity.
Next time you are driving through the American “heartland” past all the green farms and rows and rows of corn, it may not seem quite the idyllic ‘mom and pop’ farm picture that it once did…or that the food marketers still try to make it out to be.
The market is really driven by consumers.
So what can we do?
Be informed. Read and learn more.
Shop mostly the perimeter of grocery stores where the ‘real’ food is.
Shop farmers’ markets (find local, sustainable farmers and markets by entering your zipcode here).
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