Leaving My Baggage at Home

I recently sat on a panel at a women’s event in my hometown of Boston, whose discussion focused on “how to keep traveling while staying put.” Comments from the audience focused on getting out of a rut at home, and the idea appeared fairly straightforward—visit museums, strike up conversations with new people, take photographs and try to appreciate where you are through the eyes of others. But as the panel went on, it was clear that something was not quite making sense. What was the link between location and freedom of spirit?

Then, a young woman mentioned that she had been planning to move to a new apartment. She was excited to explore a neighborhood that she did not know well, but since it was an acknowledged “bad” area, her family did not approve. Her frustration showcased what we had all been navigating around: the joy that so many people find when on the road isn’t about being on vacation or the thrill of discovery. What we’re feeling is freedom from the baggage of our own culture.

In one’s own environment, where the line between “safe” and “dangerous” is clear, it’s easy to make the choice to remain inside your community’s unspoken rules. “This neighborhood’s good, that one’s bad… people here dress a certain way… watch your accent to blend in…” It’s never-ending, the list of subtle social signposts that we all get facile with in our own homes. And there’s something comforting about understanding these signals on a nuanced (or even invisible) level; reaching that level of cultural fluency is really how you become a local.

So, for many people, travel is fun when they can bring their own culture with them, which they achieve by staying at a certain style of hotel or using their own language. They understandably want to mitigate the disorienting experience of ignorance. To be fair, there’s a particular sense of power that comes with knowing that you have the ability to make yourself comfortable wherever you are.

But my theory is that, in the end, doing this means carrying your fears with you as well. Instead, there’s potential for mental freedom when you travel, particularly for people who decide to abandon their native culture and rub up against the limitations of unacknowledged social conventions on a daily basis.

When I backpacked in Europe during my senior year at Smith, I did not know the difference between a good neighborhood and a bad one and ended up staying in red light districts, grim workmen’s blocks, and high-end luxury apartments. I chatted with strangers, had romances, and drank wine before 5pm. Years later, stuck in the Sinai desert after flash floods tore up the road, my friend and I jumped out of our car to push a taxi out of the mud. We forgot that we weren’t in modest Egyptian clothing—still, a local man, grateful for the help, serenaded me with “American Woman” as I wiped the mud off my arms.

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A view of Cairo

But losing mental constraints isn’t always fun, especially when not done responsibly. Fed up with haggling over every purchase in rural India, I said I was a student to elicit sympathy and make me sound less well-off—however, there, my formal education marked me as prosperous in a way that should have been embarrassing. Furthermore, the reason I was dressed immodestly while pushing the stranded taxi was because we had spent the night trapped in our car at a rest stop. Only men were out and about; all women in the vicinity had been reduced to the occasional pair of eyes peering out from other stranded vehicles. So we three women sweated in the back seat of a small sedan so that it appeared our male friend, in front, was “in charge of us.” We barely drank water, so we could avoid needing to leave the car to pee—I was ill from dehydration when we finally made it back to Cairo.

Returning to Boston for a few years, I found real comfort in knowing exactly what slang meant, what constituted “polite” behavior, and how to navigate the pile of logistics—health care, phone contracts, apartment leases—that always surprise me in their differences across national borders. It was relaxing in a way I’ve never known abroad.

For me, the value of having lived internationally is that I don’t have to carry a sense of familiarity with me wherever I go, with its associated limitations and complacencies. Rather, I can carry with me a sense of comfort in the strangeness, a freedom from obligation to the cultural expectations put on my body and mind.

Photo © Julia Hudson. All rights reserved.

Hudson bio photo

 

Julia is a writer and digital marketer in London, England. She founded The Epic Adventurer, a website that celebrates independent travel.

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