The Eternal Tourist

This is a subject that I have often thought that I have discussed repeatedly in this blog, to the point where mentioning it further would be pointless. However, after going back and reading lots of the blog I can't find it written down anywhere, so I'm going to talk about it.

A thing that many people like to do is to be a tourist. To be a tourist one simply needs to go to a place where you don't know what's going on, and then do what you feel like, which in places that you are unfamiliar is very often looking around. I like this activity very much. I like to be surrounded by new things, to be challenged by new problems with easy solutions that are all about me being happier. When in a new place I spend lots of time just walking around and looking at things.

The opposite position from being a tourist is being at home. At home you know where everything is, you have arranged things to your own comfort, you are shielded from the new and the different. This can also be a delightful thing, to be safe and cosy in your own little den, protected from all the morons, the loudness, the difficulties.

I have just been a tourist in a place that feels more like home than my home. Pubs, green grass, hedgerows, ruins, walking. As I was coming back to where I presently live I was determined to use my vacationing in something like home to my advantage and decided to pretend that I was a tourist who was renting this home for a month or so. This worked marvelously until I picked up the dog from the vet and found out they had decided to do $350+ worth of stuff on him because he had a skin infection and some diarrhea. I wouldn't spend that money on a child with the same problems. At this point I simply became angry, and the magic was gone.

The thing is about this whole situation is that in the place that I felt the most at home, I had never been there before in my life (The Dingle Peninsular), and every single person there could tell I was from somewhere else as soon as I opened my mouth. I didn't know where anything was without a map, the money was different, and a fair amount of the time the people around me where speaking either a language I didn't understand, or a dialect that I only understood with difficulty. In the place that I was more at home in I was still a tourist.

We were asked while traveling where we were from. This is a surprisingly difficult question for us now. Are we from Texas? It certainly doesn't feel like it, we don't want to be from here, and we would probably be disowned by actual Texans. Are we from Oregon? Neither of us were born there, we don't live there and we probably won't return to live there again (although we might, if we give up on the rest of humanity). Am I English? The English I met didn't have a clue that I was.

A friend of mine once told me I was a man without a country, that essentially where ever I am, I'm from somewhere else. Under those circumstances I have therefore attempted to be the eternal tourist, always wandering around, peeking into alleyways, looking for what might be going on. I thoroughly recommend incorporating this into your general life, to look at the things around you as a tourist would. The problem with doing this on such a consistent level is that vacationing now is less special, less amazing, more ordinary. Another journey, another new place, another temporary stay.

I think just a couple more years like that will be more than enough. It's getting close to the time where I should make myself a home, a place in which I can grow roots deep into the soil so that when I travel I can once again be going from somewhere, and to which I can return.