"All of life is a foreign country" Jack Kerouac [letter, June 24, 1949]

First and longest ... 


Unpronounceable words created by a socially constructed culture form the alienation one feels when they stray from the confines of the airport. All airports look, feel, smell identical; the hustle and bustle of  jet lagged bodies moving about, a sense of familiarity and safety; all removed as one steps from this cocoon into the seemingly unknown. A sense of bewilderment, excitement mixed with anxiety, hands protecting valuables, eyes searching for a way out, a tough façade, a friendly face in the crowd, someone who won't take you for a walking dollar sign.
The humbling feeling of the unexperienced. Time slows with the processing and saving of nascent neuronal synapses. Unable to grasp or perceive the situation, merely relying on idealized foresight from previous lived experiences that shape a possible predictable outcome. Life, like travel, is as exotic as a faraway and tropical Pacific atoll, the humid sweaty exit of an alien airport, or the tiresome 9AM Monday back at work . It may feel estranged or standardized, yet always adhering to the preconceived norms and seemingly randomness of physics and biology. Thus, this pseudo philosophical ramble optimistically exemplifies how life can be as foreign as travel (he wrote the title of the blog in the blog!).

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Visas, grants, ethics. Numerous pedantic and bureaucratic forms, letters, and emails written, sent, replied, rejected, re-written, re-sent, accepted. Forms filled out, forms created. Self-written egotistical reference letters autographed by names that matter. Appease the holder of the hoops. Contradictions, self-reflection, and re-evaluations. Time to test the minds and salient thoughts of innumerable writers, researchers, and idealists in order to determine if any academic deduction will hold practicality in the real world.

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I stretch out in Victoria on my queen-size pillow-top mattress for the last time. Not wanting to get out of bed, stemming both from the comfort factor and as much from the inordinate consumption of Molson Canadian (any number higher than one Canadian is inordinate) and spicy-sodium hot wings the evening before. It will be the last morning of such leisure. Not that the beds are bad on the road, they just aren't yours. I find that when I wake up I typically try to vacate them as soon as possible in order to let the bed bugs breathe. Unfortunately, I know the Victorian pillow-top mattress has made me soft, and after a few hours of lapsing in the doldrums, the motivation to stir is a cup of coffee. 

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Vancouver to Chicago, Chicago to Washington, Washington to São Paulo, São Paulo to Rio. Total travel time guesstimated: 22-26 hours. 

Four or more mile-high dry sandwiches, a sedative and some pretzels, 1 or 2 whiskeys in DC, and a couple more Matthew McConaughey films (see: Three Matthew McConaugheys and a Baby). Twenty-four hours of flying, compounding a further 6,000 pounds of CO₂ exhausted into the atmosphere, adding to my total airplane travel footprint of 30,000 lbs CO₂ in three years (although morally canceled out due to my lack of vehicle, wavering attempts at vegetarianism (see hot wings above), and my choice to drink locally brewed beer (disregard the above mentioned abnormality and mistake aka Molson Canadian)).

I will be spending the proceeding few days in Rio de Janerio, sitting on the beach, reading non-academic fictional accounts of logger-union disputes in the Pacific Northwest. 

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I have found the success of backpack travel is packing all contents into little bags, then into bigger bags, then compression sacks, and then into the pack. The only difficulty is memorizing which pack contains what. After a few weeks it becomes second nature and unpacking/repacking takes only moments, thus allowing you to locate and flip inside-out the damp mildewy socks/underwear/t-shirts/pants.

Yes, traveling with a laptop this time. Should be fun to stick out like a sore thumb target on the buses in Brazil!

Anyhow, more blogs to follow. Less serious, less lengthy, more random. I hope to entertain all 2 of my readers with photos and hilarious anecdotes.