Seat of Our Pants » Notes From the Road

How Studying Abroad Allowed me to See the World

Jaime — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:57:51 +0000

I didn’t always love to travel. Actually, in the grand scheme of things, I’ve loved it for a just a short time. I would be downright mad as a kid when my parents packed us into their van for weekend adventures. It meant missing my Saturday morning cartoons, a GROSSLY unfair thing to do in my mind. I didn’t like going away for summer camp. In fact, I made it just two days at tennis camp before calling my parents in tears, asking to be picked up. I moved away for college, but just a three hour drive away – just far enough but not too far.

It’s not that I wasn’t curious about other places. I have memories as a child of standing in my parents garage, staring at a world map that hung there. Splayed across the pastel-colored continents were little red pins, marking my father’s travels. What would it be like to be in those far off places, I wondered, but just as quickly I would turn and run to our backyard to play. Why would I need to travel when all the joy and happiness I knew was found right there at home?

It’s that sort of mentality, combined with a fair deal of shyness, that kept me close to home for most of my life. If you’ve been following this blog, you know that I have a very different philosophy about travel today. So what gives? What happened between the Saturday morning, cartoon missing tantrums and taking a year off to travel the world?

A rash decision made my final year of college.

Checking out what I looked like as a study abroad student 11 years ago

Driven by a foolish desire to impress a worldly boy, I signed up to study abroad for a year. Sadly, the boy remained unimpressed but it was a decision that changed my life.

As a lifelong lover of old masters (that’s art-speak for guys that painted a long, long time ago), I chose to study in the ground zero of Renaissance Art: Florence, Italy. I shared an apartment with seven – that’s right – seven other girls, just five minutes from the Duomo, Florence’s central cathedral. The location was unreal, the roommates were amazing and the wine flowed like $2 magnum bottles should. Wine aside (sort of), the experience was a once in a lifetime slap in the face. Finally I understood what all the travel hype was about.

I came home alive, buzzing with the love of travel, thirsty for more. It took that initial step out the door – to Italy, in my case – to see what traveling is about. It’s not just a pin on a wall map (though you can be sure I’m going to have one of those in my future garage). It’s a glimpse of what else is out there: the amazing people, the awful people, the delicious food, the crazy there’s-no-way food stuffs, the foreign culture that feels just like home and the culture that opens your eyes.

Sharing the study abroad experience with me were seven amazing women – who ten years after our tear-filled good-byes, I was able to meet up with again recently in New York. Many of them are married. Some have children. All of them are just as great as I remembered them. Ladies, if it wasn’t for our time together 11 years ago, I wouldn’t have had the courage to see the world.

Thank you.

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My Dumb Little Protest

Jaime — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:12:14 +0000

If you’d seen me just one minute ago, you would have caught me in a rather telling position. With one hand covering my eyes and one on my keyboard, I was scrolling through our website, peeking through my fingers at our recent posts. How many days have passed since I’ve last made an appearance? My embarrassing results: I posted something in early August and before then it was early July.

Yikes.

Such utter lack of attention to our beloved website begs the question: why have I abandoned writing for this project? My simple answer is also a confession. Not posting anything is my one and only form of protest. We’re not traveling anymore and god dammit I’m bummed about it. There, I said it. Not writing was really all I had to use as a protest. I’m an adult so tantrums were out. I’m a relatively responsible person, so running back into the world with our little re-entry savings is out of the question, too. All that was left to do is go on with life. But I could stop writing for our travel blog! Yes, that’s the ticket. I’ll stop writing and that will make me feel better.

My return to these pages shows you how great a solution that was. The reality is this: I miss travel blogging. I miss the community of fellow travel bloggers. I miss our readers and their comments. Writing for this site was an important part of our life for over a year so why would stopping it suddenly make me feel better? It wouldn’t – it doesn’t – plain as that.

Sweating it out in Jaipur, India

No, I’m no longer struggling in an Indian internet café in 110 degree heat with 1,000% humidity, being swarmed by mosquitoes to get a few line post up. We’re not dealing with that caliber of travel, but the adventure hasn’t necessarily ended. We’re currently living in a trailer in a retirement-age mobile home park (seen in the photo above) an hour outside Yosemite National Park. We have most of next month booked for road trips. I’m working on an independent website project (more to come on that later…) No – I’d say the adventure is far from over.

Consider this post my cure. I’ve stopped my silly no-writing-protest. In its place are plans for future blog posts here at SeatOfOurPants, updates on our twitter account and the occasional tantrum that (fortunately for you all) only Martin will have to deal with.

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On the Road for One Year, One Month and One Day

Jaime — Mon, 31 May 2010 19:03:50 +0000

Am I a totally new and improved person? No, not exactly. Do I feel different? Yeah, I do. The feeling is a special one: poignant yet incredibly hard to describe. For the last thirteen months we’ve been on the road: living out of our backpacks, finding our ‘happy-places’ on bus rides, bargaining our way into cheaper guestrooms, laughing at our (sometime) ignorance, being laughed at for our foreign looks.

We’ve covered sixteen countries in thirteen months. Not a huge count, but nothing to be ashamed of either considering two are India and Indonesia. Those that have traveled there know just how long it takes to get from point to point. We’ve climbed a 6,000 meter peak (well Martin did, I got sick), developed and maintained a website that attracts thousands of readers every month, overcome a fear of flying (again, that one’s Martin’s), spotted rhinos and orangutangs in the wild, survived India without a single bout of Delhi belly, and helped each other through a thousand other things while still being in love and best friends.

Was it worth leaving the comforts of home? You bet your ass it was. One year, one month and one day later I feel like the luckiest girl alive.

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Freud Would Have a Field Day With This

Jaime — Mon, 31 May 2010 18:57:08 +0000

Traveling Americans have a habit of falling into a number of stereotypes. There’s the loud travelers, the cheap ones, the I’m-an-American-so-F-you crowd, and the people who refuse to eat anything that isn’t served at their local restaurant; the list goes on for longer than your attention span. While I may fall in to some of those categories at one time or another (I am, after all, an American), the one stereotype I actively try not to propagate is the Loose American Woman.

I wear appropriate clothing when it’s called for. I don’t swagger around clubs late at night. I don’t kiss my husband in public. In other words, I try to be very sensitive to the nuances of a foreign culture’s expectations of women. There are times however, that I have at admit absolute failure in this respect.

We arrived in Georgia a few days ago to find that almost no one speaks English. Mustering up my best picture drawing skills, I tried to explain to our hotelier where I used to live. He had heard of San Francisco and asked it it was a very big city (this was all communicated with hand motions). I whipped out my trusty notepad and pen, drawing him a brilliant diagram of the Bay Area, explaining that the city itself (circled) is quite small – just 7 x 7 miles – but the Bay itself supports a much larger population.

Feeling proud of myself for explaining a tricky thing like that, I glanced up at him. The puzzled look on his face led to a sly smile and an interested nod. Confused, I smiled and returned to our room. It was just today that I realized my mistake.

It was Martin who called my attention to it while glancing through the notebook this morning. He cried out, equally confused,”What the hell is this?”

Um…San Francisco Bay?

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Digital Guidebooks vs. Paper Guidebooks

Martin — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:56:17 +0000

We all know that traveling isn’t what it used to be five, ten or fifty years ago. A lot of things have changed, some for the better, and some things are perhaps not the great improvements we once thought they’d be. Good things such as Skype (no more hyper expensive collect calls) and internet research (a mixed blessing but Google is handier than lugging around an encyclopedia) stand against things such as lightning speed proliferation of popular places (thereby flooding them with tourists) and the ability to be reached anywhere on your holiday.

Many things have gone digital and more will: the next product in line seems to be travel guidebooks. For a while now, Lonely Planet has been selling their guidebooks online on a chapter by chapter basis. Since we decided to travel to Georgia on a whim, we didn’t have time to buy a guidebook nor do much research, so we opted to buy the online chapter.

The pros are these: it’s nice to be able to buy and instantly use something that you need. It also saves weight. The cons are more plentiful: it is a total pain in the neck to access information on the fly. Try sitting on a hot park bench and start up a laptop, squinting madly at the screen to try to read it just because you haven’t memorized the street name of your next guesthouse. The pdf format is awfully slow to scroll through as well – you don’t really use a guidebook like you use a book, you want to flip back and forth between maps, glossaries and place descriptions. This doesn’t work with a pdf file. The obvious solution would be to print the pdf guides, but who wants to lug around a wad of loose leaves?

So here’s the seatofourpants.com verdict: pdf guides may be a decent emergency option, but until they develop them into something better and more useable, old fashioned guide books are worth their weight. Go books!

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Travel Dining: A Tale of Wanting What I Can’t Have

Jaime — Wed, 26 May 2010 14:52:21 +0000

I love food. It’s as simple as that. Catch me a few hours after a good meal and I’ll most likely be thinking about my next meal. It’s a habit that becomes heightened when traveling. Sure, it’s great to see pretty things, explore soaring mountains or wile away on an island beach. If I were honest, though, I feel most in touch with local traditions when I’m eating the local cuisine.

A bit of Dosa in Kolkata strengthened my sense of India. A mouthful of Momos in Nepal broadened my understanding of mountain life. A spicy Vietnamese Pho helped me understand what street food was all about. The list goes on and on.

There is irony in this situation, though. It doesn’t happen right away, but I often find myself longing for food I can’t have. When I’m in Thailand, I want some Nepali food. When in Sweden I’m longing for Mexican food. Perhaps I’m just used to variety. I’m American after all. We don’t have a national cuisine, but we do have food from almost everywhere else. It’s that variety, those options that I start to miss after eating my 20^th plate of the same local cuisine.

Turkish cheese store

Take the delicious cheese that we’ve been eating in Turkey and Georgia as an example. Two months ago we couldn’t stop talking about cheese. We had long, detailed discussions about whether or not cheese is the best food ever made. We were in India at the time, where you can’t find the type of cheese that we were craving. We flew from there to Sweden, where we could finally get our fill of cheese. We left happily satisfied, flew to Turkey to find that it has some epic cheese options too. Yay for more cheese!

Two weeks have passed and the enthusiasm is gone. Because we’re traveling on the cheap here, we eat out only once a day. The other two meals are made up of things we can find locally – mostly bread, cheese and the odd piece of fruit. This makes for a lot of cheese eating.

We came across this gorgeous cheese shop in the northeastern town of Kars. Out of respect for big beautiful rounds of cheese we bought some. It was divine cheese for sure but my heart wasn’t in it. I couldn’t get Indian food out of my mind.

Kolkata fast food - mmm mmm good!

Such is eating on the road. A long story of amazing food, followed by selfish bouts of wanting what I can’t have.

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Couples Who Brave the World Together

Jaime — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:40:14 +0000

Traveling as a couple has its ups and downs. For the most part it’s worked out incredibly well for Martin and I but only because we found a system that works for us. I call it Divide and Conquer.

I ventured out into guest writing last week for Pam at Spunky Girl Monologues. My post explains the differences I’ve noticed between traveling alone and traveling with a partner (my husband in my case) Both ways are great, but also have their challenges.

Take a few minutes and check it out here.

Happily, Martin and I aren’t the only couple who are braving the world together. Check out these great sites from other couples on the road*:

Trans-Americas Journey

*If you’re a traveling couple and want to be added to this list (since I know there are more of you out there), please include your website in a comment.

I’m curious. If you had to choose one thing about traveling as a couple that you couldn’t do without, what would it be? For me it’s Martin’s eerie memory for place names. If we’re driving away from a town, chances are I’ve already forgotten its name. He’ll remember it 30 years from now. It’s an invaluable trait and really comes in handy when people have asked me where we’ve been. I stutter around a while before he come to my rescue – every time.

Happy trails fellow couples-who-make-traveling-work!

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To My Mom

Jaime — Sun, 09 May 2010 16:31:10 +0000

You poured your heart into raising us. You were amazing. You were my mother. You were my hero.

Today, because you are still all those things, you are my friend as well.

Thank you Mom. I love you.

Happy Mothers Day.

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Buying Gifts on a Long-term Trip

Jaime — Sat, 08 May 2010 19:12:55 +0000

Europe has been on the travel agenda for the past month and a half. That means many things. The most important for us is seeing friends and family again. We can’t afford to jump around European hostels/hotels like we could in SE Asia or India. That’s just not in our budget. Our solution is a happy one: we stay with friends and family.

Rather than checking into hotel rooms, we’ve been graciously brought into homes – which is such a treat – and one that needs to be properly handled. I learned early on that there are a few simple rules to follow when you’ve been invited into people’s homes. The first is, of course, to be respectful of their space. The second equally important rule is to bring a gift. At home that gift was usually a bottle of wine. We can’t be toting around a case of wine on the road, we are barely under the airline weight restrictions as it is, so we’ve had to be creative.

Small, light gifts are the best, obviously. We’re backpackers after all. Gift options vary by region, but we’ve found that Tibetan prayer flags were the absolute best gifts we bought. You can buy them for almost nothing, they are extremely light and pack really well (translation: they can be stuffed into anything and survive bumpy roads like champs).

Collecting rocks in Nepal

Some of the failed (or nearly failed) gifts were those that I was sure we couldn’t do without. A pile of rocks were just given to my mother-in-law. Yes. For the last four months I was carrying around a bunch of rocks. They were odds and ends we picked up in Nepal that I couldn’t part with. Four months later I can tell you that I was very ready to do without.

I also bought an unstretched painting in Burma for my mom. I found it a few months later at the bottom of my backpack. It looked like the rest of my clothes – crusty and wrinkled. Luckily it straightened out after a good ironing (who knew!).

Our time in Europe is soon to come to an end. We’ve given nearly all our gifts away, just in time to fill our packs with new gifts. Sadly, we’ve run out of prayer flags but I’m willing to bet Turkey will have much to offer us. All that is left is to figure out how many Turkish carpets Martin will be willing to carry…

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365 days of travel

Jaime — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:27:05 +0000

As of three days ago we’ve been on the road for one year. One year of bus rides, backpacks, airplanes, amazing adventure and writing – 725 posts, the last time I checked. We’ve been in Stockholm for the last few days visiting friends. We decided to celebrate the one year mark with a little break – so we unplugged. No writing, no tweeting. Just time spent catching up with friends and enjoying ourselves without a constant consideration for what needs to be posted, edited, cropped, reformatted – you get the picture.

We head to London tomorrow – so have no fear! Seatofourpants.com will be back at it with gusto. This little break has been exactly what we needed. We’re itching to write again.

Happy one year Seatofourpants.com!

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