As fast as it all started, it stopped. The rapidly spinning gears that drove me from coast to coast of the Iberian peninsula slowed, halted and started spinning in the other direction. After 3 weeks in continental Europe, the Stud had no plans of return; but, in a whirlwind of two days, flights were booked, taken and dormrooms were unlocked. Then a nap was taken, followed by a shower and a pensive look in the mirror. Then, without afterthought or hesitation, the Stud’s three weeks of straggly growth on his face was sliced off, falling into the sink below.
I look at my for the first time in 3 weeks clean-shaven (and clean for that matter) face. As is parallel to my return from Prague, this moustache contains truth. It contains all of the facts of life, tid-bits of truth and meanderings of my own thoughts that accumulated in my mind over the previous three weeks, but funnelled and refined upon reflection, centrally located between my upper lip and my nose.
As you may have read (but I don’t blame you if you didn’t slog through it) I framed my Western European travels in Booked Porch as not just a trip of leisure or self-discovery (it was indeed both of those things), but also a journey into the core of travel, into the art of travel, into its ideals as well as subtleties and skills. It was a journey into the abstraction of travel in its theory as well as its practice.
I framed my argument on travel around the dichotomy of traveller and tourist identities, focusing on the concept of authenticity, contending that where authentic experience is found, so is travel; and, conversely, where authentic experience is not found lies tourism. The dichotomy traveller and tourist is a problematic and ambiguous one; and, in the many scholars I researched and concepts that I carried with me, bouncing around in my head, finding relevance here, irrelevance there, the idea that I found to be most compelling also happened to be one my maxims for travel: “To travel is to work.”
This idea comes from twentieth-century cultural scholar Daniel Boorstin, an impassioned supporter of the separate identities of traveller and tourist. Boorstin analyzes the historical connection of the words travel and travail, effectually arguing that to travel is to work. Another very useful scholar on travel, Jeffrey Melton, adds to Boorstin’s point: “The traveller is active, while the tourist is forever passive. Travellers seek to earn experience, while tourists sign up for a program and sit back to wait for experience to come to them. For travellers there is work to be done; it will not be easy, but it promises rewards worth the discomfort.” As I have found, spending the last three weeks travelling on my ones, travelling is hard. Travelling is work. Cities with different languages, different city layouts, and different customs make you think harder and relearn everything you know all over again. Travelling (physical relocation) forces you to relearn and adapt what you already know about life at home to life in Lisbon, Madrid, most critically, in Barcelona (a couple quick examples: walking down the street, easy to adapt, speaking, not necessarily). It is not easy, it is work, but it’s the best job I’ve ever had.
The goal of tourism is to take the work out of travel, and this can be most easily accomplished / is accomplished through money. Tourists are willing to pay to take the work out of travel, and businesses readily lap up the incoming cash supply. An example of this can be seen in a night out of bars and clubbing. As was my job during the two weeks I spent in Barcelona, I worked in tourism on a bar crawl. I would spend four hours rounding up people to come on the crawl and then at 12, I would help guide the group from bar to bar and then to club. Each person would pay 15 euros for bar crawl, which included free drinks and club entry as well as a massive group of people to party with. In effect, these crawlers would pay 15 euros to take the work out of the night. ‘Leave it to us. We know our shit’ is the basic concept behind any bar crawl. It is not that a night out is particularly taxing, but it requires relearning and adapting everything you know about a night out in Norwich to Barcelona, a stark contrast (though the latter is infinitely better) but some tourists would rather just not think about this and that and leave it to us. I wrote about the parallels of tourism to drug dealing. I felt as though I stood on a corner and the drug I dealt was parties, but whatever it was we did, the work was lessened for our crawlers, and it paid for my hostel and food for the two weeks I was in Barcelona.
I also wrote about the antithesis to tourism, loosely referred to by scholars as authentic experience. Melton argued that authenticity exists in foreign cultures, but is inaccessible to the tourist/traveller (he argued that both identities were the same). I thought that authenticity is indeed accessible, though I knew not how. Now I do. Authentic experience in travel should more appropriate be called authentic experience of travel, for that is really what a traveller is looking for. Before I left for the continent, I viewed authenticity to be a product of the nation in which the traveller in currently located; it is, but only to a small extent. A man that works on the corner selling beers for one euro and goes home at 6 in the morning is indeed an authentic experience in Barcelona, but it cannot be more irrelevant to the traveller (unless they are on a night out). Rather, a traveller primarily seeks authenticity not from the city’s inhabitants (that, like Melton says, is impossible) but from other travellers. A traveller does not wish to conduct an anthropological study of Barcelona, but wishes to meet new people, share exchange stories and see the city.
During the two weeks I spent in Barcelona, I lived in a heap of a hostel. Or, not to be crude, just to be honest, a shit-hole. Dirty floors, dirtier bathroom and bed bugs, I’ve got several (too many) bugbites. When I asked Red (a 19 year-old Australian that runs the hostel) about them, he said, “Yeah, they’ll bite you, but only for the first couple days, then they leave you alone.” The weird thing was that he was right. After a couple days, though my bug bites still itched, I found that I had acquired no new ones for the rest of the two weeks. I wrote about his hostel as authentic, clearly not of the Spanish/Catalan lifestyle, but of the traveller.
Furthermore, at the hostel, I met other travellers. I know the tourist/traveller dichotomy is ambiguous at bestand indefinable at worst, but if you met these guys I lived with, you couldn’t call them native and you surely couldn’t call them tourists. One of them was Jacob. Staying in Barcelona for five months, a German, he studied Spanish and volunteered. He had little time to go on bus tours, though the time he did have we often spent it playing chess and smoking cigarettes. Mike, to date, is the most Californian person I have ever met. He surfs, skates and uses “gnarly” and “rad” more than the words “the” and “it.” Mike works for the company Stoke Travel, making bookings for surf camps, festival (Las Fallas, Pamplona, Tomatina etc.) and studied abroad in Barcelona before coming back to work in the city. Lewis, I only got to meet for a couple days, but was an epic dude. A German hippie, he has been travelling in India, New Zealand and all over Europe for the past two years. Loves to meditate. Simon came from Liverpool, planned on staying two days, has been here for 2 years. And then there are all the people I’ve met from working on the pub crawl. Students, ex-students, soon to be students, or fuck-it-just-bumming-around’s. In its abstraction, the traveller is a loose concept; but, when you meet people (while travelling, you absolutely cannot do this from reading books about travel) you realize, there’s no way these people are goddamn tourists. Their goals are not to remain forever passive, their goal is to work, and, quite literally, they all did, as did I.
The hostel I stayed in and the bar crawl I worked for were focal points of my experience. Though I got paid to party six-nights a week, my job was still a student. Religiously, I would write in my journal, write for the blog and think. As a student, to think is to work. In Barcelona, I went through a major creative and personal development and it is this, I believe that also separates a traveller from tourist and labels me a traveller. Being in a city, changes the way you think, simple as that. To travel is to think. You could debate me, but you’d either be wrong or had not had one thought in that city. As I would look out on the balcony of the hostel over Ferran (despite being a dive the hostel had a great location), writing in my journal or not, I would think and everything around me would influence me. Everything, no matter which way I looked, would grab me and shout loudly, “Barcelona!” Do you know why this is true? Because all of it is fucking in Barcelona!
This is another point that I feel is missed by cultural scholars of travel, and to me, it suggests that they perhaps have not done much travel, just studied a lot of it. Physical location is paramount. It is the first requisite of travel, and, without it you are not travelling, you are at home. Just the process of taking the bus to train station; then the tube to heathrow, the flying to Lisbon preps your mind for travel and prepares it to soak up experience, authentic or otherwise. Any film critic/scholar would argue definitively about the importance or the effect that physically going to the cinema to watch a film has upon the experience of the film as the viewer watches it; it is likewise the same notion in travel, but times 5,000!
So being that I have to offer a defintion of traveller/ tourist dichotomy (cos that was the whole damn point of this shit) here goes: A tourist explores cities, countries, geography, languages, food and cultures. A traveller explores himself. The food, the wine, the architecture and the pople you meet are all just stimulants to spark self-exploration. We're travellers, not explorers, and the "Discovery!" exists in your mind; thoughts that you did not think before, drams that you had never before realized.
I struggled as traveller in Lisbon, I was just visiting a friend in Madrid, but when I got to Barcelona, I started travelling even though I stopped moving. Why because I started thinking; or, I let Barcelona think for me. If you read my entries about Lisbon or Madrid, they are about what I did. In Barcelona, my blog is about what I thought about there. Each experience spawned a domino-effect of thought; and, to me, what I thought became more important than what I did, so that’s what I wrote about. To travel is to work, to work is to think, to think is to live. So have we reached the statement that lies embedded in my moustache? To travel is to live? Home is death? I think the former is true, but the latter is overstated, for I plan to do more travelling (the northern leg of my intended trip of W. Europe), so I can’t be dead. I guess I’m just asleep. Which is good, for awhile at least, cos I’m fucking exhausted ... LW
(A Note From The Stud: As another trip has concluded, I know what all my loyal readers are thinking: “Luke, will you be writing The Barcelona Chronicles?” I am delighted to say that, in some way, shape or form, I will be. However, in order to write these properly (which to me is my most important task) I will need the assistance of my journal; which, if you do not already know, cannot be read by myself or anyone until I return to the states. So, bear with me, but The Barcelona Chronicles will happen. I’m not sure how I feel about posting to Stud Abroad from America, but we’ll work something out. That, or I’ll just let you know when it comes out on paperback.)
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