BORN TO TRAVEL, FORCED TO WORK
What- I don’t like my job? Naaah- it’s just something I read on souvenir mugs in Melbourne last week. It reminds me of Pristi, actually; ma cherie ami living in Bali currently.But if you travel a lot, and you end up in big cities like Jakarta or Singapore or Tokyo or Melbourne, you’ll get to see something in common sooner or later: shopping malls. Perhaps that’s the inevitable implication of this thing we call globalisation. The other implication is, whereas in the past a traveler was always associated with broad-minded, reliable, sophisticated person, nowadays it is not necessarily so. It expands your soul to see the beauty of exquisite, almost undisturbed nature. It gives you another perspective of life to learn local wisdoms practiced by tribes of thousands of year history. But it gives you nothing to shop at yet another global brand stores.
Margaret, a friend of mine, told me of her one traveling experience that changed her forever. She was only ten, spending her summer holiday in China with her family. Note that China twenty five years ago was not the fast-emerging China as we perceive it today. It had been more or less a closed territory- Margaret went there exactly when it was about to open up. It amazed her how little children and adults alike literally approached her in awe- touching her hair and her skin and her clothes like they had never seen anything like them before. Indeed they had never set eyes on them. There was no TV in the villages; no newspaper, no phone, nothing whatsoever to link them to the “global” world. It was mind-opening for Margaret and her whole family- that there were still people in other parts of the world who didn’t realize that there were other human races living on earth. When I heard her story, even I was thrilled. Imagine what such an experience could do to a girl of ten. Well, that’s what traveling meant in the old days.
Now? Between Senayan City in Jakarta and Chadstone in Melbourne I don’t see many differences. Gucci and Prada and Versace- what else? They’re meaningless- those extravagant shopping sprees. When Margaret plans her next travel with the children, shopping malls sure are way off her list. So are commercial beaches. “Just the beach and the hotel and the crowd of other foreign tourists. What I want is for my family to get in touch with a culture different from their own, so that they may grasp the idea that this isn’t their planet alone.”
That’s her idea of traveling. And if everyone shared her opinion, perhaps you didn’t have to meet so numerous bores well-traveled today.
posted by eloque @ 4:36 PM
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