Weird Travels

I know, Dear Reader, you probably find the title of this post to be reductive, redundant, or both.   Reductive, because travel is one of those richly rewarding experiences that I cannot represent accurately using a single adjective.  Redundant, because travel gives us access to a globe of possibilities and (after all) one human's quotidian is another human's weird.  This post, however, will treat a particular subset of travel: the weird in-between world of the tourist experience.  Existing in a temporary limbo in which she is neither at home nor truly abroad, the tourist packs a bag full of dreams and heads off into a kind of parallel universe.  Thanks to the Houston airport baggage claim for making visible the glowing oddity of tourist travel:

Upon arrival in the unknown locale, this parallel universe might seem normal enough.  The laws of physics remain in place; gravity still keeps her feet rooted to the ground.* Faces and food stuffs might seem uncannily similar to the ones she left at home, but also not quite right all at the same time.  The bed in the hotel room seems normal enough.  So does the water in the tap, but something tells her vulnerable digestive system not to drink it.  The towels are still towels, in substance, but they look like this:

She would never mistake towels for fish at home.  But then, she spends such little time thinking about towels, which occupy her cognitive space in proportion to their functionality.  Do they need to be laundered?  Are they waiting for her when she gets out of the shower?  They rarely ever sprout fins . . . at home.

This uncanny sense that the familiar has become foreign is, I think, one of the most interesting aspects of the tourist experience.  And it is most certainly weird.  Don't get me wrong: sight seeing is lovely; encountering new places and people is not only exciting but essential to the maintenance of one's humanity; practicing a foreign language is a humbling and thrilling challenge.  But being forced to reconsider the basics of daily life can cause us to notice them in more detail than we otherwise would.  Can cause us to discover just how unfamiliar they really are. (Like towels... If you live a towel-less lifestyle, substitute some other object.  Maybe a thimble, wooden spoon, or crescent wrench... I don't know what you do at home.)  

There can be a kind of psychic violence in this.  After all, where does it end?  If towels can become unfamiliar, unreliable, perhaps other things can as well.  Perhaps the tourist might find that in this new place, she will become utterly unfamiliar to herself.  While my own recent vacation days in Mexico were spent in relaxing beachy bliss, I had uncharacteristically violent dreams each night.  Normally my subconscious is more Jarmusch than Peckinpah, but this was a solid week of nightly slasher films.  Was this touristic revelation of the daily weird causing a nocturnal mind-war?  I guess it could just as easily have been brought on by my weirdly handless new amiga:

But maybe not.  I brought these gorgeously weird amigos home with me, and my dreams have returned to their typical pacifism:

Here at home, where my brain can safely assume that a towel is just a towel, I suspect that my mind ceases to make war on itself.

And you, Dear Reader, what experiences and thoughts (weird or otherwise) have crossed your path during this summer travel season?  Leave a comment below, and let's compare weird notes.

For some weird photos of the beach in Playa del Carmen, click here.  May your own travels be weird and wonderful!

*Except in the case of interstellar tourism.