Travel

Every time I pack, it takes less time, it involves less things and is lighter. The way I figure it, by the time I do my final packing in my life it will weigh nothing and will take no time to do. To think of all the things I used to carry...

Scribbled in a notebook, backed up to the web.

Wisconsin

International travel now requires people to check into an airport up to 3 hours in advance of their departure. But the International House of Pancakes in Janesville was closed at 5 a.m. Maybe they should change their name to the Domestic House of Pancakes?

The Dane County Regional airport in Madison, Wisconsin has wonderful wildlife in the morning - birds of many types and mosquitoes that are easily confused with birds. Birds of prey.

Always tip the authentically smiling faces serving coffee at the Madison airport. They may be the only smiling faces that you see all day.

Chicago, Illinois (O'Hare International)

A woman wields her squeegee in an S patter on the glass, mutually oblivious to the bustle around her - people trying to get where they are going. And she gets where she is going one S at a time.

McDonalds in O'Hare doesn't serve breakfast at 10:10 a.m. A blessing.

An apparent family of Indians runs a Dunkin Donuts franchise in O'Hare like a greased wheel with a heavy accent.

A note left to the Latina girl occupying valuable internet kiosk real estate thanks her for the demonstration of her lime green 'EWA'(?) panties and asks her to wear a thong next time she occupies two seats. Signed by John Q Public with 3 kisses.

The young lady going to Haiti from Kentucky sitting next to me, after some discussion, saw fit to write down some passages from the Bible for me. But she'll need them more than I where she is going.

Miami International

Could they make this airport any more spaced out between connections? Going from one end of the airport to another in 30 minutes with a backpack was reminiscent of humps 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, with various obstacles ranging from crying children to lost grandparents.

Trinidad and Tobago

Having read Should You Adapt When You Travel? and having traveled quite a bit myself, I agree with the article.

But I have further comment.

I don't recognize the distinction between 'authenticity' and 'adaptability' as Akila (The Road Forks) writes of. The adaptability aspect I have no problem - but the authenticity I do. Maybe it's just the wrong word for me; maybe she means 'not changing' - I believe that is what she means.

Culture is a lot like baggage. In that, I have always had the blessing of traveling lightly whereas others - such as Akila and her own examples - may carry more cultural baggage. She mentions vegetarianism as an example, and while it is a personal choice for her that choice was made more possible for her by her culture. There's nothing wrong with it. It is sort of funny how vegetarians identify eating vegetables as a lifestyle but rarely identify eating meat as a lifestyle. Akila seems above that.

But I don't have that issue. I don't have the problem of religion. Adaptation has always been easy for me because I live outside of the cultures that so many people cling to unquestioningly. And that has given me a lot of different ways to look at things.

This train of thought, thanks to Akila, got me on a train of thought that lead to what we now call tourism - which is the manufacture of a more acceptable culture for tourists so that they spend money.

Going out to the smoking area in Miami, having lost my lighter to a cult of security in Trinidad and Tobago (who probably have a shrine of lighters that they have found), I bummed a light from an American Airlines employee named Geovanni. So we start talking - something the healthier and less social non-smokers wouldn't understand. We talked about all sorts of things; he on his break and myself awaiting a connecting flight while drinking coffee and trying to singlehandedly decrease the percentage of damage that bovine flatulence does to the climate of the planet.

We talked about Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba (where he was from), Panama, Nicaragua, Colombia, and many other things. We talked about how people can never simply get along. We laughed about life, smoked our cigarettes and blew smoke at the universe. We spoke of places we'd been, people we've met - be they Palestinians in Greece or Jews in Miami or Barack Obama or Fidel Castro. We agreed that the world made less sense than people generally thought it did because when you peek under the soft lace that the media dresses many things in... it's naked. And naked, despite what testerone powered adolescents may think, is not always good. But to see the world naked is a passion for some of us, and by pure chance and addiction to nicotine, we sat there and talked for about an hour. An hour passed idly between strangers at an airport discussing the world, the people of the world, and so forth.

He was a teenager when he left Cuba; he tells me the first 10 years in the United States were hard but that his dream was being fulfilled: by working with American Airlines and the nature of his work, he traveled the world. He and I are alike in that we don't stay on the beaten paths - we want to see how people live, how they think, what they think and why they think it. The world is an open ended question.