Our Upcoming Trip
(Initial post.)
We haven't been off this continent before. As small-boat cruisers and occasional train- and automobile-tourists, we have spent a bit of time in very mildly foreign southwest British Columbia, and Cindy has been just across the Mexican border, but this will be the first time we have had to deal with some of the long-distance travel issues that so many others (including many of our friends) find fairly routine (if that word even applies).
We have packed our passports; measured and weighted our luggage; bought the foreign electrical power converter and adapters; procured optical devices suitable to the tasks of seeing and recording some of the sights--and for the flights have bought sound-isolating earbuds and have filled our mp3 players with books, music, podcasts, and radio plays.
We have also dealt with the realization that although we will travel toward the south, we will actually move toward a place that is somewhat cooler than it is here. We have therefore switched from thinking about how to stay cool to thinking about how to stay warm.
In terms of climate, I had been thinking Australian beaches and such. Our destination in N.Z. is actually farther south (i.e., away from the equator), than the southernmost part of the bulk of Australia, by a non-trivial margin. It's in line with Tasmania, the little island that rather looks as if it may once have been part of Australia proper, but has been apart from it for long enough to have its own ecosystem.
The season is not as we had anticipated, too: like our late September/early October at roughly the same distance from the Equator. As our home enters our spring, they (and we) will enter their autumn.
Stupid mistake, but we caught it in time.
Our expectation regarding the culture we will find there is that the experience of encountering it will be like the experience of visiting in SE Canada: It will seem familiar, if very slightly shifted--and with different brand-names on most of the same kinds of retail stuff as we have here. We aren't going there for the retail experience, of course, but having grown up with such matters all around, I do find it interesting to walk through the grocery stores of other nationalities. (The Korean store a very few miles from our house is a wonderland of the amazingly unfamiliar. All mundane and probably comfortable to the local Asian population, but strange and almost unsettling to a midwesterner whose dining-table tastes are as narrow as I know mine to be.)
We expect to find some landscapes that may resemble some of ours (or more correctly some of what we have seen while cruising our little sailboat in B.C.): bays, fjords, mountains, valleys, trees, and such. Even so, no speculation, memory, gorgeous calendar photograph, or Google Earth view could ever substitute for the experience of standing there, breathing air right off the feature at which one is looking. We are eager for the excitement of that kind of novelty, and we have been advised to expect absolute wonder.
We aren't certain about what to expect of the natives we will encounter in the two somewhat separate places that we will visit, except that we have been advised by those who have gone before us that everybody there will be warmly friendly. We will expect this, and we do hope that we can reflect and project attitudes appropriate to that experience. One does not travel hoping not to be bothered by encounters with other people. I am not very good with "strangers", so I will have to be careful to engage.
Foreign travel is alleged to be good for (more than just) self-improvement. It can (also) permit one to compare his life, his values, his society, and his culture to those of others. I shall be interested in seeing a little of how they and we are similar and how we are different--and how our different ways of organizing ourselves fosters (or perhaps interferes with) the expression of our values. If it occasionally seems that some things are not going so well here, how have others solved or avoided problems with issues similar to ours?
For several reasons, we are eager for this first trip abroad (albeit somewhat horrified at the prospect of more or less an entire day in a voyage that will have consumed multiple days). We will get to spend time with friends | on their boat | in waters we never expected to see | next to lands and peoples we might have missed otherwise. The trips to arrive there and return will be long, and the time there is certain to seem terribly short, although probably quite intense.
We hope we're up to it.
[My intentions for this web-log are somewhat uncertain.
[I will not have a computer with me, and I do not expect to mooch or pay for computer time. I will, however, have my Apple iPod Touch, which can do many of the kinds of things that larger computers can do--including sending updates by e-mail (when within range of an open wi-fi station). It is not an iPhone, so it lacks a camera and the always-on wireless connection that iPhone users like so much.
[So: Use your own judgement about taking the trouble to monitor this space while we are away. It may turn out that I find I can easily keep it up-to-date, or that may prove inconvenient or even impossible. I shall try, but if real-time posting doesn't work out, updates may have to wait until after our return.
[Although this service does support pictures, most of what I have to share will probably be hosted on my Apple hosting service at < http://gallery.me.com/socrates4718 >.
[I believe that this blog isn't in the usual index of web-logs, and I have disabled some of the usual features such as comments. I do invite contacts sent to my usual e-mail address.]
--Mark_
