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How to Take a Walk in a
HOW TO TAKE A WALK IN A foreign country BY MARGARET HUIBREGTSE
Bring a rain jacket. And good shoes. These might sound obvious, but trust me on this.
And this might seem almost insulting in the age of smartphones, but make sure you have a camera. Just in case.
The camera isn’t to take pictures of any famous landmarks or postcard skylines, either. You can if you want to, but that’s not why you need it. You need the camera to take photos of the little, funny things that make a place real – the incongruous graffiti, the weird ads. And also, of the details that make the people real – the hand-lettered lawn signs, the spectacular (or spectacularly weird) gardens. And there might be a cool building or picturesque landscape in there, too. Mostly, though, we aren’t looking for photos. This walk isn’t a search for the spectacular. It’s an exercise in the mundane.
It’s easy, when travelling, to skate over a place, to visit the museums and the landmarks, the cute little shops and the Anglicized restaurants and feel like you’ve “seen” the city, “know” the place. You don’t. All you’ve really demonstrated is how quick we as tourists are to forget that our exotic travel destination is omeone else’s home. The people who tour you around the landmarks and sell you things in the cute little shops go home at the end of the day, or maybe they go out for a drink, or they take a run or go bowling or any of a million other things. The point of the walk is to remove the blinding patina of tourism, to find fresh eyes to look at this new place as a place, a rich hub of humanity instead of a dot on the map.
So bring a rain jacket. This might take a while.
John Steinbeck once wrote about the Spanish verb vacilar, which he said meant something akin to “wandering,” but also slightly different. To be vacilado is to be looking for something without actually caring if you find it or not. I don’t speak Spanish, and the translations I found online don’t bear this definition out, so Steinbeck may have been completely making this up. I still find it useful, though, because vacilado is exactly the state of mind to be in when taking a walk – it’s good to have a goal,
but really what you’re looking for is what exists in between you and your ostensible destination. When I was in Cardiff, I set out to find the water. Wikipedia tells me the water I was looking for is called Cardiff Bay, and that it was responsible for the rise of Cardiff as a major city after the coal boom of the 19th century. I didn’t know any of this when I went out looking for it, though – but I had seen it when the train pulled into town the night before, and I wanted to find it again.
So I did. I walked at least two hours before I got there. I was passed by dozens of loud trucks pulling into a garbage processing facility. I read dozens of signs in both English and Welsh, and tried to link the two together in my mind. I crossed a bridge. I saw a sign for a dalek, which my Whovian friend tells me is because, according to the Doctor, time is particularly thin in Cardiff. Or something. I walked through a tiny church that had been converted into a craft store. I bought a bag of jalapeno peanuts. I talked to a man running boat tours across the bay. And yes, I did eventually find the water. I even took some pictures of it. But that wasn’t really the point.
In Dublin, I found a beach and walked the length of it barefoot, then found a canal and sat alone on its banks, listening to the traffic. There’s a plaque by the Thames dedicated to people with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and if you stare at the trees in London long enough, you can work out the patterns of the blinking lights. There’s a public art display near the Cardiff train station apparently inspired by green beans, and a park in Ireland dedicated to Gulliver’s Travels. If you walk far enough out of Galway, you can see children’s names carved into the sidewalks, and if you walk the other way, you can greet the horses living in people’s backyards.
Of course, going for a walk always introduces the possibility of getting lost – especially in European cities full of winds and alleys, narrow streets between tall buildings. In Amsterdam, I ended up in a Dunkin’ Donuts at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, eating a muffin and trying to connect to the Wi-Fi. Wherever I went in Edinburgh, I always seemed to find my way back to the same statue of David Hume. There’s an art, though, to getting lost – the trick is to know vaguely which way you’re heading, but not be clear on all the twists and
turns in between. At its core, it’s Steinbeck’s vacilado – wandering with a purpose, searching for something as an excuse to find you don’t know what.
So make sure to give yourself plenty of time, in case you don’t find what you’re looking for. And then a bit more extra, in case you do. And don’t forget that rain jacket.
YELLOW ROSES AND SUSHI: AN UNPLANNED ADVENTURE BY SOPHIA MADORE
I lived in the midwestern prairie lands most of my life, but for the past two summers I have worked in the Rocky Mountains. With this elevation difference, I can conclude it was a breathtaking experience— literally and physically.
For both summers, I was out in Colorado to work at the YMCA of the Rockies and be a part of a Catholic leadership program called FOCUS Summer Projects. It was fun to stay at the YMCA—even during a pandemic summer. Both of the summers I spent in the Rocky Mountains were great. When reflecting on my experiences, I realized that I learned an important lesson about traveling.
One may think because I went out to Colorado I got to hike many mountains. The world is full of uncertainty and trips don’t always go as planned.
RACHEL BETTERS, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK, USA
There were a few crazy moments at the YMCA of the Rockies this past summer regarding COVID-19. For ten days, three other student leaders and I had to quarantine in a tiny cabin. We had been exposed to someone that had traveled to the YMCA and was sick. In addition to us leaders being quarantined, many girls in my small group were forced to isolate in their own rooms.
This was devastating—we did not travel out to Colorado in the hopes of being quarantined. It was a pain to see the mountains outside of our window and not be able to hike them. Instead of being able to spend time with our new friends, we spent time setting up traps for our newly found house mouse: Remmie.
As hard as this was, so much goodness came out of this unplanned adventure. We spent most of our time waving at trucks as they honked by our cabin. Friends came to our cabin to drop off yellow roses and sushi (what a combo).
Spending ten days in a cabin with people, you get to know them pretty well. Us student leaders spent the beginning of summer running all over the YMCA campus. We didn’t have a chance to spend much time together--quarantine changed that. We had many chances to dance to the Have a Great Day playlist on Spotify, make pancakes and drink countless cups of French-pressed coffee.
Traveling isn’t about the destination, but the people you share the experience with. Through this unplanned adventure, I got to see the community and friendships I found in Colorado unfold before my eyes. The mountains are beautiful--but the courage that I saw in my friends of making the best of a hard situation was filled with so much more beauty and awe.
The lesson I learned is said best by Katie Gapinski, one of my best friends:
