#7 Maybe you're touristy (and that's okay)
Travel, conversational beverages, & why your brain likes some people more than others
What is it like being a tourist if not propping yourself up against new backgrounds and telling yourself you traveled?
I’ve been questioning the notions I’ve had of travel. How as a kid, when I ‘traveled’ with my parents, it meant seeing all the things on the checklist (which usually meant the most famous things).
“Did you visit Sentosa Island while you were there?” We would take recommendations from friends and family who had traveled (read: toured) the same places before, and compare notes, “Yeah we did! Beautiful, right?”
And we’d pass on our notes to another friend or relative who would then make the visit. An extended Chinese Whisper of the same view, the same place, each of us, with our unique stories from the place we visited.
In my twenties, as I travel solo and am undistracted by the inevitably varied expectations of a group, I’m learning to redefine what the activity of visiting a place means to me. Travel, I’m realising, is less about the place and its sights, sounds, and smells, and more about how a place and its elements change me in big or little ways. It is the act of paying keen attention to a place (and to yourself).
Travel has become less about the outfits I wear against new and beautiful backgrounds, and more about tying my internal, moving components (my thoughts, feelings, opinions) to the external elements of a place. ‘How has the place been able to colour my perspective of the world?’
And so eventually, maybe travelling will amount to more than just pictures against localised versions of Starbucks outlets. Maybe it will instead be a collection of discoveries I made about myself while sipping on the local conversational beverage.
Conversational beverages
Just like chai at every corner-shop at home in Bombay, different cities within India (and the world) seem to have their own versions of conversational beverages — beverages a people chooses to fill up, in nonchalant company of strangers, the quiet lull of a day.
I remember a hot afternoon in Kochi, Kerala, that I spent by the fishing dock, sipping on fresh coconut water. A rainy morning in Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, that I spent doing yoga on the rooftop of a french villa — an experience so peaceful and moving, I nearly cried. It was followed by a humble cup of filter coffee — which is, I found out, a remnant of French colonialism just like the villa I had spent my morning in.
Travel has stopped being a touch-and-go experience, and has instead become a quiet exploration of a place and its little details: its unsaid rules and non-verbal languages. We think language is restricted to just words. Isn’t it also head-nods, hand gestures, and facial expressions? We’re almost always conversing using our bodies without saying a word.
The maker of the list
When travel stops being about touch-and-go, you begin to pick the street food instead of the fine-dining restaurants. You learn about the corner-shop conversational beverages, and you choose to spend evenings at the tiny bar you found in an otherwise missable lane. Travel is when you don’t follow the handed-down list anymore; it’s when you’re making the list yourself.
The more I thought about it, the more travel’s real measure — how deeply I was changed by it — began to apply to other aspects of my life. Just like places can change us when we allow them to, so can people.
Which were the relationships I had explored like a tourist? Which were the ones I had explored like a traveler? Who were the people I was approaching lightly, unchanged by their presence, and who were those that made a sizeable impact on my life?
I realised that the moments I held closest to me were a result of the times I chose to stop looking at my pre-existing list of the boxes I wanted people to check off. The best moments were when I was with the people who didn’t fit any of my usual boxes. These moments made me question the boxes I had once held so sacredly.
Making the list.
Our preconceived notions of how we want people to behave tend to come from the supposed-to-be’s we’ve allowed others to narrate. And often enough, when we ‘click’ with someone, it’s really because something inside of us feels at ease before we know why it does. Ever felt weirdly tense and on-guard around certain people while being instantly breezy around others?
Traveling through human relationships is eerily similar to traveling through places. It’s less touch-and-go, and more a quiet exploration of a person and their little details; their unsaid rules and non-verbal languages.
Our brains are perpetually registering people’s unsayables — the languages they speak that don’t involve any words. But here’s the problem: there is a definitive lag between when the brain registers this information and when it finally reaches our frontal lobe (the part of the brain we use to make decisions). And so this information instead manifests itself in the way our body auto-responds to certain people. The result? We find it hard to put into words why some people feel like the human version of a hug while others either don’t make us feel anything, or worse.
Starbucks vs. chai-stall: a choice
Like travel recommendations, our friends and families tend hand down subtle definitions of what we’re supposed to value, and in turn who we are supposed to be. And we pass them along further. A Chinese Whisper — a check-list — spanning across social circles and generations with unearned credibility, never to be questioned.
It’s understandable, but it’s also questionable. Collectivist cultures, such as that in India, push us to move through life in groups. And so when we are faced with choices, we’re inclined to pick the choice that the group is likely to approve of — ‘deeply distracted by the inevitably varied expectations of the group’. Our lives become less an act of discovering ourselves out of curiosity, and more an act of repetitive conformity by fighting (or worse, killing) the parts of ourselves that emerge different.
So maybe the key is to hold on to curiosity. Especially when it comes to people, places, and experiences that aren’t cut out from the generationally & socially handed-down cloth. While touring is generally easy and reduces cognitive load, travel is ultimately more enriching. Maybe both hold value in shaping the way we make our choices. Maybe (like in my case) there’s a phase for each approach, and maybe (for others I know) both the approaches can co-exist.
But in the end it’s important to remember that we get to choose whether we visit the Starbucks or the corner-shop chai stall. For both, people and places. One more intimate, more impactful for the individual. The other more beneficial for the group. Neither less valuable.
As promised, sharing a small collection of some of the great reads I keep revisiting. It’s a list I’ll continue to update periodically, so if you like what you read, consider bookmarking the link. Happy reading!
P.S. Thanks Shivani, for all your help with this piece!
//Which were the relationships I had explored like a tourist? Which were the ones I had explored like a traveler?// 🖤