Beyond The Guidebook – Truro & Another Side of Travel (Cornwall Chronicles #11a)

Somewhere along the line while traveling to Europe on numerous occasions, I came to the realization that travel is less about sightseeing and more about the overall experience of being in a foreign country. This might sound obvious, but the way I travel today is quite different from how I started in my first trips to Europe two decades ago. The first thing that drew me abroad were specific places. For instance, I traveled to Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina so I could stand in the exact place where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip. This was the trigger point which led to the First World War. The odd thing about this visit is what I remember most has nothing to do with the Archduke or his assassin. Instead, my most enduring memory is a girl sitting on a bench near the Latin Bridge which is directly across from where the assassination occurred. She was talking rather dreamily on her cell phone. I still wonder today whether this was the start of heartbreak or passionate excesses to come later in the day. This moment was not what I imagined visiting one of the world’s most famous assassination sites.

Passion & Pilgrimages – Seeing For Myself

Once I made that visit to Sarajevo, I began to seek other famous and/or infamous places in Eastern Europe such as Lviv and Chernobyl in Ukraine. Vienna was a high priority because of the artifacts from the Archduke’s assassination on display (blood-stained tunic anyone) at the Austrian Military Museum. In Budapest, the magnificent neo-Gothic Parliament Building and Line One, the first metro line in Continental Europe, drew me to the Hungarian capital. Several other trips revolved around the old haunts of writers I admired such as Miklos Banffy whose Transylvania Trilogy lured me to his ruined palace in Romania. The childhood home of Sandor Marai – author of Embers - in Kosice, Slovakia. These experiences were worth every dollar I expended in the pursuit of them. I will value the memories of those pilgrimages for the rest of my life.

Such trips continued as I darted from place to place during those first few trips looking to satisfy my love for history, which basically consisted of anything from the period of the late-19th and early 20th century in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was all fascinating stuff, but I did not realize that the joys I derived from travel had begun to change. At a certain point in my travels which I have not yet been able to identify, I began to find the mundane a source of fascination. Perhaps it started with that girl on the phone in Sarajevo. Sometimes the moments which define my travel habits occur long before they manifest themselves in future trips. Whatever the case, something in the way I interacted with the places I would visit slowly changed during each additional journey.

Daily Duties – Miracle of the Mundane

My memories of European travel are laden with simple delights such as walking down random sidewalks in Sofia, the sound of a rooster crowing in a Hungarian village, a short bus ride in Belgrade, looking up at the lights in an otherwise anonymous apartment building in Kispest and holding in my hands a pile of tickets while riding the tram in Lviv. There is nothing out of the ordinary about these moments other than the fact that I can still recall them many years later. Such things as supermarkets remain with me while museums are largely forgotten. Visits to shopping malls rather than palaces hold a special place in my memory bank. Everyday life in Europe has made some of the most prominent impressions upon me. Slovakia is less memorable for the hilltop castles I visited, than a dreary drive through the southern part of the country during a steady rain. I remember the drive as unpleasant, but I have found myself periodically thinking about it again and again. Passing through gloomy towns along cracked pavements is a much more educational experience about Slovakia than anything I have seen in a museum. ??

Such experiences have taught me that daily life in a foreign country can be just as interesting as the can’t misses and must-sees that are advertised as the reason to travel in foreign lands. I have noticed that more and more of my time while traveling is spent scrutinizing the items for sale in grocery stores, observing staff in train stations, and wandering through residential areas. These experiences have been just as edifying as anything featured in guidebooks. After my latest trip which took me to Cornwall, I began to ponder what was worth seeing and why. Comparing the recommendations in guidebooks to my own highly personalized experience.

“Higher Education” – For Your Own Good

I am keenly aware that guidebooks have their limitations. They detail places which are of natural or historical significance. These are the must-sees that travelers will find of the greatest interest. Among the most lauded attractions in guidebooks are museums. This is because museums often contain artifacts that can be found nowhere else. While this is undoubtedly true, in many ways museum experiences are pretty much the same everywhere. Either the museum experience is good, which means it was educational and enlightening. Or it was utterly forgettable due to poor displays and less than interesting artifacts.

Museums, with the notable exception of Skansens (Open air museums with rural architecture), are inside jobs. No matter how unique the building is, visitors are still sequestered in a walled environment. They spend an inordinate amount of time in a climate-controlled environment while standing on their feet and reading text, staring at artifacts, pictures, and paintings. This experience is supposed to make their visit to an unfamiliar land more intellectually edifying. To a certain degree, museums are the equivalent of “great books.” Those totemic literary tomes that 99% of the population does not read and never will unless they are forced to in school. In this sense, the term “higher education” can seem oxymoronic. Museums are often filled with artifacts that are just as mind numbing as Moby Dick. In other words, they are an acquired taste that most people would rather ignore. Increasingly, I have become one of those people.