Warning: this one is an unconnected jumble of thoughts and inadequate philosophising. It sort of follows on from the previous one, but I thought I'd break it up so that if you only want to know roughly what I've been doing or seeing, rather than what I've been thinking, you can skip it.
My reactions to Prague and Bratislava have been making me think. Just
as I wonder what I make this trip, so do I wonder what this trip makes
me. They are bound up together; the experiences of travel undoubtedly
shape you, if you allow them, but you shape your experiences. It is
obvious that in reflecting on your reaction to events, you learn as
much as you do from the actual events themselves, but, more subtly,
it is just as valuable to understand why you sought those experiences in the first place, and why
took what you did from them.
My feelings towards the two cities are not just a matter of simple expectations: everyone told
me Prague was beautiful, Munich and Bratislava (and even Madrid - "why
are you going there, why not Barcelona?" - to some extent) boring or
ugly and so, expecting the best or the worst, what I found naturally didn't fit. Expectations effect reactions: it is often easier to deal with difficult situations by managing expectations to prevent the need to deal with unhealthy thought patterns than attempting to directly manipulate said thought patterns after the fact. So these are not unrelated, but neither are they simply related. One aspect of this complexity is perhaps not in explicit expectations but (subconscious) mental 'landscapes' that condition our perception. This might explain my strong experience in Munich, conditioned by my reading, in Fontainebleau, of a number of books about the Middle East that I had picked up in charity shops over my last six months in Edinburgh (and that I hadn't previously found time to read).
Nor are my reactions, as some cynics might suggest, just a matter of me being contrary or obstreperous (I suspect you could mark that one down, along with stubbornness, as another family trait). I've begun to wonder if it isn't more complicated than that.
In reading my description of Braislava, it occurred to me that maybe
the keyword there is quintessential. It's a telling term, saying as
much about the describer as the described. Perhaps it's also
telling that my favourite building in Prague was the magnificent and playful,
but thoroughly contemporary, dancing "Fred and Ginger" Milunić and
Gehry building, a contrast to the Neo-Baroque and Neo-Gothic panoramas
of the old town. (It might also be worth noting that it is not
unlike, in some respects, the Scottish Parliament building, my
favourite building in Edinburgh.)
As someone who would like to consider themselves a traveller rather than
a tourist, I seek authenticity. Not existential authenticity - the authenticity of being - but that of experience. I want to experience the 'real'
country. Ticking off the tourist sites, snapping
holiday snaps and following the crowd are not what I want. I want to go
off the beaten path perhaps, try to find out what life is 'really' like
in the countries I visit, uncover what people 'really' think.
It was a shock to realise that on my final morning in Prague I was glad to finally see some dilapidated buildings, graffitied and run-down. That I was glad to see them made me realise the absurdity of the lengths I go to, perhaps subconsciously, to find the authentic. And I suddenly understood that I, too, just see what I want to see. In travel, as in science, all observations are theory-laden. By that I mean that in observing, we necessarily use terms that are grounded in a net of pre-existing metaphysical concepts.
In order to describe what we see, we must use concepts and terms we already understand, terms that have connotations and meanings in the context of our entire world-view. We cannot truly see something afresh. The concepts we have available to describe the world are proscribed bthe fetters of our upbringing, our culture and, perhaps most importantly, our language. Those things for which we don't have the concepts cannot be conceptualised and so cannot be perceived - they fall through our perceptual net. G.K. Chesterton was wrong in claiming the difference between a traveller and a tourist is that the former sees what he sees and the latter what he wants to see; in this regard there is no difference. In some sense, we all see what we want to see.
This is, perhaps, related to the subconscious mental landscapes of which I spoke earlier. One way to view this is to imagine that experiences shape our internal landscape, but subsequent experiences must lie in the plane of that landscape, confined to its contours, though those later experiences change the landscape to which they are bound (analogous, if you like, to General Relativity: matter shapes spacetime and spacetime tells matter how to move). A cynic might say that the difference between tourist and traveller is just a bourgeois conceit constructed to differentiate the tourist with pretensions to intellectualism and upward mobility from the other, the plain tourist, the proletariat (and it's pretty clear I'm a tourist with pretensions to intellectualism if not upward-mobility). And so Alice Thompson was wrong too: Inter-railers aren't "the ambulatory equivalent of McDonalds, walking testimony to the erosion of French culture": that's just middle-class snobbery.
There is a second side to this, perhaps just the other side of the same coin. That is to view the different modes of travel experience as simply differents methods of illuminating the same reality. Here I'm going to lay out my cards and admit to being a realist about reality - I don't think that we all simply construct our own, or that some demon (or, yes, some sort of matrix) is feeding us a bunch of lies about our world. One half-reasons for this is just economy of metaphysical explanation - it's simply more sensible to explain how we all manage to perceive roughly the same stuff most of the time using the rather simple and obvious explanation that that stuff is actually there. If you don't think that stuff actually exists, you've got a lot of explanatory work to do in mapping out how we are all so similar when it comes to seeing the world (in particular why science gets such uniform results).
Of course we can doubt this, but in the end, even Descartes didn't deny the existence of an external reality, just the possibility that we could definitely know about it. And, as Hume pointed out, any reasoned thinking about sceptism leads to schizophrenic intellectualism and doubts about the existence of external reality quickly vanish in the light of the quotidien world. It is simply impossible to function as a true sceptic in everyday life - try it. And, as someone who would like to think of themselves as taking a down-to-earth approach to metaphysical philosophy, this dichotomy suggests the error lies in the library-bound rationalisations of true scepticisms, rather than everyday experience. So that was a rather long, and possibly muddle-headed, tangent. The point is that through our perceptions, we all perceive the same underlying stuff, stuff that actually exists (like different shafts of light partially illuminating a sculpture in a dark room).
In this sort of view, the modes of travel experience could possibly be viewed like modes of literary criticism: we can intepret a text in many ways, depending on our intellectual bent, or school of thought. The text is the same underlying object (yes, this is most definitely controversial, please feel free to comment or email me to point out my errors), but no one way of reading it will capture it in its entirety. A feminist reading is as valid as a close account of its historical context, but neither is complete. Reality and our experience of it (most importantly and pertinently for our discussion, our travel reality - that of a foreign, unknown destination) is like this. Maybe. (If you prefer shafts of light illuminating a sculpture, fine. It's probably less controversial.)
My view of Prague, in this account, is just another way of looking, just as pitching up, like the three Irishmen I met on the train, to do nothing but get drunk is a way of seeing the reality (ha, some people might say getting drunk is the only way to see reality). These guys were on a month long trip, their sole proclaimed aim to 'drink their way round Europe'. One of them was chiefly excited about Prague because it had excellent brothels and you could go to a firing range and fire a real AK47.
And so the question is as follows: there are many ways of accessing the same reality (ie many ways of travelling, or many ways of experiencing the same destination) - does that mean all are equally valid? This is an open question for me, though I have some thoughts.
My couchsurfing host in Prague was a pubcrawl guide. I'd never come across the concept of paying to go on a pubcrawl, but apparently it's very common, especially in Berlin, Amsterdam and Prague. So my first evening there (and my second too) was a pub crawl, an experience I would never have contemplated had it not been my host's job (I must point out that it wasn't something they were that psyched about, but it paid the bills). And I should say I felt very uncomfortable. Not least when we went to Coyote's, a bar based on the film Coyote Ugly, where, in fact, I felt so uncomfortable I almost left. Not since Bangkok had I been somewhere so flagrantly exploitative and I didn't like it. However, spurned on by the fact that when you're having a rubbish time it's often largely you, rather than your circumstances, I became more accepting and ended up having a reasonable night.
This forced me to become more accepting in general of the type of traveller that would seek out a pub crawl as way of experiencing a city such as Prague. If we are all conditioned to see what we want to see, and all modes of experience are just the same, no better and no worse, then maybe it really is just middle-class conceit to think that I'm a traveller and not a tourist. Or even to distinguish them at all.
And then, just as I became more accepting, more tolerant of that type of all drinking tourist, as I strove to understand and accept the insight that all modes of travel experience are equal, I heard some Aussies brag about a hilarious taxi ride in which they found the driver couldn't speak English. So they swore at him and insulted him in English for the entirety of the ride, to gales of laughter from all concerned. I don't even know what to say.
