I sat at a table of no fewer than fifteen people on the street Pio Nono, entry to Bellavista, the down-home party section of Santiago, Chile. I’d been invited to go out for a beer after the monthly critical mass bike ride, and we stacked our bikes tidily (handlebars to rear wheel) against a nearby tree and set to the matter at hand. We sat at a long series of card tables extending down the street, each of us perched on one of those ubiquitous white plastic chairs, serving ourselves beer into small glasses from the liter bottles of Escudo on the center of the tables. Some, drinkers of fan-schop (a Chilean specialty), mixed theirs with Fanta. I drank mine plain, and listened.

I spoke, and people understood. At the time, I felt that this was the only necessary linguistic accomplishment. You, listen to me.

I arrived to Chile in 2004, with way more than a passing knowledge of Spanish. Between high school and a couple of travel and study stints in the mundo hispanohablante (Spanish-speaking world), I could express myself fairly well, if not cleverly. Hadn’t I explained the electoral college to a group of teachers in Antigua, Guatemala in the 90s? Wasn’t it me who grabbed other travelers by the hand to take them to the post office, the bus station, to get their hair cut? I enjoyed helping, expressing, being in charge. I could get you a seat on the bus, a doorstop, tape to fix a book – you name it. I could ask for it directly or circumlocute it. I spoke, and people understood. At the time, I felt that this was the only necessary linguistic accomplishment. You, listen to me. And then it was over.

While output was the feather in my linguistic cap, my listening wouldn’t have won any awards. Still, I was skilled enough (or so I thought). Ask a predictable question while travelling, and get a predictable answer. “Where” questions should lead to a location. “When” questions should yield a time, or a day. “I don’t know” might come up at any time, so be prepared. Other times you might get a “probably,” or “No, we’re out of that (on the menu), what about this?” These little sayings are repetitive, predictable, often accompanied by hand and head motions, and occasional pointing. Understandable.

But what happens when you get out of the predictable, and put fifteen of your new closest friends on a loud sidewalk, add an unfamilliar accent, country-specific slang and not just a touch of cheap beer? As an ESL teacher I’d seen students reduced to frustration, to squinching their eyes shut against visual input while they leaned their heads closer to the audio, hoping that the problem wasn’t their ear for English, but their hearing. Try as I might there on the sidewalk, no matter of eye squinching or head leaning was going to fix the fact that I was simply not up to the task. My Chilean friends could understand me, but of the reading/writing/listening/speaking quadrifecta that make up second-language learning, clearly my listening was the weakest.

I’m loquacious at the best of times, grate-on-your-nerves chatty when it’s worse. But here, on the street in Santiago, 5,000 miles from a place where I could understand easily (and foolishly had taken this for granted), I was relegated to good listener status. It wasn’t that I couldn’t exactly understand what anyone was saying. I could understand enough to follow, kind of, but not fast enough to say anything relevant to the conversation while the topic was still hot.

I was also in Chile, which, with the exception of not letting people off the metro before getting on, is one of the most polite places I’d ever been. What this means is that any time I so much as appeared to want to say anything, a hush would fall over the string of tables. People knew they might not understand me easily, so they wanted to give me their complete attention.

The less I spoke, the more people felt I was being sweet, lovely, an observer, a listener. And whenever I did speak, I was no longer the boy who cried wolf.

Between the hot topic issue and the plancha (embarassment) I felt at having all eyes on me, the venerable communicator, I simply had to take a different tact. No longer was I Eileen, wordsmith extraordinaire. I was Aylín, the good listener. I was polite. It was cute. People described me as quiet.

And for a while I rebelled, thinking, no! I’m a whirlwind of communication. But what I learned here was that the less I spoke, the more people felt I was being sweet, lovely, an observer, a listener. And whenever I did speak, I was no longer the boy who cried wolf. I was a woman of few words. And I spent several months as a good listener because I simply couldn’t keep up well enough to speak. During downtimes in the conversation, I would mull over a conversation a Honduran woman had with me on the bus years ago, all communion and priest, mass and confession, a jumble of nouns held together with words (verbs? adjectives? who knows) that meant nothing to me. “Did you understand?” she asked. “Church,” I’d replied.

Not being able to participate in a conversation is like being in disguise. I would sit there in my shy suit and let the words whirl around me, swirl past me. For the first time in my life I was getting to know the patient people, the ones that reach out to quiet ones. I’d never met them before because I was so busy with my soundtrack. It made people want to take me into their confidence, their inner circle. I was not a person who repeated private information. As far as they could tell, I didn’t even speak.

After several months of more listening than speaking, I took it up as a new challenge: To follow every conversation with surgical precision, and say nothing, or nearly nothing. I could feel the cloud of wonder and panic lifting, and still I chose to stay quiet. I learned about body language and turn-taking, Chilean social niceties, and watched the other quiet people to see what they were doing. Following along as well, in most cases. They weren’t bland, just quiet. It was a revelation. Church indeed. The church of shut up and listen. And I was a convert.

Nearly five years later, I don’t have to just listen any more. I can exchange jokes and fling around slang with abandon. But what I’ve found is that I often don’t want to. I’m often happy to let events take place without interrupting them, just listening to people say what they have to, what they want to. I don’t interrupt as much and I’ve discovered this whole new world, even among my very own family, the self-professed masters of interrupting and simultaneous yammering (I blame Brooklyn). Sometimes I just try to let them talk themselves out before chiming in. Because when people are talking, they tend not be great listeners. I’d rather have their attention before saying something.

I’m often told I’ve changed quite a bit since being in Chile. Years have passed, and in that time we’ve all changed. But what I learned here is that you don’t have to be on your game at every possible second. You can watch from the sidelines and participate at the same time. Sometimes the story we tell when we’re not saying a word is the most important story of all.

© Gretchen Wilson-Kalav for TravelBlogs, 2009. | How I Learned to Shut Up and Listen | 7 comments |
Post categories: Articles
Post tags: Chile, cultural experiences, expat life, learning languages, Spanish

If places we expect much of sometimes disappoint, the inverse is also true. Today, travellers share about places they visited that turned out to be hidden gems.

From the very obscure to the well-known, each of these travel tales attests to the fact that the best moments in travel catch you by surprise.

Cambodia. (Nomadic Matt)

Cambodia. I didn’t really have any expectations about the country. I knew it would be poor, rugged, and undeveloped. But other than that all I knew was that it had Angkor Wat.  Coming out of Vietnam, a country I hated, I thought anything would be better than there. Cambodia was all the things I said but it was much more- the people were so upbeat, the atmosphere chaotic but relaxed at the same time, everyone was friendly, and happy you were there. Cambodia was the opposite of Vietnam. Though the country wasn’t pretty, the people made up for it. I ended up extending my stay, spending extra time on the coast and in the capital. I can’t wait to go back.

Tasmania, Australia. (Ant Stone from Trail of Ants)

When my girlfriend, Reb decided we were heading to Tasmania I smiled and nodded. Inside I was imagining a timid island doused in dank forests and eerie village folk nibbling on dried salmon. Then I began some light-hearted research and got snowballed by what must be the world’s most intense tourism campaign, and it almost all rang true.

Tasmania is underpinned by some unreal rock formations; from proud cliffs and classic peninsulas to the underworld realms of caves and boastful mountains. Couple this with the world’s most sublime beaches, the world’s cleanest air and a history so epic that it’s rivalled only by its future.

While parts of Tasmania remain undiscovered those that have been are deservedly promoted as regional trophies. Such a stage doesn’t just cater for the endless convoys of caravans and campervans, but also plays home to some of the most untormented populations of wildlife in Australia. From possums and platypus to kookaburras and quolls; add the infamously savage Tasmanian Devil and the absent Tasmanian Tiger (thylacine) and you have a quintessentially furry cast. Timid Tasmania turned and socked me with an unforgettable, unexpected yet truly monumental punch and I’m still unable to stop staggering.

For more information on Australia’s island state check out Discover Tasmania or follow my blog over the coming weeks.

Lake District, England. (Angelina Hart from The Little Travelers)

A place for us that was an “oh, we’re in the neighborhood, so maybe we should check it out” was the Lake District of northern England. We just happened upon the world of Beatrix Potter, which turned out to one of our kids favorite things of our entire trip. It was truly adorable for children ages 2-10. I’ve never read or heard anything about it so it was a wonderfully delightful day that wowed all of us.

Cochamó, Chile. (Eileen Smith from Bearshapedsphere)

Cochamó promised to be just another town standing in the way of home, and I was convinced to go there by a man who was retracing his own history, having been a Peace Corps volunteer in the early years in the skinny republic of Chile. I was not optimistic but willing to give this southern town on the Reloncaví estuary a try.  The water rises and falls with the tides, flooding the front yards of the hastily-built stilted homes constructed at its edge. I ate a slowfood lunch of fish and salad and the sun hung stable in the sky for hours after it seemed it should have set. I was offered and took five-hour horseback ride, ducking among the trees, eating astringent caqui fruits and hearing the white blossomed ulmos (trees) buzzing with nectar-collecting bees before I even saw them. Giant, climbable granite boulders and cliffsides dwarfed me, my horse and my ever-slipping saddle. Sunset over the estuary was stripey, perfect, and I had aromatic leaves in my pocket given to me by my guide, which I found when I arrived back to the urban sprawl of Santiago.

Nepal. (Dave from The Longest Way Home)

Like a sledgehammer on the side of my head Nepal was my unexpected gem. I’d arrived a few days before Christmas, and was expecting a place crawling with tourists, tours and soulless commercialism.

Instead I found myself walking down a near deserted road in Pokhara breathing in the winters chill air, yet still warm from the high sun. Before me a vivid blue skyline background magnified by the magnificent Annapurna ice capped mountain range. Beside me, the quite, gentle chanting of “Omadi Padi Hum”  flowed out of store fronts as a cow ambled across the road without concern. A local man passed by and pressed his hands together and greeted me with a smile and humble “Nameste” before moving on.

I looked up and felt a lifetime of emotion overcome me. It said quite simply, “this is home”. This is what it feels like.

After near 4 years of searching I finally felt something many had  ridiculed me over, and something I was desperately certain of that existed.

Nepal, is  not my home. But it did, quite unexpectedly, one winters morning give to me the gift of a feeling for something I am searching for; and now know exists.

Dominican Republic. (Rosalind Cummings-Yeates from Farsighted Fly Girl)

Because I tend to over-research like a maniac, I haven’t experienced many destination surprises. The only place that has managed to catch me off guard was the Dominican Republic. I had consciously avoided the island because the country has been charged with many human rights violations, not to mention forced slavery of Haitians working on plantations. That just doesn’t inspire many high expectations. I had been searching for an ecomomical place for a family Spring break trip last April and the Dominican Republic kept coming up. I checked the latest Amnesty International reports and the findings appeared to be a bit better, if only because of the huge push to build resorts and a subway system to increase tourism and raise living standards. But I was still skeptical. We traveled to La Romana, which is a fishing village at the southern tip of the island, hours away from the capitol of Santiago. I was intrigued by the bustling communities whizzing by on motor bikes. Mango trees seemed to dot every street and kids playing baseball were everywhere. We stayed in a hotel with mostly German and French tourists so I was pleased that we had to rely on our Spanish to communicate. From that point, we were embraced like long lost relatives everywhere we went. The warmth of the people was genuine and unexpected. The natural beauty, from caves we discovered horsback-riding, to the nature preserve on Sanoa Island, was unforgettable. Devouring the spicy local cusine of boca chica fish and mangu plantain stew, I got to talk to Haitians who informed me of the political situation. It’s not good, the Haitian border is patrolled and many Haitian workers are afraid to go home because they won’t be allowed back. But they acknowledged that there were more jobs for them and they could send money home.  I learned a lot from my Dominican excursion, mainly that you can’t truly judge a place until you’ve experienced it. 

Midwest USA. (Greg from Greg Wesson’s Esoteric Globe)

The Midwest of the USA has some great places, and most tourists probably would never think of going there.  Chicago, St. Louis, Omaha (even, a stretch to call mid-west, but Denver). There is something about the air in Midwestern cities. It’s so clean and fresh.  Omaha was quite a shock, as most Americans would probably never suggest a tourist stop in Omaha.   The downtown area is nice, they have a beautiful old market area, there are some nice lakes, and you can get excellent steak dinners for not much money.  The area is also home to many German immigrants, and thus home to some great German food.   I had an excellent meal of potato pancakes and a selection of wurst sausages at a little German restaurant in Bellevue called Edelweiss, which I would highly recommend.  Good thing the air is so clean and fresh in the Midwest, because after all that wurst, a night-time stroll to work off some calories was definitely needed.

The jungles of Laos. Photo by Derek Turner.

Lightning Ridge, Australia. (Nora Dunn from The Professional Hobo)

When I rolled into Lightning Ridge – a tiny outback opal-mining town in Australia, I had high hopes but low expectations. And my expectations were perfectly met, when I (initially) saw the faded billboards and weather-beaten look of a town trying too hard to be attractive to tourists.

So after driving more than a little bit out of my way to get there, I was prepared to drive away the following morning.

Lucky for me, I had one evening; one chance for Lightning Ridge to redeem itself. And so it did. In fact, I met such a warm and friendly group of people at a Rotary meeting that night, who introduced me to more fabulous people over the next few days, that I stayed a week in this place I had only intended on passing through. I now have friends there who will surely be so for many years to come.

Sometimes looking beyond the façade of a place and allowing its true colours to seep in can result in the most beautiful of experiences.

Venice, Italy. (Debby Lee Jagerman from Debby’s Departures)

Venice, Italy. Well, yes, I guess I had some expectations, as Venice is obviously quite famous. But, I was not anticipating that I would feel that Venice would be awesome enough to visit at least five times during my five-month solo travels in Europe.

Thinking that I would only travel to Venice once, the first time I went, I explored the tourist sites. But from that experience, I was drawn to Venice, and felt that there was so much more to discover. So I went back again…and again. I visited the islands of Murano and Burano on my next trip. Another time, I just walked up and down the busy main streets, filled with tourists and stores to people-watch and window-shop. My favorite trip was strolling off the beaten path, exploring the quiet side streets, and experiencing the local life. I saw locals use boats as most of us do cars, children playing, and women preparing fresh greens for the evening meal.

Finally, I took my mother and sister to Venice so that they could experience the magic of this city, and so that we could take a sunset Gondola ride together.

And yes, I would even go back again!

Grand Canyon, USA. (Tammie Dooley from Solo Road Trip)

My son and I set out for the Grand Canyon to celebrate his graduation from HS. Seventeen hours later a parking lot filled with buses, crawling with fellow travelers, greeted us. Both had envisioned the Grand Canyon with its sweeping vistas of color, water, sky – not this. We’d projected ourselves into a pristine environment, feet dangling over the side of a steep drop-off, wind ruffling our hair. Struggling to a point that provided a glimpse of the canyon, we returned to the car dejected by our disillusions. At the exit a Ranger asked how we’d enjoyed the Grand Canyon. “We were hoping for something, uhhh, quieter with better views.” The Ranger said, “I don’t know how much time you have, but if you travel to the North Rim of the canyon you’ll get what you came for. Only 10% of the people seeing the Grand Canyon see the North Rim. There’s only one drawback, it’s a 5 hour drive from here.” We thought “exclusivity, feet dangling over the sides, wind ruffling our hair – we’re there!” Wildlife, sunshine, and the slightest of breezes met us this time. Giddy with seeing the panorama before us, we frolicked on the unprotected edges of the pristine North Rim until dark. It was better than anything we’d dreamed.

Po Lin Monastery, Hong Kong. (Nikolas Tjhin from Unearthing Asia)

On a recent trip to Hong Kong, I visited the Lantau Island and went over to the Giant Buddha Statue at the Po Lin Monastery. I wasn’t expecting much, judging from what my local friends said. But as you may as well know by now, travelers would often be intrigued by the small little things that locals find unamusing. This was definitely a good example of that!

The journey towards Po Lin Monastery started with a 20-minutes cable car ride called the Ngong Ping 360, towards Lantau Island from Tung Chung MTR Station. This was an experience in and of itself, with the amazing view to be enjoyed throughout the ride. I can see a walking pathway down below the cable car, which turns out to be this adventurous hiking trail around the island. The ride stopped at Ngong Ping cultural village in which tourists can shop and unwind, but I was more interested with the Giant Buddha Statue and immediately made my way towards Po Lin Monastery.

The walk was steep and the wind cooling (it was winter time in HK), but it was worth the effort – the Giant Buddha Statue was truly a sight to behold. Over 34 metres of bronze atop 268 steps of stairs! There are relics of Sidartha Gautama himself, and various carvings, scriptures and statues. Nearby, I also visited the Monastery which featured a grandiose hall with colorful carvings and paintings. All in all, definitely worth a day trip visit!

Laos. (Derek Turner from The World By Sea)

To be shamefully honest, I couldn’t have even told you where Laos was when I first arrived to Asia. But every time I’d meet a person who’d experienced Asia and the country was mentioned, their eyes would go distant and with a slight smile, they’d murmur something like, “Ahh… Laos…”

Two months later I learned why. My Loatian adventure began with a ½ day drive and a 7-hour hike into a remote village. Oxen stood with goats, stood with chickens and dogs. Children stood barren amongst grass-covered huts. All watching as I walked muddy paths through their village. Corn grew tall, next to fields of rice, next to thick jungles. It felt pure, untouched.

I zip-lined into tree houses, slept atop trees, under nets to the symphonic sounds of nature, and woke to howling gibbons. I rode my bike through villages to waterfalls, and traveled by boat and tube down the Mekong. The people were poor, but no one seemed to notice. I’m not sure in all my travels that I’ve ever a people more genuine-quick to smile and say hello, with nothing at all to sell. It was beautiful.

It’s a place I never planned on visiting, but anytime I pause at the beautiful picture painted by my experience, I can’t help but stare into the distance and smile slightly… Ahh, Laos…

What about you? Have you ever been pleasantly surprised to discover a hidden gem on your travels?

© Gretchen Wilson-Kalav for TravelBlogs, 2009. | 12 Hidden Gems: Great Destinations that Caught Us by Surprise | 18 comments |
Post categories: Panel Discussions
Post tags: Australia, Cambodia, Chile, Cochamó, Dominican Republic, England, Grand Canyon, Hong Kong, Italy, Lake District, Laos, Lightning Ridge, Nepal, off-the-beaten-track, Omaha, Po Lin Monastery, Tasmania, USA, Venice

© Gretchen Wilson-Kalav for TravelBlogs, 2009. | Bearshapedsphere | No comment |
Post categories: Blogs
Post tags: Chile, expat blog, living abroad, Santiago

© Gretchen Wilson-Kalav for TravelBlogs, 2009. | Marisa and Izzy’s Blogsite | No comment |
Post categories: Blogs
Post tags: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, couples, North America, Peru, South America, United States

© Gretchen Wilson-Kalav for TravelBlogs, 2008. | Southern Cone Travel | One comment |
Post categories: Blogs
Post tags: Argentina, Buenos Aires, Chile, Patagonia, travel writing

You list your hobbies as travel and “sampling beers of the world”… What’s the best beer you’ve ever had?

The last one… until the next one.

Seriously,
though, one of the seminal experiences in introducing me to the beers of the world was a night at a pub in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, USA back in 1993. I was on a ski trip in the Pocono mountains, and we wandered into this bar that had over 200 different types of beer in bottles, organized on the menu by the country of origin. I hadn’t travelled much at that point in my life, and so I decided to try and do a round the world trip by trying beer from different countries that night – Germany, Britain, Japan, Jamaica, even a Belgium beer made by Trappist monks. It was really my initiation to the fact that different beers can really have different tastes. The bartender said that if I could drink a full bottle of the “chili beer,” which is basically a Mexican-style beer that had been picking up the heat and taste of the chili pepper soaking in it for months, he would buy the next round. The chili beer was undrinkable and I had to pay, but the whole night really got me started on experimenting with different types of beer.

I am now a big fan of wheat beers, and getting a chance to have a Hoegaarden in Brussels was pretty cool, because it felt a little bit like making a pilgrimage.

You’ve said that two of the favourite places you’ve visited were Punta Arenas in Chile and Denver, Colorado. What was it about these places that really impressed you?

A lot of people go travelling to “find themselves,” and while I still haven’t found myself completely, both Denver and Punta Arenas were places where I had a small epiphanies.

In Denver, it was really the first time when I was travelling for work that I started to feel like some place other than Toronto could feel like “home.” I had been travelling for work for about 2 years by that time, but every trip prior to heading to Denver always felt like I was away. In Denver, I made a bunch of friends, had some great times hiking in the mountains and skiing and got a beautiful apartment overlooking the Rocky Mountains. I even managed to sort of get myself in shape. I started to really feel like I lived in Denver, and just happened to occasionally visit Toronto, instead of the other way around. I had never before believed that I could “live” anywhere other than Toronto, but Denver made me realize that the whole world was open as a place to live. It came at a really good time for me, because prior to that trip I had been having a bad couple years in Toronto, including the death of my mother, and I was projecting a lot of my anger and sadness on my physical surrounding in Toronto. Everything in Toronto felt haunted. So it was nice to live somewhere else for a while, and let the ghosts in Toronto leave.

Punta Arenas provided me with a feeling that I hadn’t really felt in a long time. I was in Punta Arenas when I took 3 months off my job and backpacked around South America. As a 32 year old who hadn’t had anything longer than a week off since starting university at the age of 18, it had been a long time since I wasn’t loaded down with responsibilities. I was, at this point, about 3 weeks into my trip, and starting to get into the swing of backpacking (it was my first experience with it). On this one day, as I wrote about in my blog entry on Punta Arenas, I walked out from my hotel to a bright sunny day, of which they had been few in Patagonia since I had gotten there, and I was suddenly struck by how happy I was. I was in a place as far as I had ever been from home. Everything was at the same time both so familiar and so alien. Everything that was worrying me back home was completely and totally off my shoulders. I was totally free to not worry about anything except walking around and checking out the town. It was a moment of complete and total freedom. And the sun was shining. It was the first time I think I’d ever had a vacation where I actually felt like I was on vacation, and I didn’t have any thoughts of what I left undone when leaving, or what I had to do when I got back.

What’s the most disappointing trip you’ve ever made?

I don’t know if I’m just lucky or the kind of person that always sees the glass as half full, but I haven’t had a really disappointing trip. There are portions of trips that I’ve taken that have been disappointing, but nothing where I find myself entirely disappointed.

As an example, I loved Missouri, but a day-trip to Meramec Caverns was quite a disappointment. Dubbed “America’s Cave,” Meramec Caverns has an excellent history including being a hiding spot for the outlaw Jesse James. But upon arriving, the place was tourist kitsch. The main entrance was turned into a ballroom complete with disco ball. The cave was nice, but nothing special and no ability to get off the tourist trail and really explore the cave. At the end, you get to sit and watch a SUPER CAMPY light show while “God Bless America” plays, ending with the American Flag being shown in lights on the side of the cave wall. Not at all the day of cave adventure I was hoping for. I had a great time otherwise in Missouri, and can recommend spending some time in St. Louis to check out the excellent blues clubs, so one day of a tourist kitsch doesn’t sound so bad.

Of course, some people might look at the experiences I had with altitude sickness on Mount Kilimanjaro or getting caught in the middle of a revolution in La Paz, Bolivia and think these should be disappointing experiences, but they are really unique experiences, taught me something important about myself and the place I was in, and make great stories at parties, and that’s why we all travel in the first place, right?

You’ve been to every continent, except for Australia and Antarctica. Planning a trip down under any time soon? Or do you have other travel plans on the horizon?

Australia and Antarctica are both on my list of places to see, along with about 10,000 other places, though. I’d love to go down to Australia, but given it’s size and the distance from Canada, I’d like to make sure that if I go, I go for at least a month or two so I can get some time to travel around and see at least part of it.

As for the horizon, other than some business trips in the coming weeks, most likely to see more of Detroit, the next big trip I have planned is to spend a couple weeks in Europe in August. I am going to do a week seeing London and Brussels solo, and then meeting up with some friends to see the Netherlands, before flying out of Frankfurt, Germany.

I think some of my friends and family are a bit shocked at the choice of destination, though. They are usually used to me announcing that I am going off backpacking in Central America or taking a train through Siberia, so they are suggesting that perhaps I’ve gone soft.

Some people idealise the idea of travelling for work. It can seem like a pretty cool life, getting paid to travel. As somebody who’s been doing it for 10 years, do you think that travelling for work is a satisfying way to travel? Or does the thrill of travel get old once you’re doing it as part of your job?

Travelling for work can be a satisfying way to travel, but it does require a different kind of effort than travelling for pleasure. When you travel for work, as you’ve implied, it’s easy to lose the thrill of travelling. When you are on the road, you are often expected to put in longer hours than you would at home, and so after a long day at the office, it’s sometimes hard to get yourself energized to go out and see the city sights, especially when a four-star hotel with air conditioning, cable TV, a soft bed and room service is the other option. If you can get yourself out of the hotel lobby and start wandering around, though, it is almost always worth it. It’s very easy to fall into the habit of seeing just airports, hotels and office buildings, and usually when I see co-workers who spend every night in the hotel, it’s a pretty safe bet that they are going to be looking for a new career pretty quickly.

Travelling for work does provide some benefits that you don’t get when travelling for pleasure. The best benefit is having someone pay for you to travel. Though, when someone else is footing the bill, you lose a lot of the ability to plan the itinerary. You go where you’re needed for work. That can be good, though, because I’ve gone some places for work that I never would have gone to otherwise. I can’t imagine that I would have travelled to Columbus, Ohio or Omaha, Nebraska if I was planning a trip on my own purely for pleasure, but I ended up quite enjoying both places.

Obviously, travelling for work implies that you have to do work when you arrive. That cuts into your sight-seeing time, but it does provide you an opportunity to get to know how people in a place live. I’ve been constantly amazed at the differences in the people who live in different regions in the USA and Canada, let alone what people overseas are like. Working with people from another region or country gives you an opportunity to get to meet people and learn what life is like for a citizen of the area. It’s kind of like getting to do a homestay program, though it’s really more of a “workstay.”

You commented in one blog entry about your doubts when you first started travelling for work, about 10 years ago. At the time, you didn’t really see yourself lasting 2 years – let alone 10. Now that you’ve been doing it for over a decade, could you imagine yourself in a job that didn’t require you to travel?

I have no idea any more. If you’d asked me 6 months ago, I would have said, “of course I can see myself settling down and not travelling for work any more.” Now I’m not so sure. Recently I’ve found myself getting an itch to travel to a new location after spending 4 months in a place.

I do think I could see myself quasi-settling, by moving to a place overseas and living there for a while. I think I could be happy having a job that didn’t require me to travel if I was living in some place I could explore. I really liked Paris, and one of the missions of my upcoming trip to London is see if I think I could live there. London would be good, because my grandparents were English, and therefore I can get an ancestry visa to legally work there relatively easily.

© Eric Daams for TravelBlogs, 2007. | Talking beer, business and travel with Greg Wesson | No comment |
Post categories: Interviews
Post tags: beer, business travel, Chile, Colorado, Denver, Punta Arenas, United States