Toli makes some obvious points about vacations.
One of the lessons Christine and I learned during our trip to Europe is the difference between vacationing and touring. Vacationing means simply removing the concerns of the daily everyday routine from our lives for a short period of time: no litterboxes to clean, no cooking, etc. Touring means exploring a new place. So far so good.
Usually, vacation and touring go together: you go away from home to vacation, in order to remove yourself from daily routine. And once you find yourself in a new place, you can either bore yourself to tears or explore, which means touring. Again, so far so good.
The not-so-obvious point is that touring is a heck of a lot of work! At least with a job or daily routine, you get accustomed to a task, and you get weekends. As a tourist, you are constantly on the go and seeking the unfamiliar, and weekends don't exist. So it's pretty exhausting.
Which is why we ended up realizing that
(a) We are glad to be doing all this traveling while we are young and without kids: if I am a grouchy old man now, just imagine how grumpy and impatient I'll be about everything (from smoke in restaurants to signs in France) when I'm old!
(b) We were planning to do way too much in this trip... and so we skipped Switzerland and Poland.
(c) We need to be vegetables and bored to tears for a short time in order to relax. Sure there is a sense of 'wasting time' (thinking along the lines of 'we only have one week in Vienna and we want to see so much, we should not waste time resting or sleeping'). But for a six-week long trip, resting is plainly necessary so we'd better stop fighting the basic laws of physics (can't expend more energy than you get) and lie down.
(d) Physical rest is half the story... sleeping in late or going to the baths in Budapest. For me, I also need some mental rest. I need to see some sky and some nature to warm the soul: read my earlier entry on cities, and you can tell that going from one city to the next still can't fill the void left behind by seeing deer (or even our own cats) every morning... funny how for granted I had taken the sense of inner peace this daily experience provided. And for Christine, there is a regular phonecall to family, email to friends, and so forth.
(e) Once Christine and I put (a)-(d) together and formed our traveling rules, we needed to apply them. Well, this was easy as long as it was just the two of us. But add the many wonderful people we saw during this trip, and you can tell that the overall balance was harder to achieve. Of course, the challenge to balance everything was truly worth the trouble as we thoroughly enjoyed the company and hospitality of every friend we visited. For example, my parents (despite their age) have so much energy that you if you could put them in a hamster wheel and harness the energy they expended while touring Vienna with us, you could provide electric power for Vienna for quite some time. It was wonderful hearing their perspective during our walks, sharing an Opera performance or many a fine dinner with them. Yet we were absolutely exhausted when they left... and had to recharge in Budepest! Similarly, when my friend Myrto came to Prague, she was also an Energizer bunny... in fact, having arrived a day earlier, she had walked through all of Prague by herself, and over the next three days, she showed us everything she had seen. Yes, it took us three days to cover the ground she covered on her own during one day; and not only that, she had to feed us good Greek food she made, as well as 8 pounds of vissino (my favorite Greek sweet) she made in Greece and hawled over, just to keep us going!
Lesson learned... first off, we'd better leave time to relax; and second, we have to warn whoever friend joins us that we are old foggies who have to take things slow.
When I was a young boy, I used to walk 5 miles to school every day... Well, I'm no longer a young boy. And I'm glad I don't have to get up at 8am to go to prison... um, school... any more.
Posted by Toli at January 25, 2004 02:34 PM