Philosophy of a Wanderer

It's been more than a year since my last post. Since then I've graduated college, traveled to Europe, traveled around the U.S., attended an Artist Residency in Iowa, and got a job at a Starbucks in Needham, Mass. 

One of the many tram stops downtown Prague

Currently I'm sitting at my kitchen table in Prague, listening to BBC on the radio and nursing a coffee addiction. The new flat I've just moved in to boasts a half-sized dishwasher (a huge commodity in this city), and even a washing machine, though my clothes have to be hung out on a line on the balcony. It's not much, and is inconveniently far from Old Town, but I'm reminded of the greatness of Prague's public transportation every time I skip out my door to catch Bus 137 to the nearest metro, which will take me anywhere I wish to go. 

This part of the city is quiet and residential, and makes me forget I'm even in Prague. During my free time I reminisce about the people I've met and chatted with during my recent travels, most notably Freddy, the charismatic taxi driver from Rockford, Illinois. He picked me up from the Clock Tower Inn at 10pm, and though I was insanely tired and had been traveling for more than 24 hours, Freddy's bright, loud voice and friendly countenance woke me up. He wore a baseball cap, pullover, and blue jeans, a fairly typical getup for middle-aged Mid-Westerners. Freddy asked me about my travels as he drove me to my grandmother's home, and I told him about Prague and the beauty of the city. Curiously, he'd been to Prague, and was descended from a Russian and a Czech--he was fluent in Russian, though I didn't press him to show off his skills, due to my incapability to comprehend that round, dark language of my own heritage. 

I told him about what I studied at college. He found my interest in writing and music fascinating, and we fell into a discussion about eReaders; both of us understands the need for them, and the convenience of them in today's fast-paced, travel-oriented world, but we both agreed that the connection between a person and a physical book with paper pages was an almost spiritual necessity and cannot be replicated by electronic screens. With the dawn of social media and Skype, the frequency of physical immediacy and presence has fallen, in my experience, and to be enlivened by physical closeness to raw materials and real human beings is something we should not take for granted.

Freddy dropped me off and dragged my 50 pound luggage inside. He gave me his card and thanked me for such engaging conversation. A week later, he drove me back to the bus stop, and we continued our conversation, this time talking about the state of popular music and the true greatness of classical composers.

Later, in a roomy, homey Starbucks in Newton, Massachusetts, I sat at a large table with my laptop, trying to write sleek, boastful e-mails to local publishing firms in hopes of snatching up my dream job as an editorial assistant. I wasn't alone for long; a man with a brief case and a disheveled appearance sat down at the corner, and immediately began emptying the contents of the case onto the table top. Papers and sticky-notes, folders and pens, all covered at least one quarter of the table and inched innocuously toward my spot in the other corner. After attaining a coffee, he messed with his phone and sang along to the overhead music, much more loudly than just any ordinary person would dare to sing in a Starbucks.

Soon another older man sat at the table at the chair across from me, and set up his own laptop. The tops of our computers were touching because of the limited width of the table, and the briefcase man made a humorous comment--that was the spark of conversation, and the three of us at the table began talking. Bill was a businessman dealing in sports equipment, and the man across from me was Sam, a Jewish lawyer. 

It was as if we'd all known each other for years, the way we listened and spoke interchangeably. Both men were strong democrats, and when I voiced my concern about the "issue" of women's rights being debated politically, Bill announced with surprising conviction that women should rule the world, because men had had their chance and had simply screwed everything up. As a 3rd Wave Feminist, I felt a burst of satisfaction at this comment, but I had to tell him that the ultimate goal should be absolute social, political, economic, and private equality. He agreed. 

The conversation moved through politics (skimming, to my excitement, the Cuban Revolution, my newest obsession), and lingered on the issue of public transportation in the States. I told them about Prague's trams, subway, and buses, and how having a car was considered an annoyance and, for most people, an impossibility (with gas prices soaring to 9 USD per gallon, it's not hard to understand why). Americans, we all agreed, have a unique relationship with their cars and their travel independence, and living in such a large country has certainly aided that relationship. Americans get panicked without a car, and yearn for the freedom of owning one so that they can go where they want whenever they want without fuss. To some Americans, having to buy a bus ticket, get to a bus station, sit and wait as it stops every five minutes, is a nightmare. I used to think that way, but living in Prague has changed my idea of transportation, and fewer cars on the road help to alleviate and slow global warming from carbon emissions. 

I asserted my opinion on trains in America, and how our locomotive industry has fallen behind the rest of the world's, especially that of Japan, a country that has utilized the latest technology, magnets. America, I told the men, could create thousands of new jobs with a complete revamping of the locomotive industry, and create a more efficient, planet-friendly way for the everyday American to travel the country. Right now our trains eat up fuel like starving grizzly bears, and are mostly utilized for the transportation of material goods. Train tickets would be much cheaper than plane tickets, and would provide an economic jumpstart in that it would provide jobs in security, management, advertising, building, ticketing, planning, engineering, and many more. Bill said it was a good idea, but the issue was still Americans' attachment to their cars and their strange cultural unwillingness to even carpool on any given day. Families like their minivans and like toting around their stuff in a machine they can call their own. In this case, they don’t like to share.

Among others, I met a young American Airlines flight attendant who was worried about losing her job due to the bankruptcy crisis, and talked with me about how she doesn't get paid until the plane is in the air--at the time we'd been sitting on the tarmac for an hour waiting for morning fog to lift; a young woman and her Chihuahua, T.J., who was dressed stylishly in the clothes from her Build-A-Bear teddy bear; a young soldier who was flying home for the first time in eight months, who told me how so many boys and girls think going to war will be like playing their favorite video game, but once you're there and see the reality of human injury, hatred, not knowing whether your next footfall will set off a mine, you realize how serious it really is, and how much the citizens of Iraq just wanted their soil back. 

Fellow world travelers touching the gold on a Charles Bridge statue,
which is said to bring good luck

I've discovered how traveling and talking with people from all areas and all walks of life really enhances one's understanding of one's place in the world. Without even thinking about it, we go through our day passing by dozens of strangers, never speaking to them or even making eye contact. But when you take the time to start a conversation, or even just smile, you see how open people are and how willing they are to know you and your story. In our large, wide country, we Americans tend to forget how similar people are in each region, and we allow our presumptions and generalizations about people to make us feel separated from the rest of the country and the rest of the world. It's our way of cocooning ourselves and focusing on individual concerns, which makes us selfish and self-absorbed--if we could just interact with different people without putting up walls, we could find out how collective our hopes and dreams really are. And during this turbid time in our history, with the elections coming up and with political and religious polarization, this realization of the collective human experience is truly an essential step toward peace and lifelong contentment. 

My last piece of advice: Do a little wandering, and carry no expectations with you. Just an open mind and heart.