The Blue Mosque
Travel, the Unnecessary Necessity by Matt Krause
When we travel, we often want the places we visit to act like the places we imagine them to be, rather than the places they actually are.
Recently a friend of mine was planning a trip to Istanbul and asked me what he should see while he was there. Of course, I recommended he go to the Aya Sofya, and the Blue Mosque, and the Grand Bazaar. Those are Istanbul's headliner sights, and no self-respecting tourist can go to Istanbul without seeing them. If people back home found out he hadn't seen those places, his street cred as a traveler would be shot.
My friend went to those places, took a million photos, and couldn't stop raving about them. Then he asked me what he should do next. I asked him if he would be in Istanbul on a Saturday night. He said yes. I told him that he should walk Istiklal Caddesi (Independence Street).
Istanbul's Kapali Carsi (covered market)
A few days later he reported back to me. He had loved Istiklal. There are few places in the world with as dense a flow of humanity as Istiklal on a Saturday night. The street overflows with energy and excitement. Even a homebody like me can't help but get caught up in the electricity buzzing through the crowd on Istiklal.
But in the middle of his rave about Istiklal, my friend paused. I asked him what was up. He mentioned the multiple Starbucks stores, and the McDonald's, and the Burger King. He said he could get that anywhere, that he didn't need to travel around the world to see a Starbucks. “I want something authentic,” he said, “give me something authentic.”
When we travel, the reality of what we actually see rarely matches what we thought we were going to see before we got there. That is the whole point of travel. If we just want to see the world as we think it exists, the TVs in our living rooms will help us do that just fine.
When we go to a restaurant in Istanbul, Paris, Shanghai, or Santiago, we often want to our food to be “traditional”. For some reason, we think traditional is more authentic than the reality in front of us. When our waiter is wearing Levi's jeans and Nike shoes, we think our experience is less “authentic” than if he were wearing a fake costume clumsily approximating how people dressed hundreds of years ago, and certainly not how he dressed before, or will dress after, his shift. We are asking that waiter to be something he is not, so that we can have an experience we deem authentic.
The Aya Sofia
I know that when we travel we want to see what we can't see at home. But as much as we want to travel to see the differences in the world, I think the real benefit of travel is seeing the similarities.If we wanted to see the differences in the world, we could just turn on the TV or open a newspaper. Both specialize in telling us stories about things that do not occupy our daily lives ; war, revolution, murder, scandal. They feed our fascination with things that are different, even when those differences make up a tiny portion of the human experience.
Our fascination with difference is embedded deep into our genes. We would not be humans without it.
The beauty of travel is not that it feeds that fascination, but that it feeds its opposite. Travel reminds us that 95% of the human activity on this planet is boring and already familiar to us. Travel reminds us that people all over the world like to order a beverage and gossip with their friends, that people all over the world wish they could find a good parking space, even when it's not for a car. Travel reminds us that people all over the world are primarily occupied with putting roofs over their heads and food into their mouths. The material differences we see when we travel might be great, but they don't matter nearly as much as the emotions that drive us, and those are pretty much the same. I suppose it's not necessary to travel the world to find that out, but sometimes the noise at home is so loud travel is the only way to get away from it long enough to remember that.
