(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
"To travel is to live" – a mouth we can all sign. My generation's meeting with Europe through the cheap and smart interrail concept, where you could travel freely and frankly down through Europe all year for an almost insignificant amount – what you got again. It was a liberation. I mean to remember that the ticket had a duration of up to a month's travel time with unlimited access to all available state railways in the European network. Even I preferred to travel in March, where there was less crowding from the growing army of backpackers. March alerted us in Portugal and Greece, and was a time when it was possible to take trains without overcrowded wagons and spend the night traveling to save on hotel expenses. One then had a sleeping bag. To leave the train car after the Copenhagen-Paris route with a backpack and good shoes on Gare du Nord: You were greeted by a steamy Galoise, sweet perfume, spicy scents from the restaurants, the language's cacophony and visual impressions that were like gasoline in the brain, and then they moved to move erratically and enthusiastically into a new set of movement patterns in the narrow streets to become part of a large organism – to disappear. The next stop could be Trieste after reading Samuel Beckett's Watt in Gyldendal's pock edition, and then wandered wide-eyed along the boardwalk in the spring sun, the brain crisp in solitude, in the joy of loneliness, and the restlessness – and all that was open to opportunity. The night train through the former East Germany to take Berlin. Sudden stop in the darkest nothing at the border, a dark no-man's land of watchtowers, soldiers, weapons and with blows from iron rods slammed under the train carriages to check any people on the run, and manly women with rolled-up socks and filly-gray uniforms, shepherd dogs with heads big bulls that had to be held tight in the leather straps by young, serious soldiers, meticulous passport surveillance to allow American border guards nowadays, erratic and unpredictable, with ice-cold eyes, without moving a single muscle in the plastic-like face, half in shadow under the uniform loop.
To travel is to move, to be moving, to be mindful.
To travel is to live. To live travelers, alone, for no other purpose than to be true to their fascinations. ("Be true to your fascination," as Jørgen Leth impressed students at the Danish Film School from 1983-87.) To travel is to live.
But checking in at Gardermoen as a cattle, unloaded in zigzag between steel fences to be stamped and cleared for departure, is something else? Being discharged for control – being examined and visited, pupil examination at check-in, facial photo at check-in, fingerprints in some places – are the to live? Yes. To travel is to live. And when you arrive at your destination, today Bangkok, tomorrow Surha Thani south of Thailand, you immediately become aware of your role as a tourist. The uniform is slippers, shorts for the knees, t-shirt, caps, a shoulder bag. And the eyes. The eyes of the tourists, from whom you obviously distance yourself. One does not want to be a tourist. It is the others who are tourists in the age of mass tourism. It is the others who stand out, who are loud-voiced and unequivocal and mix in flock and follow, insecure, scared, suspicious. Of course, you are experienced as a few, and understand the culture's codes and social structures, and of course follow them neatly and neatly to enter unnoticed in the street scene, in the cafe and wherever you go, to be so far away from the mainstream route and the tourist traps as possible. Oh yeah, you imagine being so different, so unique. To travel is to live. And it is strenuous to live, it is hard to think, and it is almost impossible not to feel like a stranger. It is important to have a clear look, be polite to the residents, be attentive and open, sleep well, eat regularly, preferably from a mini kitchen on a corner, pay attention to hygiene, do not overdo it with alcohol or drugs, do not litter with money. To travel is to live. Eye contact tourists in between is a study in itself – it's like nobody wants contact, nobody wants to get involved in other fucking tourists, like everyone wants to rise above a recognition, or be identified as Norwegian, Scandinavian or German, for that matter fault.
Eye contact tourists in between is a study in itself – it's as if no one wants contact, no one wants to get involved in other fucking tourists.
No, you are not a tourist, one is a fellow human being. Yes, one is wealthy, rich, superficial and is only visiting in reality. One can retreat into a ghetto of luxury. Everyday life, which you try to enter into by staying somewhere long – in a back alley, on a lousy coffee, addressed to and visible to a few people – that everyday life you will probably never fully understand. One is a viewer, an observer. An observer of poverty, of living, of other people's commonalities, which you find partly exotic, partly incomprehensible, funny, tragic, tragicomic. To travel is to live. One-word answers to poor English answers. You just want to be one like everyone else. One stretches the limits of patience by listening to the monologue of an elderly gentleman from Houston. It is understood that he has so many easily readable contradictory motifs, and that his noia for the culture in which he is a guest goes deeper than at first impression. They are working together not to draw a parallel to American culture and the patroism we see developing during a new and unpredictable presidential term. To travel is to live, you say, with a smile. To travel is to live, while happily lying in a sleeping couch in the night express through the warm night. To travel is to live while listening to the sirens in the dark and hearing weak waves against a beach. To travel is to move, to be moving, to be mindful. To travel is to be able to forget oneself and one's habits. To travel is to live. To travel is to be human among people. To travel is to tolerate and take over the incomprehensible, the contradictory, and the scary. To travel is to live, to become, every day anew.
