Feb 20 2012
Local Marketplaces, Neighborhood Water Holes, OutSide Gathering Spots, Community Events And Local Accommodations Are Among Ways To Escape The Brand-Blitzed Landscapes That Globalization Has Made.
Last week we, well I anyhow, bemoaned the rampant globalization which has spread chain stores and brand names and destroyed much of what is special in the world. This week, as promised, we are here to reassure you : All that is special has not been lost. You can still find it, those unique sides of a place that imbue it with its own special personality.
Over the years, as globalization has squeezed out the mom-and-pop stores, the rough-hewn and the aspects of a culture that lead to that uncomfortable shock, travelers have evolved. They have identified what are now reasonably good tactics of finding the real folk, the commonplace life, and the heart of a place and its folks. Actually there is a whole movement, “slow travel,” concentrated on doing exactly that.
Web sites on slow travel
Slow travel is “in” nowadays, so look fastidiously at the source of the information (“About Us”) and the details of what they’re calling “slow” (A 14 day bike tour through three states? Nah.) Here are a couple of the well-established sites that will inspire you to get up and go slow :
Slowtrav.com : Focus is on finding holiday rentals ; the Firm has spun off numerous themed sites for message boards and pictures, a popular forum (slowtalk.com) and some destination-specific sites, as an example: slowtrav.com/Switzerland.
Slowtraveltours.com: A bunch of independent, small travel companies offering group tours they lead themselves. Most tours are based in one place.
Slowmovement.com: Australia-based site and slant, but has pleasant features on slow travel, slow towns, slow food and so on.
Theworldinstituteofslowness.com: Established in 1999, the institute is now a self-described “think tank for the slow revolution.”
Slow books: The Globe Pequot Press distributes some of the new manuals on slow travel, including “Eat Slow Britain”, “Go Slow France”, and “Slow Cornwall & the Isles of Scilly.” Information is on their website: globepequot.com.
Local markets, neighborhood watering holes, outdoor gathering spots, community events and local accommodations are among methods to escape the brand-blitzed landscapes that globalization has created. Incorporating such experiences and encounters on your trip likely will present new challenges and get you out of your zone of comfort at least initially. But they might also result in your most enduring travel memories. Not to mention a greater appreciation of how continually entrancing life is on this planet.
Here are ways to go about finding special experiences, wherever you are:
Go Off-season
When the visiting hordes have subsided, there’s no-one home but the neighbors. Some places close up, but what remains open for business will be quite enough. I am a huge fan of the Jersey Shore in winter ; some towns are far more year-long than others, as an example : Cape May, Spring Lake, Red Bank. The sand will not be bath temp, but it may twinkle with frost in the morning ; you will still find great restaurants, pretty inns, better rates and time to chat to the neighbors and visit unexplored parks, studios, shops. Another off-season favourite is Yellowstone National Park. The 30-below readings may scare off the masses, but that just means you will get the complete attention and awareness of the park rangers and winter lodge staff as well as a graphic, even abdominal, notion of the competition for survival in natural habitats ; nature everywhere is at its savage, pretty best.
Take Public Transportation
Yes, it can be confusing even in your hometown, you may not have the swing of it. But abroad, trains, buses, shuttles are all a part of life. I have rubbed elbows well, elbow-to-feathers with a colorful array of passengers (including stock) on an Ecuadorean train in the Andes and shared a curry meal with a local family on a long train trip through India.
Stay Local
Flat rentals are crazy-popular, partly because they’re less expensive and gave you more space / comforts than a hotel room. But boarders quickly realized they provided another entry to the local way of life. Leave your key in the lock inadvertently, you can meet and start to know your neighbor (say you have lost your pussy-cat, you’ll make fast friends with an entire neighborhood, la “Amelie”). You will be among locals instead of other travelers (though given the popularity of rentals, you might find your neighbor is a local would-be as well).
Other sorts of local stays include leasing a room in a house airbnb.com, a relatively new company, offers both whole-place rentals and a room in somebody’s home, with the host (hopefully) becoming a kind of insider guide-cum-mentor for a local experience. Home stays are also an option. My first trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, in the early ’90s included a stay with a Russian family and without them, I’d possibly have done something unbelievably goofy and wound up in some KGB-esque netherworld.
Agriturismo is another growing lodging option. Farmers and others whose lives are attached to agriculture have begun opening their homes and offering accommodations to travelers partly because they require the bucks, but most will not treat you like an ATM. You can simply stay over and eat what will doubtless be a killer delicious meal or 2, but you can also find out about or maybe pitch in with their work. In rural Umbria, we paid a visit to a family that had been tending an enormous sweep of olive trees for four generations. I ate the most notable growth of tapenades of my life, got a new appreciation of the entire olive oil making process, and also gained a few pounds in the act. Eventually I lost the weight, but I carry the memory of the sinking sun heating up the peach walls of the villa to this day.
One travel writer has spent his entire career traveling and meeting folks this way. I am not that gregarious, but I have managed to yammer my way to invites without purposely doing that. Solo travelers have a better shot at this option, I suppose, though safety is also more of an issue if you are alone (a camera with a very large telephoto lens is always my first defensive zone). After a Bedouin cab driver in Egypt started talking about his traditional bread-baking oven, I posed questions till he took me to his place a little place with a dirt floor, chickens running through the rooms, a cheery, friendly toddler and a sweet other half offering me some of their bread. Later on my Egypt trip, when I was encircled by kids appealing for money, a person came out and shooed the youngsters away, invited me in, and he and his wife sat down with me in their living room and talked about the impact of tourism on culture. “You give them money, they think of you as dollar bill with legs,” said the person, a schoolteacher. I can never forget the couple, standing with their baby in the wife’s arms, as I left their place, resolved not to make a contribution to the ruination of any more cultures.
People-to-people Programs
My first was in the Bahamas, during a cruise. It might have been a vague three-hour stop in the port of Nassau. As an alternative I hooked up with an area woman who’d volunteered for the town’s P-to-P program, which was new at the time (15 to 20 years ago). I joined her as she stopped at an elementary school to pick up her girl, to a neighbor’s for coffee, to her mom’s local dress shop chatting and studying about her life all on the way. Such programs have caught on everywhere. Check with the destination’s tourism office to work out if there is one.
Attend a Local Performance
Sure, you wish to see the Kirov Ballet if they’re performing at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. But think outside of the high-ticket-price shows. I was staying with a local family in that pretty Russian city and they suggested a concert by a local orchestra from one of the city’s number of fine music and humanities schools. It was in a theater with wooden chairs and great acoustics, and the performance was dazzling particularly because the young musicians were so balanced, eager, brilliantly gifted. Thereafter, kids coming out to welcome their acquaintances and family, smack kisses and proud words OK, I couldn’t translate, but I knew were as noteworthy as the music. And a reminder that while we’ve got our differences, some human behavior is universal.
Volunteer
There are loads of volunteer opportunities to work with local people teaching English to adults or kids, working the land with local farmers, building homes, or reconstructing them after a disaster as I did in the trail of Katrina in New Orleans. Often, I volunteer for programs that concentrate on helping animals. But they always bring me new comprehension of the local people, too. In Namibia, the two-week PAWS big pussy-cat restoration project was positively attached to the local community ; without learning their philosophy and conventions, anything we did would be opposed, ineffectual or fully futile. So when we went to rescue a leopard that had been encircled on a farmer’s property, we were able to speak with him a person who in the past might have just shot the animal because it was a threat to his cows and sheep. Our connection, on his land, chatting for a few hours, provided an epiphany for me, and I came away with an understanding that wouldn’t have been possible were I to stay in my ivory tower of environmental idealism.
Local Markets
In towns and rustic areas worldwide , the custom of the local marketplace has somehow endured. In agricultural parts of many European states, markets have naturally evolved a productive schedule that may keep family fridges and cabinets stocked weekly. A good concierge or manual can provide you with the days and places to be to partake of the colorful, regularly loud and completely down-home scenes. The overview of Dubrovnik, Croatia, I was treated to from a walk along the old city walls was sublime, but at floor level, the Sat. market in the square, with its bright, lined-up produce and shuffling aged men and hind-leg-walking dogs and outgoing sellers touting samples and calling “Try it!” in Croatian and English was what I recollect best.
Specialty markets, particularly those with artisans and artists, are also full of local flavor. They are especially bounteous around holidays. While you can encounter the odd slick, humorless entrepreneurs, for the main part these local craftspeople are earnest and passionate about their work, and love to talk with passersby. In the yearly Shrimp & Petroleum Holiday on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, a major attraction is the massive tented area with folks selling their home-made and customarily regionally flavoured creations. I can never forget the beautifully balanced young mom behind the counter with her teen girl, all their hand-crafted jewellery spread out before them ; a peculiar reversal of roles, with the studded-nose girl surprisingly professional and the ethereal mom simply needing to talk about her girl, the economy and how I liked this bit of Louisiana.
Do not forget the supermarkets. Holiday makers don’t spend a little time getting a shop cart and hunting for lettuce and dishwashing liquids. But if you’re searching for daily life, get thee to a corner store! In Paris, just figuring out how to extricate the cart from its neighbours is fun (requires an EU Buck coin deposited in a slot that permits you to turn a key unlocking a chain you get the coin back when the store gets the cart back). What’s on the shelving (no-one beats our cereal aisles), how the locals buy (small quantities, and yes, the 4-euro bottle of wine flies off French shelves), the chats, the packaging, the packed fast food, are all areas of local understanding. And naturally, having the ability to bring my dog into the Monoprix food store (he sat nicely in the cart) was something you’d do only in Paris!
Pedal or Bipedal Power
Wanna stop and smell the roses and start up a conversation, read a makeshift poster, pet a dog and speak to its hiker, drop in someplace unplanned but that strikes your curiosity? Ride a bike (more towns have public cycle rental systems) or walk!
I’ve employed all of the methods above at one time or another. Little do I’m sure that they’ve been wrapped up and now outline a new movement : slow travel.
Slow travel is an offshoot of the “slow food” movement that commenced in Italy in the 1980s as a protest against the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome ; the idea was to instead preserve regional cuisine, local farming, communal meals and standard food preparation methods. Today, the idea has spread into a movement, a means of living that emphasises connection food, first, and in the case of travel, also to local races and cultures.
Instead of making an attempt to squeeze as many sights or towns as practicable into each trip, the slow traveler takes the time to explore each destination comprehensively and to experience the local culture. As founder Pauline Kenny puts it on her website SlowTrav.com, “Slow Travelers say that they don’t have to see everything on one trip, that there will be other trips.” The key is slowing down and making the most of each moment of your holiday. You’ll stay in one place long enough to recognise your neighbours, shop in the local markets and pick a favorite coffeehouse.
All of the above strategies are part of the movement, from finding a place to settle in for a week, to using local transit or biking, or your feet to find a way around and meet the neighbors, do the shopping, enjoy the common-or-garden and the night hobbies, cook the local techniques and so on. And find points of interest from their point of view.
It isn’t necessarily straightforward : If you are shy (like me), it will take beating some fears to get out the door and get chatting. There could be language barriers to beat, as well as currency conversions, size and weight conversions, getting lost, getting knackered, and we are, after all US people being annoyed by all this slowness, writes tagza.com.
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