Being Here now – theo

I haven’t been travelling as lightly as I’d like.  Our rucksacks seem pretty sorted, and I’m proud of us for that, but I’ve still been bringing a load of expectations and assumptions with me over each border we’ve crossed, and I hope I’m beginning to shed some of that as we get deeper into this journey.

It’s not that I need to jettison everything I’ve learned about people and history and places, but I do need to be fluid enough to discover everything I don’t know already, and everything I’ve been mistaken or even deliberately misled about.

Another obvious thing I need to keep remembering is that I can’t tell that much about people and their culture on the basis of a few short stops we make while passing through.  If you landed among Geordies in Newcastle on a Saturday night you still wouldn’t know very much about people in Chesham or Truro.  What you could say about “England” in general would be pretty limited. So even though I want to record some of my impressions, I know these could be completely at odds with those of other travellers, and coloured by the baggage I’m bringing with me.

I thought I’d feel unsafe in Romania – we found it not only safe but pleasantly egalitarian;   I thought I’d feel overwhelmed and hassled in Turkey – we found it quite relaxed and respectful;  I thought I’d feel chilled in Georgia – I found it a bit manic and tense.   By contrast with Turkey – a more conservative culture than our own, where we were guarded about our own behaviour – in Georgia we became guarded about the behaviour of others,and we were wise to do so.

Of course, all cities are to some extent places of intensity and alienation, but it’s fair to say that, contrasting Istanbul or Konya with Batumi  or Tiblisi, Turkey felt like a world that knew where it was and was proud of where it came from, and Georgia felt like it was desperately striving to be somewhere else. Not only that, but it was divided about whether that somewhere else was Europe or Russia or just some personal fantasy version of an unobtainable American Dream.  Which is a shame, when Georgia has such uniquely beautiful cuisine and music and language and nature of its own.

It’s given me a more detached view of the Britain we’ve left to notice that, pretty much everywhere, there are local class divides, identity politics and big polarising issues which we as passing travellers can only guess at from graffiti in the backstreets or the attitude of government officials or the range of rich and poor.  But I’m discovering also that what I think I know about those things from reading online reports and opinions in England may not always be that useful, and certainly can’t give the whole picture of regular people rubbing along together and  going about their everyday human lives.

Better for a traveller to remain, as our good friend Mike advised us, in the Here and Now.