By Pat Savage (2007-2008 Amherst-Doshisha Fellow)
My trip basically had two very different parts: for the first week I was in Shanghai with my friend Ding (a former member of my a cappella group at Amherst College who graduated in 2006) and Nanjing with my friends Joe and Kris from New Zealand, Joe’s wife Yuran and her parents. For the second week I traveled on my own detouring inland to Xi’an and then up to Beijing. They were both really great and I’m really glad I had the chance to challenge myself to travel completely on my own, while also getting to visit friends and see how much more rewarding it is traveling with locals and not just doing all the generic tourist things.
The cheapness of everything here would become one of the major lessons of my trip, as I got my first chance visiting a developing country and also got to experience for the first time what it’s like to have way more money than the local people and be able to afford to throw it around. I also learned how such a system infallibly means that the locals will harass you endlessly for the money that they know they can get from you and people who look like you, and realized how easy it is to get fed up with it and resent the harassment, and how easy it could be to form racist attitudes like my Noh teacher, who warned me about the “sneaky/crafty” Chinese. In a way, she was right, because they did act really craftily towards me, but it’s an obvious result of the economic inequality between the relatively poor locals and the relatively rich foreign tourists.
I think it was here I achieved the best perspective on my trip, as can be seen in my enigmatic expression. I think this trip was just what I needed, a great success, despite being a failure in many ways. Or rather, it was a success BECAUSE it was a failure in many ways, because I think you can learn the most from failures, and I wanted to go on this trip to learn, to be challenged, and to put myself outside of my comfort zone, all of which I definitely did.
First off, you can see from my scruffy beard and messy hair that I haven’t shaved throughout the whole trip, and only got to shower a few times, mostly at the beginning. Although you can’t smell the photo, you can rest assured that this is a good thing. I smelled awful. I also had no cell phone for the whole trip, minimal internet access, didn’t speak a word of Chinese when I arrived and was using an old guide book left in my possession from a previous Amherst-Doshisha Fellow 5 or 6 years back, and was trying to use this to navigate around, among other places, the most rapidly changing city (Beijing, in its pre-Olympic frenzy) in the most rapidly changing country in the world. But I made it through all of that with only a few problems, and I’m very glad I got the chance to do that, if only to prove to myself that I can do that in this age where we’re constantly connected to up-to-date information and can’t go a few hours without checking our email or cell phones or Wikipedia or Facebook. That being said, it was so nice to come back and have all those things again!
Basically, that was the best thing about my trip: I proved a point to myself and got it out of my system. I’d been thinking a lot lately about how I wanted to go traveling around the world and have all these crazy adventures and meet locals and see wonderful sights, but now that I’ve tried it a little I realize some of my ideas were unrealistic or just not as grand as I’d thought. Most of all, I realize that it’s all well and good to visit foreign countries, but if I don’t speak the language and/or have friends or connections living there to show me around, I’m never going to actually get to engage with the people living there and have a meaningful interactive experience beyond the shallow, typical tourist experience of going to the famous sights and checking them off on my list of “places to casually mention in conversations to impress others with my worldliness and life of leisure”.
For the first part of the trip I did get a little taste of the local life and culture, but without the language I still felt removed from the reality of the city. For the second part I got a taste of the life of the many travelers who travel all over the world and yet remain an outsider in the places they visit, creating community only with the other travelers or just being alone. Although there’s a certain charm to that, that’s not what I want to get out of these kinds of trips. So, in the future, I want to try to travel as much as possible to places where I have friends and absolutely make at least a half-decent effort to learn some basics of the language before I go.
All in all, though, it was a wonderful experience and I hope to use what I learned from this trip to broaden my perspective on the world and its people, and to plan how to make the most out of my future travels to new and exciting places.
*The articles were reproduced by the “Doshisha University Staff English Club News “Topics” No5. (dated on May 31, 2008)