The benefits of international travel from the perspective of someone who abhors traveling.

In this excerpt from an email to my closest friend, who was preparing to leave on an international' trip with his wife and daughter, I temporarily go nuts and over-examine the upsides of traveling given the obvious downside which is having to leave my own bed and home.

Because P was a fiercely dedicated traveller, I’ve spent considerable time traveling the world. Back then, we’d have a great compromise: I’d take her on the trip of her choice three times a year. In return, I had authorization in our couple’s pact to insist on a very comfortable hotel room wherein I could read and nap during the day if I so chose. . .and I so chose 95% of the time. I may be a buzzkill but Prague, Shanghai, Cairo, Paris, Tokyo, Vienna, Athens, Istanbul, Hanoi, Delhi, Lima, (fill in many blanks) all have one simple thing in common: they are all at least slightly or often much more than slightly worse and uncomfortable than my bed and home. 

But I travelled nevertheless to appease my girlfriend/fiancee/wife.  I mean: it’s wasn’t painful. It’s just not comfortable to me to sit in airports, airplanes, taxis. . .contend with time differences, showers that suck, and pull clothes out of suitcases.  

With the fact that I abhor traveling being a given, here are some positives about travel from my jaundiced and somewhat warped perspective:

 1) something about being in a bustling metropolis in which no one every peripherally knows or particularly cares about your life situation/story is exhilarating. My favorite things to do when traveling are always on weekdays. I like to walk by or into office buildings, take the elevator (which is invariably slightly worse than an American elevator) and lurk a bit in and around business offices, whether they be insurance companies or the headquarters of some Widget concern with factories out in the countryside, or whatever. Here I can see people with meanings-stories-worries-problems-triumphs that have nothing whatsoever to do with “Sanjay”.  In LA, walking into such offices doesn’t cut it because, well, besides sharing a time zone and an urban culture, I am almost by definition in their customer base or related to their customer base.  An insurance company selling life insurance to local businessmen Berlin doesn’t give one single fuck about “Sanjay Sahgal”. . .so it’s kind of like visiting the past or the future. I mean: if I somehow overcame the racial barriers and visited Los Angeles in 1935, not one person would have a clue or give a shit about “Sanjay’s” daily worries and inner torment or goals or whatever.  So I like being anonymous. It creates a perspective shift and my life situation at home becomes simultaneously trivial and extremely relevant to “Sanjay”;

2) P and I (and when we had our baby son, he joined as well) were placed in a situation of unique solidarity. When no one knows you or cares much about you, your wife and child become even more clearly valuable. You draw closer together. Sharing meals every singled day. Spending more time with one another daily than usual. Even with my agreement with P, we’d have breakfast and always dinner together in some restaurant and, on occasion, like when I wanted to see Auschwitz or the Eiffel Tower or Freud’s study, we’d be doing it together. So you spend quality time with your family;

3) As much as I am comfortable in my home, traveling forces you to take a break from the oppressive consumerist barrage of advertisement and manipulation that is just background noise to us in LA.  I find that, in any city that doesn’t have English as it’s first language, that oppressive barrage is usually still in full throttle mode but, because I don’t understand the language or urban memes, the advertisements and consumerist manipulations breeze right by me. Do not underestimate the tremendous relief to one’s nerves and disposition this causes. To use a bad analogy, it’s proven by contradiction (or something like that—proof by contrast?).  You may feel a sense of relaxation and ease and attribute it, in part correctly, to being on a vacation with the two people most dear to you in this world. Nevertheless, a non-trivial piece of that relaxation and ease is due to NOT BEING CONTINUOUSLY BOMBARDED WITH CONSUMERIST ADVERTISING AND MANIPULATION.  The commercials, the billboards, the advertisements on buses——they all seem incredibly over-the-top and silly.  A man beaming while his girlfriend glows in the shine of the new watch he has purchased for her underneath the billboard is written something in German or whatever. It creates a disconnect of the well oiled advertisement apparatus.  The precisely effective manipulation was not designed for YOU, for American “Sean”.  I urge you to watch a Czech television commercial. It’s like watching an insane circus of loud and gaudy nonsense just to sell what appears to be juice boxes. It’s relaxing and kind of funny. Of course, the same exact type of commercials or billboards abound in LA but their insanity is opaque to us because teams of people who, in aggregate, are no match for our individual brains, have targeted YOU.  Being in a different country frees you of this.  The way to know this is the case is to return home. Whenever I return home, I feels this sort of opposite adjustment for a few days, as if LA is intruding on my mind and getting into my head and business. Soon, mercifully, one acclimates to being manipulated by well-designed and targeted corporate manipulation memes and life in LA seems “normal” again..

THE REST OF THIS EMAIL HAS BEEN DELETED TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT