Dirtbag Traveler – A travel blog for how the other half lives

Visiting Toledo, Spain

On May 26, 2020

Visit Toledo in one day

This ain’t the Toledo in Ohio…

Working on a travel blog in times of global pandemic, travel bans and quarantines is the kind of thing that can prompt calls for a mental health wellness check, but here we are.

I mean, it wouldn’t be the first time, so do your worst.

But for those of us who are stricken by the mental illness we call wanderlust, just because we’re not traveling at the moment doesn’t mean we’re not thinking about going places.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

Who among us hasn’t thought about being elsewhere lately?

Who among us hasn’t thought about sending whoever we’re in quarantine with elsewhere? Somewhere far, far away – or perhaps just a mere six feet down? (PARODY! SATIRE! A JOKE!)

But as they say, this too shall pass. We will escape our housemates and our families, we will escape the same dreary view and boredom and stress, and we will travel again – although it’ll no doubt be with increased health-related security requirements. We’re likely to face mandatory use of masks, temperature checks, self-quarantine upon arrival and other precautions.

I’m fully down with all of that.

I think I’m not alone in saying I’m ready to travel somewhere, anywhere – provided it can be done with relative safety and in a responsible manner.

Visiting Toledo, Spain: The History of Toledo

So! Having said all that, I have been pining for Spain and thinking back on my first time visiting the Iberian Peninsula.

One of my favorite tourist day trips was visiting Toledo, a gem of a historic town near Madrid, and well worth taking a day to fully explore. Known for its widely renowned Toledo swords, Toledo, Spain is also known as the Imperial City as it was home of the primary venue of the court of King Charles V the Holy Roman Emperor. Toledo, Spain is also known as the City of Three Cultures, as there are strong ties interwoven throughout its history and architecture to Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths.

When you arrive on your visit to Toledo, you’ll immediately see why this city has been such an important strategic stronghold for a grab-bag of civilizations spanning 2,000 years of history. That’s because it’s situated atop a rocky hill, protected on three sides by the river Tagus. In the ensuing millennia, various rulers added imposing walls and fortifications, making it a tough candidate for full frontal attack.

Puente de Alcantara Bridge with the Alcázar de Toledo in the background.
(kjb/Toledo 2018)

In fact this spot has been an important trading hub dating back to centuries before the Christian era began, when the Romans called it Toletum.

After Rome’s influence waned, Toledo was ruled for a couple of centuries by the Visigoths, and then by the Moors until the late 11^th century when Spain retook the city. After that, Spain made Toledo the nation’s capital, where it remained until the city reached the physical limits of its potential growth in the 1500s and the court was moved to Madrid.

Visiting Toledo: World Heritage Site

Despite enduring repeated wars over the centuries, Toledo is nonetheless so unique, historical, charming and well-preserved that UNESCO recognized the entire town as a world heritage site in 1986.

But visiting Toledo you’ll note right away that the city is impressive not only in terms of how unspoiled it is architecturally, but also for the fact that three major world religions have had an influence here for millennia, each of which can be seen in the architecture and development of the city.

There has always been a large Jewish population in Toledo, dating back to Roman times. Historic synagogues rub shoulders with mosques constructed during the Moorish reign, along with numerous Christian edifices, including one of the Gothic era’s most stunning Christian cathedrals.

Hit that cardio before coming to Toledo

The Toledo train station is just a short 20-minute walk from the old part of the city, and there’s an escalator to take you up there that’s located near the Puerta de Alfonso VI, on the old town’s north side. There’s also a city bus you can catch right there at the train station if you prefer.

But I, along with most of the people who rolled off my train, just walked straight in and up after crossing the pedestrian-only Puente de Alcántara Bridge. It’s a picturesque walk, and it’s not like you’re going to be able to avoid hills here anyway. It’s enough to give you a bit of a cardio workout, but honestly it’s not too terrible.

These fancy gentlemen were among the people who walked from my train to the old town.
I dig the white shoes/pinstripes/cheap backpack look.
(kjb/Toledo 2018)

The truth is you could easily spend hours just randomly wandering these winding, narrow streets and seeing what you see and not be disappointed with how you spent your day. But at any rate, here are a few highlights among the places to visit in Toledo, Spain.

1. Puente de Alcántara Bridge

As mentioned above, this bridge in itself and the view from it before you even get into the city proper is stunning all on its own. If you’re familiar with the Spanish language, you may also note that ‘puente’ is Spanish for bridge, so the Anglicization here by adding ‘bridge’ at the end is a bit silly.

However, it gets even more ridiculous, as the word ‘alcantara’ is derived from the Arabic word al-QanTarah which means…you guessed it: bridge.

So what we have here is the Bridge of Bridge Bridge.

The portal into the city from the Puente de Alcantara.
(kjb/Toledo 2018)

Whatever you call it, this bridge has lasted in one form or another since the Romans constructed it, although it has suffered damage from periodic warfare over the years. It’s always been reconstructed from the same locally quarried rock and today it offers stunning views of the surrounding countryside and a fairytale portal into Toledo.

2. Zocodover Plaza

Once you make your way up and into the city on this route as you visit Toledo, you’ll pass a statue of Cervantes and the Arco de la Sangre and emerge in Zocodover Plaza, the bustling marketplace and natural hub of the city. It’s a good place to take a moment to catch your breath and get your bearings, and there’s tons of tourist-oriented shops, fast food and cafes on the square.

But even just grabbing a seat on a bench and doing some people-watching – perhaps while enjoying a discreet beer, dirtbag traveler-style – is fun too.

Found the drug dealers…
(kjb/Toledo 2018)

It’s easy to imagine this scene across the centuries, variously as the commercial heart of the Spanish capital, and before that as a Moorish souk, and before that a Visigoth marketplace, and before that a Roman trading post.

Little has changed when you get right down to it; a hodgepodge of dialects pierces the air as shopkeepers ply their wares and cautious, herd-like groups of people who are visiting Toledo from all over the world poke around and assess potential purchases. Apart from the clothing and the specific items and foods people are clamoring to buy and sell, you’re not seeing anything much different from what a Roman or Visigoth or Moorish trader saw centuries ago.

The town’s tourist office is also on Zocodover Plaza if you’re into that sort of thing, but to me the attraction of ancient places like Toledo is just to wander and get lost among the winding, narrow streets and see what there is to discover on your own.

3. Alcázar de Toledo

There has been some kind of fortification on this spot for at least 2,000 years, but it got its name when it was rebuilt as an al-qasr (fortress) in the 10^th century. This building was later reconstructed by Christians after the reconquista, and still later as the castle that was to be home to the royal family of Carlos I.

But by the time it was completed the fickle royals had buggered off to Madrid and taken the capital with them. It’s nonetheless a stunning building, unique for having each of its four main outer walls designed in a different style, each adhering to the particular Renaissance period in which it was constructed.

Today it’s home to a spacious and informative military museum and offers stunning views of the city and surrounding landscape. You could easily spend a couple of hours here.

4. Santa Iglesia Catedral Primada de Toledo

With all the intertwined religious history here, you just knew we couldn’t avoid houses of worship for long. Might as well start with the Toledo Cathedral, a massive structure where you can spend at least a couple hours. One of Spain’s best examples of High Gothic architecture, this impressive edifice was begun in 1226 but not completed for over 200 years subsequently. As of pre-Covid-19 times, it was €10 to enter the Toledo Cathedral, complete with audio guide, but worth every shiny little Euro-penny as you can lose yourself exploring all kinds of nooks and crannies, and admiring the opulent artwork and interiors.

5. Monastery of San Juan de los Reyes

One of the top favorite things to do in Toledo is to see this gorgeous monastery, a former 15th-century church now run by Franciscan monks. It features impressive, ornate galleries and overlooks the Puente de San Martin on the city’s western side. The interior courtyard and gardens are a popular retreat, a wonderful little respite on a hot summer day, so add it to your list of places to visit in Toledo.

However if you find yourself running out of coin for paid entrances to places in Toledo like this, just wandering around this sector is great. It’s the former Jewish Quarter, and you’ll see numerous synagogues and homes and other buildings adorned with Hebrew lettering.

On the grounds of the Museo Del Greco.
(kjb/Toledo 2018)

6. Museo del Greco

If you head southeast from the Monastery through the Jewish Quarter, you’ll run into the museum built in the reconstructed home of the artist El Greco, one of the top sites for people visiting Toledo, Spain – not least because the entry fee is a mere €3. There are lovely gardens and nicely laid-out galleries of some of the work the artist did once he settled here in Toledo.

But perhaps one of the best highlights of the structure is that it was built on top of the cellars of a 14^th century palace, constructed by Samuel Levi, the treasurer of King Pedro I ‘The Cruel’ of Castile. The brickwork and below-ground chambers are really fascinating for history buffs.

Beneath the Museo del Greco.
(kjb/Toledo 2018)

You can take a nice break from your visit to Toledo and grab a seat in the Parque el Tránsito just to the south of the museum, where there are artisanal craftspeople selling their wares, musicians, a kid’s playground area and stunning views.

7. Synagogue el Tránsito

Pedro the Cruel and Levi were also instrumental in the construction of the nearby Synagogue el Tránsito, considered one of Spain’s most important historic Jewish buildings. It’s a pristine example of Mudéjar architecture, with exquisite Arabic and Hebrew calligraphy, intricate stucco walls and a gorgeous larchwood ceiling, an absolute must on your list of what to do in Toledo Spain.

The building also contains the Sephardic Museum where you can learn about the history of Judaism in Spain dating back to the 5^th century B.C.

8. The Mosque of the Christ of Light

If you find the name of this building near the Puerta del Sol confusing, you’re not alone. But by now it should be apparent that some mixing and mingling of religious influences in this uniquely hybridized place is to be expected.

As the oldest building in the historic district of Toledo, built in 999 A.D. under the Caliphate, this mosque is no exception. It was converted to a Catholic church a couple hundred years later, and today visitors can see the ancient stones that make up the original structure. In itself the building is rather small and not terribly imposing, but the gardens are lovely and worth a stroll even for those who for some reason are unimpressed with being able to touch a 1,000-year-old wall.

Parque el Tránsito.
(random tourist/Toledo 2018)

Getting to Toledo, Spain

(Presented with the caveat that this info is from “The Before Times.”)

Traveling from Atocha Station in Madrid, the high-speed AVE train to Toledo takes around 33 minutes. It’s a comfortable and picturesque jaunt into the nearby countryside that’ll run you just over €21 round-trip. Be aware that when you purchase a round-trip or return ticket, you have to specify your return time in advance.

You can also drive the 70 km route in about an hour, depending on traffic, taking the A-42 highway.

There are also Alsa buses that run from the Plaza Elíptica station in Madrid every 30 minutes until 21:30, and which cost just under €10 round-trip for about a one-hour journey.

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Travel Blogging in the Time of Plague

By kurtis bright

On March 25, 2020

In rambling nonsense, travel philosophy

When you can’t travel due to coronavirus, blog…I guess.

Welp, with my usual gift for reading the tea leaves and spectacular timing, I have managed to finally, at long last, launch a travel blog right at the moment when global travel is shutting down for the foreseeable future.

That’s beyond a Homer Simpson ‘D’oh’ moment.

That’s a head-smack of such force that you push right through your brain to the back of your skull and beyond.

Of course, it’s not my fault. (By which I mean Covid-19. In this case I really am innocent, I swear.)

It’s also not my fault that I ramped up a travel blog at a time when no one (apart from some plugged-in and utterly sociopathic U.S. Senators) could have known that travel was going to undergo such a dramatic shift.

Times have been weird for everyone, of course. I currently live in Valparaiso, Chile, a town that is heavily reliant on tourism, and the abrupt shift has been devastating to local businesses and vendors. There was a hapless cruise ship floating out in the bay for a good four or five days after the government handed down with the order that no cruise ships would be permitted to dock, but they finally must have found somewhere else they could go.

(I imagine a modern-day, aquatic version of Sartre’s No Exit in which cruise ship passengers must spend eternity at various buffets, attending karaoke night in the Rainbow Room, and walking the Promenade deck. ‘Same thing we do every night, Pinkie: eat gristly prime rib and listen to Cruise Director Tad remind us about Sunrise Aerobics and Salsa Class.’)

Perhaps Sarte was right: hell really is other people…

And Covid-19 has been devastating for people around the world as we all know, not only in terms of the direct threat to human health, but also by grinding the entire global economy to a halt. It is an enormous mess that is illustrating in sharp, eye-watering detail the many shortcomings of the current global system we live under.

And things are bound to get worse – at least for some of us and probably for a lot of us – before they get better.

But despite all this, despair is simply not an emotional texture that adheres to me very well, apart from those night-sweating, ceiling-staring, 4 a.m. ‘O what the hell am I doing with my life’ moments.

I can feel despair, sure, like any sensible person living in this era who has an IQ that reads more like Farenheit than Celsius. But I personally can’t maintain despair over time.

I think that’s another signpost on my personal road of life, if you will: rather than truly dwell on the despair and loneliness that all humans feel from time to time, my thinking has always gone to, ‘What’s next? What’s around the next bend in the road?’

So rather than simply packing in Dirtbag Traveler and assuming we’re all going to be spending the rest of our lives imprisoned in underground chicken-wire bunk beds a la the brilliant (and prescient?) Terry Gilliam film 12 Monkeys, I think what I’m going to do is allow my native optimism to percolate here in my personal bunker, and keep sharing posts, regardless of whether I can actually, currently go anywhere new right now.

I have tons of material in the form of notes from recent travels in Europe that were after all the ‘inciting incident’ that prompted me to start the blog in the first place, and I also have a ton of stories from back in my old hitchhiking days that I’d love to share.

All of this I plan to do with the hopes that we will soon (soon-ish, anyway) be free to not only move about the cities where we each live, but also resume traveling the world, albeit in a different, and hopefully more thoughtful way. For starters, we will no doubt face a different kind of security inspection taking place not only in the country where our flights originate, but where we land as well, in the form of temperature-taking and etc.

Makes the recent years of silly TSA security theater stateside in which you’re forced to take off your shoes, give up your water and carry only 3 ounces of shampoo seem quaint in comparison, no?

So, whatever. I’m shouting into the void anyway, as it’s not like I had any readers to speak of even before the crisis hit, haha.

But thanks for checking this out, and I hope you’ll keep reading!

Cheers,

How to Exercise When Traveling

By kurtis bright

On February 27, 2020

In travel exercise, travel hacks, travel tips

Top 3 ways to maximize your vacation workout routine

I’ve started wondering if maybe part of the appeal of travel is actually something that’s generally considered a negative: the hassle.

Why? Well, for one, travel keeps us busy, doesn’t it?

When you’re on the road and you’re occupied with simply getting through the mechanics of it all, it obscures any existential angst or ennui.

All the self-doubt, aimlessness and boredom of modern life is washed away. You’re thinking about things like: where am I staying, what do I want to see, where should I eat, what should I eat, is that thing safe to eat, what even is that thing, where is this bus actually going, oh fuck is it going to RAIN, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

Rain happens, yo.
Ansgar Scheffold / Pixabay

You simply don’t have time for thoughts like, ‘Why am I here?’ or ‘What am I doing with my life?’ or ‘Why didn’t I listen when they said I should learn how to code?’

That’s where a travel workout comes in. Nothing like contemplating your life choices while getting lost on a long run or doing lunges in a park while puzzled locals look on.

But of course, things like regular exercise and diet often go right out the window when you’re on the road.

Even if you have the best of intentions, vacation workouts are really hard to stick with. Add to that the fact that generally speaking your diet is going to get more adventurous and likely less healthy when you’re traveling, and the results can be less than ideal.

You’ve heard of ‘The Freshman 15?’ How about ‘The Traveler 20?’

Just pour the coffee in my mouth. And stuff a cruller in there too, would ya?
Quinn Kampschroer / Pixabay

However, there are some ways to help you work out and burn some extra calories while traveling.

1. Walk

It’s a given that you’ll be walking more than usual when you’re traveling. But consider the possibility of consciously deciding to walk even more by thinking of it as part of your travel exercise routine.

Instead of automatically looking to take a taxi, metro, or bus, think about walking instead, if it’s not ridiculously far (and assuming you’ll exercise proper caution and research the neighborhoods you’ll be traversing.)

Not only does extra walking add bonus calorie-burning to your travel exercise routine, it’s also a great way to see more of a place. You’ll pass through real communities where real people live rather than popping in and out of metro stations at each tourist hot spot, those areas that are likely overrun with postcard stands and t-shirt shops and depleted of any speck of genuineness anyway.

Walking the York city walls.
kjb / York, England 2019

You might even see a rainbow…
kjb / York, England 2019

2. Just do

If you can manage to stick to a fitness routine at home, there’s no reason why you can’t exercise on the road too. It’s far too easy – and again, guilty as charged here – to sort of mentally throw up your hands when you embark on a trip, and assume that since you can’t do your travel workout precisely the way you do it at home, it’s just impossible.

Pass the morning beer!

It doesn’t have to be like that.

Yeah, sure, there will be morning beer days, at least for this dirtbag traveler.

But just as with exercising at home, I try to approach travel exercise with a mindset of ‘These are the days when I work out. Period.’ Set a plan for your travel exercise routine and stick with it.

Sure, you may have to make adjustments, you may have to do some improvising, but that’s part of travel in general, isn’t it? If Tuesday is a running day and I happen to be on a plane, I’ll make a point of running Wednesday instead. Making adjustments is okay; compromising exercise altogether is slow, fatty fat-fat death.

3. No gym? No problem.

You can try to find a gym where you can work out while traveling that’ll let you in on a day pass, but in my experience these are prohibitively expensive. I think one gym in Barcelona quoted me €10.

Do feel free to fuck right off with that.

Instead, I try to bring as much of the gym with me as I reasonably can.

Portable gym equipment includes running shoes obviously, but you can get a really good travel workout with small, packable things like a jump rope and resistance bands.

TRX works, for real.
Tanja Shaw / Pixabay

For me the best portable exercise equipment to work out while traveling is the TRX cable system.

It packs away into a little bag and weighs like 1.5 pounds, making it a great portable workout gym for travelers. I found a used one for like $25.

And while it doesn’t feel quite as productive as hitting the free weights, it’s nonetheless quite versatile – and you will feel it afterward, I promise.

When I was in Barcelona and going to the muscle beach outdoor gym regularly, I’d do my other travel workout stuff then hook up my TRX to close out my routine. The other meatheads – like, the serious meatheads, not pudgy, aging wannabes like me – they always wanted to have a go on it even after doing muscle-ups and the other ridiculous shit they were into, so it’s not without its uses.

They actually completed this while I was there and it was glorious.
kjb / Barcelona 2019

Bonus: 4. Work ya body wherever

And that brings up my other point: the gym is where you make it. Sure, not every place will have a cool-ass outdoor workout area like they do in Barca, but every place you go will at least have playgrounds and parks.

If you keep an eye out you can find chin-up bars, places to do pushups, sit-ups, stretches, planks, lunges – there are tons of bodyweight exercises you can do as a travel workout that rival the burn you get from gym equipment.

And really, truth be told, isn’t a good workout a great way to wash away the soreness of travel as well as the angst of modern life?

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7 Ways To Make Travel Easier On Your Body

By kurtis bright

On February 23, 2020

In travel hacks

Those of us who love travel often find it revitalizing and inspiring. Not to go all ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ on you, but travel really is balm for the soul sometimes.

But that’s once you get where you’re going. On the way there it can often be grueling and exhausting, leaving you a physical wreck, greasy, sweaty and completely wrung out.

No matter how much you love to travel, no matter your age or fitness level, travel will take a physical toll on you.

And with good reason: you’ll end up walking a lot more than usual, you get thrown into more stressful situations, you cram yourself into a variety of increasingly laughable seating arrangements on various forms of transport, you lug around bags or a backpack – travel is actually kind of brutal when you get down to it.

Whose child are you and why did they leave you here?
holidayweekly

But there are some tried and true travel tips for helping you to minimize the physical demands travel exacts from your body to help you maximize your enjoyment once you arrive.

1. Pack light

Do some careful planning before you pack up a massive bag for your travels. I’ve witnessed people in their 60s and 70s trying to haul suitcases nearly as large as they were up and down staircases – bags that when I went to lend a hand were heavy even for me.

Gotta have an assortment of clean robes…
Ben Kerckx / Pixabay

Sure, it’s nice to have every little thing with you when you arrive at your destination. But you have to remember that you’re going to be spending a fair amount of time getting in and out of taxis, on and off buses, into and out of airports, and to and from your Airbnb or hostel. Do yourself a favor and make sure it isn’t going to cost you an extra recovery day as if you played in an NFL game every time you change locations.

Also, look into buying lighter weight luggage to give you a little extra edge.

2. Let’s talk DVT

If you haven’t heard of deep vein thrombosis and you’re planning a long-haul flight, do yourself a favor and read up on it. It’s a condition in which blood clots can form in your legs after prolonged periods of sitting still, clots that can be extremely dangerous. If they break off and travel to your lungs they can even be life-threatening.

Some of the risk factors for DVT include people who:

are overweight or obese
are pregnant or in the first 6 weeks of postpartum
smoke
have recently had surgery
take certain birth control pills (OCCP)
have a family history of DVT

Do compression socks look silly as hell? Yes.
Should you be grateful I didn’t use a pic of what deep vein thrombosis looks like?
Also yes.

Some people swear by compression socks to keep the blood flowing and prevent DVT, but at the very least you should be aware that a few simple air travel tips will help reduce the risk, and also help you arrive at your destination less stiff and cramped even after a long-haul flight:

move around the aisles as often as possible
avoid crossing your legs (as if you even could in today’s airline seats…)
stay hydrated and avoid alcohol
frequently stretch and flex your legs even while in your seat

Personally, I say go beyond just stretching your legs. Whenever I get up to move around or go to the bathroom I try to take the opportunity to find a little space near the galley or at the front of a section to touch my toes, rotate my trunk, stretch my arms – anything to get the blood flowing and avoid arriving feeling like you ‘slept wrong’ on your entire body.

3. Schedule your flights carefully

Jet lag is real and it’s a bitch, for some people more than others. It can cost you days of feeling groggy, tired and unable to think clearly.

But you can help yourself by scheduling your flights in such a way that you’ll arrive closer to bed time in the new time zone where you’re going to get yourself on the correct schedule sooner. Avoid tight connections and really early flights or red-eyes that take you way off of your regular schedule too, as they just make the process of adjusting to your new time zone more difficult.

There are even people who suggest booking an extra layover day if you’re going on a particularly long trip to help alleviate jet lag. For instance, if traveling from London to Australia, you might stop off for a day or two in Bangkok, breaking up a 21-plus-hour trip into two parts – and seeing the Thai capital in the process, however briefly.

I’m trying to sleep here, peasant.
kjb / Kotor, Montenegro 2019

4. Sleep if you can

Some of us have an easier time sleeping on airplanes than others, but there are some ways you can increase your chances of catching some much-needed shut-eye, helping your body to recover even while you’re still in the air.

Get ear plugs, get a sleep mask, and get an inflatable neck pillow for starters. Also, some people strategize their airplane sleep by getting a window seat. Hit the bathroom right after the meal, then curl up in your corner and you won’t have to worry about people banging into you as they pass by in the aisle or climbing over you.

Not the kind of sleep mask I had in mind, but whatever works for you…
Łukasz Dyłka / Pixabay

5. Take a cab or Uber

Of course one of the prime directives for dirtbag travel is keeping costs as low as possible, which means we lean toward public transportation.

But when you arrive in a strange place where you don’t know your way around, hauling all your shit and trying to navigate a bus or other public transit can be a nightmare, physically as well as mentally. Once you get settled and have a moment to get your bearings, you can rely on public transportation — and I usually end up finding public transport way back to the airport when it’s time to head out too.

Still preferable to hauling all your shit onto a bus and simultaneously trying to figure out where you’re going when you first arrive.
Michael Gaida / Pixabay

But unless you’re solid on how to get from point Airport to point B – and certain that you’ll be able to easily wrangle your suitcase or backpack on a crowded bus or train – it’s often worth it to just say fuck it and call an Uber or take a taxi.

Yes, it costs more, but to be able to toss your bags in the trunk and be assured that you’ll get to where you’re going, door-to-door, without having to fret over the map or wrestle your bags through a commuter crowd is sheer bliss at the end of a long day of travel.

If you do opt for a taxi, make sure it’s a legit, registered cab with a meter that works, or negotiate a price before you get in. Avoid going with the touts that come inside the airport and try to grab tourists coming off of international flights, because sometimes they’re scammers or worse.

6. Exercise before and after

I like to get in a run or a workout the day before or the day of travel, so as to stave off the inevitable physical compromises you’re bound to make when you’re on the road and taken out of your schedule.

Also try to get in some kind of exercise once you’ve arrived, even if it’s just a walk around the neighborhood where you’re staying, a swim or a short run – anything to break out your muscles and joints from the stiffness that sets in following hours of inactivity on the plane. Sleeping on that stiffness instead of working it out may be what you really think you want, especially if you’re exhausted, but often makes it even worse when you wake up the next day.

Don’t be like Toupi when you arrive. Get out and go for a walk before you crash.
kjb / Valparaiso 2018

And if you’re traveling longer-term, it’s a good idea to try to stick to your workout schedule as much as possible to help your body stay in the best possible shape for faster recovery from travel days. I bring a TRX cable system and a jump rope with me wherever I go. It’s not as productive as going to the gym, but along with push-ups, lunges, and chin-ups and of course running, it’s a whole lot better than nothing.

7. Eat right

Travel means yanking yourself out of your routine, and that of course includes your diet. You’ll want to try new foods and you’ll probably eat more and worse food than you normally would, that’s a given.

Dude, if you eat mayo on your fries, you deserve everything you get.
skeeze / Pixabay

But that doesn’t mean you have to throw everything in the shitter the moment you hit the airport. Pack some fruit and nuts and other healthy snacks in your carry-on, and do your body a favor and limit the junk food. You’ll feel better physically and recover faster than you would if you load up on tons of sugar, salt and fats.

Safe travels!

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What Is the True ‘Gringo’ Origin Story Anyway?

By kurtis bright

On February 16, 2020

In language, rambling nonsense, travel philosophy

You might be surprised who’s ultimately to blame for the word ‘gringo.’

If you’re from the United States, there’s a word you’ll no doubt encounter if you spend any time traveling South or Central America: ‘gringo,’ or ‘gringa.’ It’s mostly used to refer to white people from the U.S., and sometimes white Europeans.

But if you ask people for the ‘gringo’ origin story, nine times out of ten they either won’t know, or they’ll subscribe to one of the common but apocryphal stories about it.

The Meaning of Gringo

But first, one of the most common search terms when it comes to this strange word is ‘what does gringa mean?’

Typically, a gringo or gringa is a person from the U.S., usually Caucasian. I’ve had conversations with people native to South America who say that Europeans are never gringos, only people from the U.S.

Others say that white people of European descent, whether they’re from the U.S. or elsewhere all qualify as gringos. Still others say that ‘gringo’ can be applied to anyone who doesn’t speak Spanish, or even people of Hispanic descent who aren’t in touch with their roots. So this is a point of contention that I have no intention of trying to sort out.

Is gringo offensive?

As to the question is gringo offensive, I can only really speak from my own experience of living in Chile and the conversations I’ve had here and while traveling around the rest of South America. (In my experience, the word gringo isn’t commonly used in Spain, which in itself is interesting, when you see where this gringo origin story is going.)

But based on those purely anecdotal observations, ‘gringo’ as it’s used today could be seen as a tiny bit derogatory, but in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. It was probably a much more salty sobriquet years and decades ago.

Today it’s a word with just a little bit of denigration built into it, a sense of light-hearted mockery more than true offensiveness or a nasty insult. So, yes, while ‘gringo’ is something of an epithet, for the most part it’s used in a gently teasing kind of way – or even as a matter-of-fact reference.

As in, ‘Did you meet the gringa who’s also staying at the hostel?’ You might say that in the same way you’d ask after ‘the redhead,’ or ‘the tall guy.’

Now, a HUGE caveat: is it possible that I only ever hear the word gringo used in this particular way because I happen to BE a gringo? Particularly, a large-ish and rather scary-looking one with ‘resting bitch-face’ for days?

This isn’t even my final form.
kjb / Toledo, Spain 2018

Sure, of course. Nonetheless, if you’re asking me, is ‘gringo’ offensive, I’ll stand by my impression that it’s rarely if ever meant as a truly vile word anymore, like the n-word or something. It just isn’t used like that. Unless the person saying it has run out of every single curse word they know and already hit 10 or 12 ‘conchatumadres’ and they’re still angry.

Gringo Origin – Green Go?

But what’s truly fascinating is the myriad of legends and myths surrounding the gringo origin story.

One of the most common tales of the origin of ‘gringo’ has to do with the color of the uniforms of U.S. soldiers who were deployed in Mexico during the Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848. The story goes that the Mexican people, quite naturally despising the invaders, shouted epithets at them when they saw their green uniforms:

‘Green, go home!’ And, so the story goes, from ‘green, go,’ we get the shortened version ‘gringo,’ as the letter ‘I’ as it’s pronounced in the Spanish language has a sound like ‘ee’ in English.

¡Verde, vayanse a casa!

Now, astute readers might notice right away that there are a couple of problems with this ‘gringo’ origin story.

First and most pressing, why on earth would Mexican people yell at the soldiers in English? A more accurate phrase, assuming it were true that it originated with angry Mexican soldiers, farmers, and townsfolk in the mid-1800s might be ‘Verde, vayanse a casa!’

So, I guess if the shortened term were something like, ‘verdevaya,’ we could maybe believe this gringo origin story.

Another sticking point in this tale of the origin of gringo is that during the Mexican-American War, U.S. soldiers mostly wore blue uniforms. So even if the people of Mexico – the masses of whom surely were not bilingual – had made up a word to insult the U.S. soldiers, in English no less, it likely would have been based on blue uniforms, not green ones, wouldn’t it?

‘Vayazul,’ anyone?

Gringo Origin – Green Coats?

Now, one regiment from Kentucky allegedly did wear green, and were known as the Kentucky Green Coats. You may notice a sound in their name that rings a bell. Some people have opined that this single regiment, with their green coats, had their nickname bastardized into ‘gringo’ and that the name was then applied to anyone from the U.S.

This is also pretty unlikely, even if we ignore the previously mentioned linguistic leap the Mexican people would have been required to make to even refer to their coats as green and not ‘verde.’

That’s because of all the U.S. military to serve in Mexico during the war, only 5,000 total came from Kentucky, and it’s pretty clear that not even all of those 5,000 were from the Green Coats regiment. But even if they were, those 5,000 guys would have to have made quite an impression among the sea of blue-uniformed U.S. soldiers for this epithet to have been coined to refer to all white people from the north.

Gringo Origin – ‘Green Grow?’

Another version of the gringo origin story that I had heard – and which seems plausible at first glance – has to do with a number of songs the U.S. soldiers supposedly sang to keep their spirits up while deployed in Mexico.

One of these songs is the English traditional song ‘Green Grow the Rushes, O.’ Another is a Robert Burns song called ‘Green Grow the Rashes, O,’ and still another candidate for a tuneful gringo origin story is ‘Green Grow the Lilacs,’ which was appropriated and altered to create an American cowboy song, ‘Green Grow the Lilacs’

Apparently these are ‘rushes.’
Now, as to why everybody was always singing about them, I can’t help you.
Image by Lucian Aeris from Pixabay

Turns out that there’s no real contemporaneous evidence that the soldiers sang any of these songs en masse. And if enough of them were singing it, presumably singing it constantly to the point where the Mexican populace took notice and actually gave them a nickname based on it, you’d assume it would show up in contemporary records, and it just doesn’t.

You’d also assume a much shorter war, because apparently all these dudes were doing was walking around singing about grass all the damn time.

Gringo Origin: First Time in Print in the U.S.

However, in 1849, shortly after the war ended, the word ‘gringo’ does appear in print in the U.S. in two places. The first was the diary of John Woodhouse Audubon, the son of the famed wildlife painter John James Audubon. The younger Audubon joined a trek from New York to California during the Gold Rush, with a plan to collect specimens and document the mammals of North America for a book.

You could say the expedition took the long way around, as they passed through northern Mexico, prompting Audubon to make this journal entry in July of 1849:

‘Cerro Gordo is a miserable den of vagabonds, with nothing to support it but its petty garrison of a hundred and fifty cavalry mounted on mules. We were hooted and shouted at as we passed through, and called “Gringoes,” etc., but that did not prevent us from enjoying their delicious spring water; it was cool and delightful. Our men rushed to it, and drank two pint cups full each, hardly breathing between times; it was the first good water we had had since leaving the Mississippi.’
John WOodhouse Audubon

While Audubon’s journal wasn’t published until years later, another book that became quite popular using the word gringo hit the shelves toward the end of 1849, titled Los Gringos; or, an inside View of Mexico and California. The book was written by one Lieutenant Henry Augustus Wise, who wrote in the preface:

‘The title — Los Gringos, with which this volume has been christened, is the epithet — and rather a reproachful one — used in California and Mexico to designate the descendants of the Anglo-Saxon race.’
Lt Henry Augustus Wise

Gringo Origin: Journalists and ‘Green Grow’

It was over 30 years later in 1883 when an article was published that retroactively ascribed the origin of gringo to ‘Green Grow the Rushes, O’:

‘The word Gringo, the term applied to American and English by the Mexicans, is said to have had an amusing origin. A lot of sailors belonging to an English man-of-war at Mazatlan went ashore, and got on a rip-roaring drunk. While parading the streets one of them was singing “Green Grow the rushes,” etc. The Mexicans only caught the first two words, and dubbed them Grin-go’s, and it has stuck ever since.’
unknown, Newspaper article circa 1883

Popular journalist Nellie Bly added fuel to fire of this particular version of the gringo origin story when she wrote a piece reporting on a six-month trip to Mexico that was published in newspapers all across the U.S.:

‘People often wonder and ask why the Mexican calls the American a “Gringo,” or what the word means… When the Americans went to war with Mexico, a melody, every verse of which ended with “Green grow the rushes, O,” was very popular. It pleased almost everybody’s fancy, and was sung by old and young. While in camp the soldiers would sing it constantly, and all the Mexicans could hear was “Green grow the rushes, O.” They immediately began to call the American soldiers by the first two words as it sounded to them, “grin go,” They made it into one word, by which they will ever know the American — “Gringo.”‘
Nelly Bly

Whether the song ‘pleased everybody’s fancy’ or not, Bly’s gringo origin story turns out to bullshit.

People were already pushing back against Bly’s explanation of the origin of ‘gringo,’ even in the late 1800s. Unfortunately, they pushed back with their own dubious versions of the gringo origin story. Another journalist, S.E. Roberston, wrote in 1889 in the Washington D.C. Evening Star:

‘”Nellie Bly” makes more errors still. Her explanation of the word “gringo” — a familiar native designation for the American — is absurd. Instead of attributing its origin properly to the “green coats” of a Kentucky regiment stationed in Mexico during the war of ’40-47 she says it came from the popularity of the song, “Green Grow the Rushes, O,” in the American camps.’
s.e. Robertson

Gringo Origin – It’s all Greek to Me

But turns out Robertson was just as wrong as Bly. In 1889 American scholar William Dwight Whitney published the ‘G’ volume of his Century Dictionary which included an entry for the word ‘gringo,’ attributing its origin story thusly:

‘[Sp. gibberish; prob. a pop. var. of Griego, Greek.]’
William dwight whitney

The basis of Whitney’s explication of the origin of gringo as a bastardization of the Spanish word ‘griego,’ meaning Greek, came from a Spanish language dictionary that was published in 1787, a good 60 years before the Mexican-American War.

The reason for this is that it turns out English-speaking people aren’t the only ones to call any unintelligible language ‘Greek,’ as in ‘It’s all Greek to me.’

In El Diccionario Castellano, Esteban de Terrero wrote:

‘Foreigners in Malaga are called gringos, who have particular kinds of accent that deprive them from easy and natural Castilian speech, and in Madrid the name is given especially to the Irish for the same reason.’
esteban de terrero

The real source of the word gringo.
Image by Roy Brockman from Pixabay

From the 1600s through the 1800s, Irish soldiers of fortune often went to Spain to fight in the Spanish army, so the Spanish soldiers and townsfolk would have been acquainted with what was apparently their mangling of the Castilian accent.

So if you’re looking for someone to blame for the origin of the word gringo, you need look no further than the Irish, and their ‘particular kinds of accent.’

###

sources:

https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/wordroutes/the-colorful-origin-stories-of-gringo/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gringo

https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/209

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gringo/

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/07/209266300/who-exactly-is-a-gringo

http://thevirtualarmchairgeneral.com/901-US%20MexWar%20Uniforms%20Page.html

Chile to Madrid – 10/2018

By kurtis bright

On February 9, 2020

In rambling nonsense, travel philosophy

My first time setting foot in Europe at long last was…effervescent. From head to toe, those first few days were like having a fizzy drink bubbling inside my brain, just wandering around giddy. Like, I imagine I looked like Danny Devito’s character Martini from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” just a permanent idiot grin plastered across my face and a little giggle perpetually on reserve, one that could come tittering to the surface at any moment.

I was in Europe at long last, the Europe of my ancestors, the Europe of so much western history for so many millennia, the place where Shakespeare and the Romans and Don Quixote and Beowulf and Monty Python came from. The place where so many had lived and died, where so much had been built and torn down and rebuilt, over and over again.

I think this is in Parque Retiro.
kjb / Madrid – 2018

Part of my joy was simply the notion of finally being on this other continent – this was 2018 and I am very, very old – this continent that I had read so much about and longed to visit for so many years. I wonder if my feeling was similar to the sense you still get from native Europeans about their desire to come to America.

But I wonder if it matches our reverse longing to visit Europe. It seems like it might be a bit different; their longing to come to America seems like a hopeful, wide-eyed springing forward, even at this late date. On the other hand, our desire to see Europe seems more like a longing to look backward, a need to touch the glory of the past, an expression of our national insecurity, a declaration of fealty to our betters. Both attitudes are hopelessly bound up in romanticism and delusion, of course.

Accordion player in Parque Retiro
kjb / Madrid – 2018

The other giddifying factor (yes, it’s a word, but don’t look it up) that enraptured me was that I had just come from four years in Chile.

Now, I have a great love of Chile, and especially Valparaiso, as I hope to share with you on these pages.

But the simple truth is that the South American standards for a lot of things, and especially public facilities and cleanliness are significantly different than those of the US or EU. There are of course economic factors; colonizer states that spent centuries conquering other peoples and extracting wealth from them are by definition going to be more wealthy, and are thus likely to have a better standard of living.

But there is a certain grim ugliness in Chile when it comes to providing anything for the public, a sense of doing just the barest of bare minimum necessary to get by. I suspect that this attitude comes straight out of the Dictadura years and the brutal crush of the Chicago Boys neoliberal economic system that was imposed on Chile in the 1970s.

‘Fuck the people,’ in a nutshell. According to this economic model, all public goods are to be extracted, exploited and sold off.

Thus, things like public restrooms, public wifi, parks, buses, the metro, street cleaning and garbage pickup, the nation’s Social Security administration – ownership of the fucking water of the entire nation – pretty much all of these things are run with the very visible hand of a not-at-all-free market guiding them. Public places and public services are kept at just the bare minimum of functionality in Chile; wherever there is no money to be made, no one in charge gives a shit about how shabby things get.

Even down to something as pedestrian as walking out to the baggage claim area after passing through customs in the Madrid airport I was struck by the comparative opulence of the place: clean, roomy toilets, hand driers that work – my God, hot water! You can’t get hot water in a public restroom sink anywhere in Chile.

Atocha Station in Madrid
kjb / Madrid – 2018

Even stupid things like the comfy, plentiful chairs arrayed around the baggage claim belts in Madrid were a joy – things like benches and seating in public waiting rooms in Chile always seem to have been furnished begrudgingly, as if they searched out the very cheapest, shoddiest, oldest furniture that they could find out by a dumpster – and there it remains until it literally falls apart underneath you. And that is only if they have seats at all. Baggage claim in Santiago has none.

All of this has something to do with money, of course, and those colonizer coffers that have been overflowing over the course of 500 years of exploiting the resources of places like Chile. But it also has to do with the attitudes about how to spend what public money there is.

Not that the people themselves, the actual public wouldn’t prefer things to be nicer; just that the public in Chile always seems to be the last to get any benefit from public funds, and then only with the maximum of resentment from the state or whatever subsidiary, for-profit entity is providing it.

But that’s of course not where the differences between Chile and Spain end.

There is a buoyancy and a freedom that permeates the Spanish crowds; people talk loudly and laugh out loud as they navigate the sidewalks in an open, easy manner that Chileans would never dare. In Chile there is often a furtiveness, a sense of gloom and a barely-concealed hostility as you maneuver in the streets, always in a rush to get somewhere, always worrying about money, always fearful, always suspicious. (All of this of course goes out the window when Chileans, especially young Chileans, are drunk. Then it’s like the cork has been let out of a bottle of baking soda and vinegar that has been held in check for a very long time.)

Metropolis Building from afar
kjb / Madrid – 2018

Please, please understand that these are overly broad (and slightly ridiculous) generalizations that don’t apply to every single individual. But I think a point about a Chilean cultural norm of blending in can be illustrated by how prevalent clothing that is the color black, gray, or dark navy blue is in Chile. There’s a grayness to the faces and oftentimes a black look that crosses them when you’re out and about making your way through the city streets. There’s a sense of not wanting to stand out, of laying low, of getting your business done and getting on with it, of getting away.

Not to belabor the point, but I think it’s not at all crazy to view these observations through the lens of nations that were conquistadores versus those who were conquered. And especially in Chile, where first the violence and cruelty of the Spanish, then later the Dictadura and the imposition of stark austerity and the monetizing of public goods and services have all served to crush so many people’s economic hopes for so many years, it just makes sense that a logic of avoiding trouble underlain with sublimated anger and despair would bubble under the surface.

But back to Madrid. Whatever parallel sense of being crushed by their own dictatorship the Spanish people may have had as a culture before it ended in the 1970s was not terribly evident (at least not in Madrid. That’s a very different thing in Catalonia, as I later learned.) No, what I observed was a people much more open and free with themselves, chatting on the streets not only with their friends and family but also with strangers, passing the time of day in vast, green parks, strolling on broad, pristine, well-maintained sidewalks, sitting at overflowing sidewalk cafes every night of the week drinking, chatting, eating in voices loud, triumphant, free.

Hanging with my homies in the park.
kjb / Madrid

Truth be told, I was terribly confused when I first sat at table at a little cafe in the neighborhood where I was staying (near Metro Embajadores or Las Delicias, if anyone’s interested. Very cool hood, not fancy but not run-down either, with plenty of shops and restaurants and bars, and easy access to a number of tourist destinations.) That was my first night there after rolling off the plane early in the morning all jet-lagged and sleeping for a few hours that afternoon in my Airbnb.

I sat at a table in the plastic-windowed tent set up on the sidewalk and ordered a beer. The old man server – one of those wiry, tough, beef-jerky old men who operate without a single wasted motion and have been waiting tables for decades – brought me some tapas with my beer and I was puzzled.

And then a second beer, and a second plate. And I was worried I was being suckered into paying for something I didn’t want, haha.

Of course in Madrid the tradition still stands of serving some kind of tapas along with each round of drinks you order, as I quickly learned. The bars often have serving lines of cafeteria-style, glass-covered pans displaying the various tapas that are on offer that day, and you can choose among them if you want, or just take your chances with whatever the beef jerky server man decides to bring. Some places have a full-time chef or cook on hand to whip up new batches of whatever strikes their fancy throughout the course of the shift as various tapas run out. It’s kind of a cool system, and really nice to have a snack with your beer.

I admit I ate more than a bit of meat while I was there, trying the Iberica ham and other tidbits. I’m a bad vegetarian…

But when in Rome, after all.

More to come…

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5 More Must-Have Travel Essentials

By kurtis bright

On February 7, 2020

In essentials for travel, travel hacks, travel tips

Travel tips and travel hacks to make your life on the road easier

It sounds counterintuitive, but it feels great when you head out on the road with just a few things in a backpack — maybe a ukulele — and little else.

That said, there are a few more things to add to the list of what you really ought to pack, and some travel hacks that can make the process easier on you. Here are some must-pack travel essentials that will make your life on the road much easier.

1. Kindle

I’m amazed when I meet fellow travelers who are still lugging around hard-copy books. ‘Travel light’ is one of the mantras of intelligent travel, and packing books – plural, inevitably, because if you’re a real reader you’re going to want more than one – just seems silly when the alternative is readily, cheaply available.

Kindles come in all kinds of various sizes, capacities and price points, but even the bare minimum model is going to hold thousands of ebooks. Converting books from almost any format including PDF almost always works a treat, and reading on a Kindle is just as easy on your eyes as reading an actual book, since it has no LCD screen like on a computer or tablet.

They stay charged for weeks, plus, as a confirmed dirtbag, I can assure you that it is very, very rare when you can’t find a particular title for free online one way or another. In other words, a Kindle saves you money on top of everything else.

It’s just easier this way. Give in to your digital overlords.
free images/pixabay

I get it, I get the argument that some people prefer the tactile experience of reading actual books. I do too. The feel and smell of old books is incomparable in its ability to transport you. But using a Kindle, especially as a travel hack, isn’t like a loyalty oath to Baron von Bezos or something. You’re still allowed to read real books, I promise.

2. Universal adapter/USB extension cord

There are some more or less universal adapters out there that go for like $12-$15 bucks. Some travel tips sites recommend bringing a lightweight power strip, but this kind of adapter works fine for me, since the only thing I really need an actual outlet for is my laptop, plus USBs for phone, tablet, etc.

I also have a really long USB extension that comes in real handy since the outlet is always, always going to be in the most inconvenient location possible, no matter where you go.

(Links are not recommendations, just to show style, price, etc. I know, I know, it’s fucking Amazon. So’s the Kindle and I hate that it is. Fact is, I’ve bought exactly two Kindles from them in the past decade, and maybe half a dozen books total, so.)

3. Plastic bags/Laundry bag

Gotta hate plastic bags, and I try to avoid them whenever possible. But since we end up with them anyway, I reuse them to death. I have a Sainsbury’s bag that I still use for grocery shopping and I haven’t been in the U.K. in four or five months.

And when you travel, plastic bags come in handy since you’re going to have stinky or wet clothes that you’ll want to keep separate. Also, extra bags come in handy for packing delicate or spillable items like shampoo, lotion, or bottles of booze. Won’t necessarily save you from some clean-up on Aisle Backpack, but it could help minimize the trauma.

As far as laundry goes, it might be worth the investment in an actual laundry bag, but again, I’m a dirtbag, so I just use and re-use a plastic one.

I have no idea what’s happening here.
pixabay

4. Super glue/Duct tape

Shit breaks, and when it breaks on the road you’re often going to be forced to buy replacement shit at stores you’re unfamiliar with, and you’ll have limited time to seek out the best bargains. A suitcase with a busted zipper is a nightmare, but paying three times the regular price to buy a replacement at the airport or in the first shop you find is pretty horrible too.

So while slapping some duct tape on there might be the whitiest of white trash moves (white trash is the inbred, toothless second cousin of the noble dirtbag, but we are not the same, just so you know) it works as a temporary fix until you have a chance to shop frugally for a replacement. Or a split raincoat, or a shoe, etc. etc.

Again, I’m not saying I’m walking around London or Madrid with duct tape all over me for weeks at a time, wearing condoms for shoes like the Crack Fox or something. We’re just talking about a temporary, emergency fix until a better solution that isn’t a complete rip-off presents itself.

Now, super glue. Here’s a travel hack I’ve used to temporarily fix sunglasses, phone cases, and all kinds of things while on the road. But the best reason to pack some superglue is in case you get a cut or other small wound and have no bandaids.

This might sound like some action movie shit, but the truth is, if you have a minor cut or one of those splits you get next your fingernails due to dryness or whatever, if you clean the wound then slap a bit of superglue on it, it won’t bother you anymore. It closes and protects the wound so you’re not forever banging it on something or poking it, and thus it heals faster, at least in my experience.

*Disclaimer: I think it should be clear by now that I AM NOT A FUCKING DOCTOR, lol. There is such a thing as actual, medical-grade superglue that is likely less toxic, but the regular stuff is apparently okay to use occasionally too. Given all the other chemicals we put in our bodies and breathe in every day, it’s probably not going to kill you to do this once or twice.

**Again, NOT a qualified medical opinion.

5. Hand Sanitizer

Oh dear lord, may the old gods and the new help you if you travel without hand sanitizer. As travel tips go, bringing hand sanitizer may be a bit of a cliché or already known by everybody who reads these kinds of things, but I see far too many people on planes, trains and buses who don’t use it. All you have to do be convinced, in my opinion, is take a moment to feel the sort of grubby, grungy, greasy feel of the handles and straps on a city metro.

Laden with germs, every one of them.
Eduardo Davad/Pixabay

No, really. Really take moment to run your hands over the surface of the metal. Reeeeally get in there. Brushed aluminum is supposed to be smooth, isn’t it? Not pebbled? Or abrasive? Or sticky?

And then think about how we talk about the recirculated air on airplanes causing colds and worse: WTF do you think the bathroom door handle on an airplane – or any other surface for that matter – is doing??

When I first came to Santiago and started teaching English as a second language, I had to pick up lots of classes that were all over the city, so I rode the metro and bus a lot. But I found shortly after I arrived that I got super crazy sick with a nasty cold that lasted forever.

This part is strictly speculative, but I think there is something to be said for the idea of your immune system not being equipped to deal with strains of germs and viruses that are not common where you’re from when travel a long way. Even after I got over that initial nastiness, I found I kept getting sick on the regular.

Then I noticed two things: those grubby handholds on the metro and buses that I mentioned before, and the fact that there is almost never soap in Chilean public restrooms, and hot water literally never.

It all came together one grim winter morning on the metro when I saw this old guy sneeze into his hand – thank you for the courtesy on that – but then immediately grab the hand-hold metal pole again after a perfunctory wipe on his pants leg.

Presto change-o, once I bought and started RELIGIOUSLY using hand sanitizer EVERY TIME I got off the bus or metro, my frequency of colds plummeted.

Anyway, hope these travel hacks/travel essentials help you on your next trip! Thoughts and comments welcome as always.

Cheers,

Travel: The Reality

By kurtis bright

On February 5, 2020

In travel philosophy, travel tips

Let’s think for a moment what the actual act of travel entails.

You voluntarily yank yourself out of your comfort zone, cram a tiny percentage of your stuff – stuff you really like and have spent years quite deliberately accumulating, by the way – into a bag, head out of your cozy home where everything is just the way you like it, and fight through traffic to get to the dystopian hellscape that is the modern airport.

Like, you go to the AIRPORT. On PURPOSE.

Right from the get-go, this is just all kinds of wrong.

There, you will fight through packs of strangers who are similarly stressed and tense and nervous about being late, just as you are. Then you will be subjected to a humiliating series of pointless ‘security’ inspections of varying degrees of theatricality, herded through an array of corridors and chutes – which are alarmingly reminiscent of those you find in cattle slaughtering facilities.

Next, you are met by overworked flight attendants whose impatience and loathing is barely disguised by practiced, glassy smiles who herd you into jamming yourself into a tiny seat fit for a child or a dollhouse inside a ridiculous metal tube that should in no way be trusted with your life while hurtling through the sky at 600 miles per hour.

Finally, you’re off the ground. Hooray! That’s where you’ll spend the next several hours breathing stale, germ-laden air while your body has every bit of moisture sucked out of it – along with every bit of your patience and goodwill toward your fellow humans.

Your only diversion that you don’t provide yourself, aside from the passive-aggressive struggle over the armrest with the massively overweight gentleman next to you (or alternatively, praying to all the gods that ever existed and never existed that the screeching infant in your row will fall into a food coma) will be that you are offered bad, overpriced food that, despite being bland, flavorless cardboard, is far too meager.

But don’t worry, you’ll also get thimblefuls of water or warm, overpriced beer to wash it down with.

You can look forward to having all your routines completely shredded, which for some people that means your bowels will be stopped up altogether – or possibly opened up like a horrific firehose reminiscent of Jackson Pollock if he had gone through a Brown Period.

Now you get to navigate the cattle-slaughtering chutes and further inspections and humiliations of another airport. Notice as you await your turn to be digitally prodded and poked – fingers crossed in hopes that your bag made it to the same destination as you – that although wifi exists at this airport, you are inexplicably unable to connect for some reason. ‘WiFi available’ is only theoretical, or perhaps it only says that to mock you and doesn’t actually exist at all.

Either way, forget about communicating with the outside world. You are airport people now.

Hey, at least you’re not stuck on the plane?
outpost magazine

Eventually, you step up to the counter and smile desperately through your fatigue at stony-faced customs and immigration officers, hoping to display a benign, inoffensive demeanor that will mean you’ll be able to pass through hassle-free. But far from putting on a cool and casual show of a sophisticated traveler at ease, you actually appear to them as a greasy, exhausted, jittery freak, completely wrung out, smelling terrible and with worse breath. The immigration guy shuffles you through quickly, yes, but just to get rid of the foul, sub-human abomination before him.

All the while, you’re wondering where the nearest toilet is and what the fuck ever happened to water fountains.

Finally, exhausted, you shove through the mob of bovine gawpers who gaze slack-jawed at the baggage going round and round yet insist on standing right next to the belt even though theirs hasn’t arrived. [Sidebar: I suspect that every airport has groups of locals that come out just to watch the bags go around. They aren’t traveling anywhere; this is just their entertainment, so of course they want to get up close to watch. ‘Get in the car kids, we gonna go watch the suitcasey merry-go-round! Hooray!’]

Yee-haw! Looka them bags go roundy-round y’all!
I told ya this was better than the water slide!
the travel lady

You are eventually able to make a lunge for your baggage – if it turns up at all, that is – and lug it out to the street in a strange city where you may or may not know the language and you almost certainly don’t know your way around at all, there to be accosted by alleged cab drivers and hucksters of every stripe.

You manage to grab what you hope is a legit taxi in which you won’t be mugged and dumped on a side street without your passport, bags or money, or you climb on a bus, just crossing your fingers that you’ll be able to figure out where you’re going. And of course, assuming you do actually get there, just hope that your Airbnb host will be waiting to let you in, or that you’ll be able to figure out some way to get in touch with them because no wifi/no cell.

And, you know what?

I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Like anything else, the more places you go, the better you get at traveling. You learn shortcuts and tricks and methods to minimize the inevitable emotional abrasion and wearing down of your soul as you navigate the hard edges of modern travel. You chat with other travelers, you make jokes with the various workers at various counters, cafes and shops, you hide behind your headphones as needed, you read.

You figure it out.

And once you do get settled in your room or apartment and take a moment to breathe, maybe grab a shower — definitely grab a beer — that first time you head out into a brand-new city or town, wander among the crowds, smell the odors of unfamiliar food, hear the sounds of music and laughter and conversation in another language, see all the faces and the shops and the buildings and the streets — well, it’s just the best.

Dancers in the night.
kjb/Buenos Aires, 2018

Worth every damn minute.

###

5 Essential Travel Tips

By kurtis bright

On February 2, 2020

In essentials for travel, travel tips

Travel Tips: Things I Would Never Travel Without

When it comes to travel tips, it may be a cliché, but you can pretty much assume that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

I mean, yeah, it’s a cliché, but like most truisms, it’s based on truth.

Part of the joy of traveling is of course learning to embrace the unexpected. Dealing with all the things that life on the road throws at you is half the fun: we adapt, we shift our expectations, we improvise.

Why must I always be waiting, waiting for you…
(pixabay)

But having said that, there are certain travel essentials, ways to make it easier on yourself when you’re far away from home and likely to have limited knowledge of local shops.

And it’s also going to be cheaper if you don’t have to make emergency purchases, without a doubt.

Items like socks or adapters – and essentials like beer – are of course usually pretty easy to find, no matter where you go. But for the dirtbag traveler, avoiding extra, unnecessary costs is vital. (You want to keep that beer budget intact. Don’t need to be wasting that money on frivolous items like, you know, food.)

And it is often cheaper than food. Or at least more fun…
kjb / Pichilemu, Chile 2018

At any rate, these travel essentials can not only make it easier on yourself, but also on your thin-ass wallet. Here are a few travel tips that I’ve found come in really handy when I’m on the road. (Products linked are not an endorsement, merely to demonstrate style and price.)

1. Bluetooth headphones

Yes, I realize we are talking dirtbag travel tips here, and bluetooth headphones sounds like one a them fancy city folk devil devices. Nevertheless, Bluetooth headphones will change your life. You can find a pair of perfectly serviceable Bluetooth headphones for $20, and believe me, they are well worth it. The hassles you avoid by not having to deal with tangled cords, ear buds forever getting yanked out of your ears, or damaged by getting caught on things is priceless.

Plus you can listen to music or podcasts and adjust volume, change tracks, pause, mute or stop all from a button on your ear rather than hauling out your phone every time you need to adjust something. That is super helpful when your hands are full dealing with your bags or paying to get on the metro or any one of a million other situations you find yourself in while traveling. Not only that, even when you’re not listening, Bluetooth headphones are a great prop to help you avoid unwanted conversations with lunatics and Mormons and the like.

‘Scuse me bra, do you have a moment to talk about Dude Jesus Christ?
kjb / Pichilemu, Chile 2018

2. Earplugs

While we’re on the subject of ears, why not mention earplugs? On the plane you will inevitably be seated next to some mewling brat at some point, and good earplugs are a lifesaver. Plus, no matter how closely you peruse the Airbnb or hostel listings and reviews, you can never really know what the neighborhood’s noise situation is going to be like until you get there yourself. And one travel tip I strongly recommend is shelling out a little more for the gel type of earplugs. They cost a bit more but save you money in the long run because they last forever, unlike the cone-shaped foam ones that get squeezed to death pretty quickly, in my experience. On top of that, you can use them for swimming – six months later I still have an entire box of three pairs I bought last summer in Montenegro and I was in the water every day. (Yes, they aren’t pretty, but hey, I am a dirtbag after all, right?)

3. Cash

So I rolled in to Belgrade, Serbia around 10pm after a really cool all-day train ride through the mountains from Montenegro, only to find that the tiny little train station – which, granted, is being upgraded and moved – had no ATM. Plus, it was way the hell out on the edge of town, so there were no shops or banks with ATMs nearby, and thus I had no way of getting local currency like I had planned to do upon arriving. That meant that I couldn’t pay for a taxi even if I had been able to find one. On top of that, once I got to an ATM after I managed to contact my super awesome host (who actually drove out there to pick me up) we discovered that my bank had shut down my debit card because I forgot to inform them I was traveling to Serbia.

Fucking oops.

Makes the world go around, unfortunately.
(pixabay)

Plus it was Saturday night, and the bank’s customer service lines didn’t open again until Monday morning Mountain time. So several lessons learned all in one neat package: luckily I had euros and found an open currency exchange, so I could exchange them on a Sunday, otherwise it might have been a very hungry and sober Sunday and most of the day Monday due to the time difference. Bring extra cash even if you plan to exchange or simply withdraw money when you arrive where you’re going, because you just never know.

4. Snacks/Breakfast

This one is a pretty common travel tip, to bring snacks with you, not only to avoid starvation, but to avoid exorbitant airport and airplane prices. I always try to bring stuff like peanuts, an apple, or a peanut butter sandwich, and to be honest I go pretty heavy on all that because I get fucking cranky when I’m hungry.

No, coffee makes the world go round.
(pixabay)

But I take the snacks thing a step further and try to already have something for the next morning as well. I hate waking up in a strange place starving, and then right off the bat having to go out and forage for food. Yes, of course there’s always a restaurant around that’s willing to take your money if you’re truly famished. But I’d rather save my precious funds by eating simple stuff I prepare myself for breakfast and lunch, and only occasionally spring for a nice dinner. For starters I always bring my little Italian coffee maker and a Tupperware container of coffee because I am not fit for human contact without a cup of real coffee. Another easy-peasy way to make sure you have at least something to line your stomach before venturing out is to bring some oatmeal in a Ziplock bag. Most Airbnbs or even hostels are going to have hot water and sugar, and if you have some fruit to go in there, even better.

5. Wet wipes

Wet wipes are an absolute lifesaver of a travel tip that will make you feel so much less dingy and gross. Yeah, you’re going to sweat, yeah, you’re going to be waiting for buses and trains and cabs amid the dust and exhaust of stations and street. But if you can occasionally wipe your face with a cool, damp wet wipe, it can change your outlook 100 percent. Plus if you run out of hand sanitizer – and dear god, don’t do that – a wet wipe is a decent workaround. Never assume there will be soap in the bathrooms where you’re going!

Also, as far as wet wipes go, let’s not get into it, but the bathroom, guys.

(I’m talking about pooping. And your taint. You know, the place where you get stinky. I hope that was subtle enough.)

I’ve got a bunch more of these that are less gross, but I don’t want to make one single, insane, long-ass list, so I’m going to break it up into pieces. More to come, and if you have any ideas for travel tips of your own, or thoughts about these, please leave a comment or send an email!

Cheers,

The Dirtbag Traveler

By kurtis bright

On February 1, 2020

In travel philosophy

“Before, I wandered as a diversion. Now I wander seriously and sit and read as a diversion.”
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Whenever people ask me where I’m from and I’m trying to give them more than a perfunctory answer, it always starts something like, “Um, well…you see…” or something like that.

My relationship with where I’m from? It’s complicated.

I have only rarely if ever felt like I was someplace I would call “home,” and even then it never seems like it’s going to be a permanent thing. Even when I do stay in one place for a long time, there’s always a piece of me somewhere deep inside that is prepared to leave. Like in the old blues song, “Got one foot on the platform, the other foot on the train…”

Moving a lot as a kid has without question colored my attitudes and my life: whatever sense of belonging somewhere and with certain people I have ever had has always been fleeting. I’ve always felt somehow separate; there but not there.

I think this may be part of why I have always been enamored of journalism: the journalist naturally adopts the perspective of the observer. He or she isn’t a participant; the journalist is by definition outside the action. And when you don’t feel like you truly belong anywhere, there is a comfort in observing. It’s a position that allows you a connection – of sorts – with whatever is going on, but at the same time you get to keep your distance because after all you are here to observe.

San Pedro de Atacama trip 2018 — Don’t fence me in
kjb/San Pedro de Atacama 2018

One thing I have done nearly all my life is to write, whether as an actual journalist or not. So as travel writing has blossomed, I’ve been lucky enough to bumble into gigs writing for various travel-oriented websites and contributing to them in a variety of ways. But writing for someone else – and not incidentally, writing for a paycheck – of necessity tends to dampen your true, wild, free and full-throated voice.

Enter The Dirtbag Traveler.

San Pedro de Atacama step-dog — Step-dog.
kjb/San Pedro de Atacama 2018

This blog lies at the nexus of my sense of rootlessness, my perpetual desire to see whatever the next place around the corner might be, and my love of writing. I came up with the name when I realized that a dirtbag traveler is exactly what I am – not much imagination needed to connect the dots there. And though I call myself that with at least a bit of tongue in cheek, nonetheless I contend that there are varying levels or tracks when it comes to travel, and not just in terms of economics or style either.

By my definition, the dirtbag traveler is the opposite of the safe or mundane vacationer. The vacationer or mundane traveler is the one on the guided tour, yapping away only in his or her native language at other people from his home country. He or she is the one who is always in clean clothes, the one who eats in nice restaurants — preferably chains he is already familiar with — every single meal, the one who gets excited about going to the shopping mall.

So, yeah, dirtbag travel is indeed contingent on budget constraints. But it has more to do with attitude, I think, and being okay with and even eager to spend time sinking down deeper into a place, allowing a place to seep under your skin rather than skating across its surface. It’s the difference between being in an airboat skimming over a swamp versus stripping naked and jumping in the bubbling, brackish water just to see what happens.

Valparaiso portal to the sea — Portal to the unknown
kjb/Valparaiso 2017

The dirtbag traveler sees new places through the lens of the scratched and dirty Plexiglas of a city bus, jostled and bumped, mired in the sweat and breath and funk of locals. The mundane traveler only catches glimpses of the cityscape from behind the tinted windows of the air-conditioned shuttle van.

I think part of my sense of being a certain type of traveler versus the other stems also from having read and fallen in love with Kerouac’s “On the Road” when I was in my teens. It is not only a book about travel itself, it is also a story firmly rooted in the tradition of Steinbeck and the working class and the people who had been systematically denied the American Dream. And it is about how those people were slowly waking up to the fact of that betrayal, their eyes opening to the nakedness of the emperor and realizing that There Is No American Dream, not for people like us anyway.

So coming from that tradition of travel, when I read most travel blogs I find them to be annoyingly chirpy and false. Everything’s too clean, too well-mannered and too tame to encompass the reality of travel. Most travel blogs read like extended Instagram posts or model auditions: vapid, devoid of context and serving no honest purpose other than to portray the protagonist in the best possible light, always having THE MOST FUN EVAR, YOU GUYS!

That, and to make money.

So while I’m not planning on making this solely about shitty circumstances that sometimes happen when you travel – nor am I planning on making any money – neither am I going to airbrush what I’ve seen or attempt to paint it in any light other than the cold reality of my lived experience.

People forget that the Beat Generation was so named to acknowledge the weariness, the shabbiness, the dirt and sweat and the un-fun parts of their lives and especially their travels. “Beat” meant beaten down and weary, but it also meant “beat” in the sense of some thing or place or experience itself being tired, boring and dreary: “This party is so beat.”

A kerouac photo I pulled off the web. — This is what beat looks like.
(Kerouac )

Hence the drive to go, go, go. Get going to the next place, then the next and the next. That particular piece of the Kerouac puzzle may well be the part I can most relate to.

The Need to Get Gone.

But perhaps there’s a kind of Zen there as well: Kerouac went on to add new layers of meaning to the word, in later years suggesting that Beat also could imply upbeat, or beatific in the sense of reaching a kind of nirvana, or the sense of being “on the beat” or in time with music.

I think all of these definitions fit in nicely with my sense of dirtbag travel. So I’m hoping you’ll enjoy reading about my thoughts and experiences as I share stories about where I’ve been — and maybe even a few travel tips shoehorned in to rambling, disjointed nonsense like what you just slogged through.

Cheers,