I was having a conversation last night with a friend of mine who also works with students in Florence. And we were talking about what it is like to travel with students on academic field trips organized by the school.
We agreed that one thing that makes us crazy is the absolute obsession with taking photos of every single thing and how photographing takes precedence over everything, including listening to the guide or trying to understand what the things in all the photographs actually are. It's like a frenzy and I'm not exaggerating at all when I say that. I have watched students run a little bit ahead, stop at every corner we passed and hurriedly snap four pictures, one in each direction. And then run ahead to the next corner and do the same thing. And with such urgency, you would not believe it, as if their very lives depended totally and completely on getting a picture of each and every street in Siena or Assisi or Rome or whatever city we were in. It's comical, really, and a little sad.
The sad thing is that anyone in the world can view the events of
our lives through our posts on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram—but I have to
ask if we are missing out on something of the moment in our frenzy to share
every last moment of our lives. People always say things like "oh, it was so beautiful, a picture doesn't even capture it,"--so what are we missing out on when we see our own travels (or even our everyday lives!) primarily through the lens of a camera or an iphone? Were we actually there? Or are we seeing our own lives from the outside?
One of my favorite "fun facts" to share with people is the etymology of the word "paparazzi." The word comes from Federico Fellini's masterpiece, La dolce vita, which, incidentally, is one of my favorite Italian films ever and a film that everyone should see at least twice. At any rate, in this film, Paparazzo is the last name of a photographer who is friends with Marcello Mastroianni's character and has a habit for being in the right place at the right time, particularly at sensitive moments in people's lives as the story unfolds.
Without going into a full analysis of the film, suffice it to say that a recurring motif is depicting the way that our constant obsession with media, photography and documenting things disrupts sensitive and important moments in our lives and even in our society. Although Fellini claimed that he was not aiming for satire, but rather just depicting reality, there is surely a satirical underpinning at work here. Keep in mind that this film came out in the year 1960.
Flash forward to the year 2013, over half a century later, and I would love to know what Fellini would have to say about the current state of things. It would look a little bit different, I think because it is not longer just the media with bulky cameras and elaborate set ups, it's each of us, looking at the events of our own lives through a screen.
To an extent, we have all become the paparazzi in our own lives.
And I'm not trying to sound preach-y here. I recognize my own culpability in all this and that I am not somehow immune from the addiction to over-sharing. Although I made fun of Instagram for a long time, I have recently become obsessed with it myself, a self-professed hypocrite as sure as I stand!
In fact, I'm almost certain that, if such studies don't exist already (and if they do, please send them my way!), in the next few years, we will see research about how all this snapping and sharing is changing our brains. I'm not a psychologist by any means, but I'm certain that sharing prompts some kind of chemical release in our brains that makes it addicting.
Am I advocating that we tear ourselves away from all technology, photography and social media? Well, no, not exactly. Technology is a tool which, like a knife that could be used to kill a man or to help us share our bread (not my words, but a metaphor that I love!). We can choose to use it to destroy ourselves or to create a better world. Pictures can be powerful and the potential for the good that can come from sharing could be exponential. When we share photos from our travels, the world becomes that much smaller, which is a powerful thing and one that could be a tremendous force for good. To give an example, I follow a handful of photo-journalists on Instagram and have been seeing images from Egypt and Afghanistan that help me to put human faces to places I've never been and struggles I can't truly fathom.
What I'm really getting at is awareness. I'm not living in a fantasy world and I'm not telling anyone to pull a Henry David Thoreau and abandon all connections to civilization to live secluded in the woods. But I am saying that when you see something beautiful or incredible, don't immediately reach for your phone, but rather take a minute to appreciate the moment you are living in. If you absolutely must snap the picture, limit yourself and take your photos consciously, not mindlessly. Take one or two and then put the phone or the camera away. (In my experience, I get better photos this way, anyway!) Recognize that, in reality, in a year, you won't remember how many likes that picture got on Facebook and probably won't even be able to find it, searching through the thousands of things that you have posted. (It's true!!)
Above all, I hope that we can realize that the value of the moments in your life is not measured by how well we documented them or how many pictures we took or how many people left comments on our Facebook page. A better metric is how we connected with other people, what we learned and how we use that knowledge to better ourselves and the world. And those, my friends, are things really can't be captured in a photograph.
-----
PS:
For anyone interested, I'm inserting a link to one of the most memorable scenes from La dolce vita. Unfortunately, I couldn't find one with English subtitles, but I think the images are powerful enough to speak for themselves.
Also, if you click here, you can see a short, but brilliant video that pretty much sums up everything I just wrote. It was viral a few weeks ago, so you might have already seen it, but if you haven't watched it, you absolutely should!!
Monday, September 23, 2013
Sunday, September 15, 2013
The Problem With Student Travel Companies in Florence
I will never forget waking up that first morning. It was my Fall Break during my semester abroad and I was travelling with my roommate Jenny. We were in a hotel outside of Barcelona and had arrived very late the night before. For both of us, it was really the first time we had traveled on our own and we didn't know anything except that we had flights and some accommodations booked for the next ten nights: it was going to be a long trip and I would be lying if I said that I wasn't a little bit worried.
The next day, after dealing with the sudden appearance of pink eye (unpleasant, but, in the end, fine), we found a cute restaurant, on recommendation from someone at our hostel, and both ordered food, without really knowing what we were ordering. Between us, we spoke an embarrassingly small amount of Spanish and, to admit something really embarrassing, I did not even know Catalan was a language until we landed in Barcelona... I cringe a little bit writing that, but I remind myself that this is why we travel, to learn things that we didn't know before.
So, Jenny takes a bite of her mystery sandwich and discovered quickly that her sandwich contained walnuts.
"Erin, I have something to tell you," she said.
"Okay...."
"I'm allergic to walnuts."
My heart dropped a little, "maybe you should stop eating then...."
"I can't, it's sooooo good."
As it turned out, her allergy was not severe and we survived to eat many fantastic meals and went back to that place three times and every time ordered a mystery meal and every time we left full and satisfied. (The restaurant was called La Bascula--vegetarian, which is not common in Spain & lots of organic/natural things!)
The point of this long, self-involved story is that we were clueless!!! Completely clueless!! But we made it through those ten days and we learned so much about ourselves, each other and, above all, the world! We both learned a little bit about reading maps, argued and got stressed out when we got lost, stumbled through two languages (how surprised was I when I found out upon my return to Florence that I had been asking for "a bedtime story" instead of "the check" at every meal we ate in Spain! Or when I booked bus tickets out of the wrong Valencia, Spain!). When our skills as navigators and linguists failed us (which was often), we compensated with curiosity and sincere smiles--and had some help from locals along the way! I often tell people that I learned more in those ten days than I everything I learned combined in my life until that point and, in retrospect, I wouldn't trade all the awkwardness or stressful moments for any other experience.
Which is exactly why it makes me so sad when I see students increasingly choosing to travel through companies rather than planning their own trips. There are at least a half dozen companies in Florence that specialize in planning trips for students, but they all provide more or less the same experience: for what you pay them, they will bundle your accommodations, provide you with a guide, maybe include some food and (joy of joys!) put you on a bus with fifty other American students (or more!) and shuttle you all around Europe.
And students tell me:
"It's so easy!"
"It's so comfortable!"
"They did everything for us!"
"They made sure we didn't stay in a bad hotel!"
The problem I have with these companies is not that they don't fulfill their promises--based on what I've heard, they do a great job of shuttling students around Europe, making them comfortable and taking them from site to site in Europe's most beautiful, historic cities.
In fact, the problem I have with these companies is that they do exactly what they say they do--they make everything so effortless and in doing so insulate students, in a bus full of Americans, from learning about the world around them and from truly experiencing the culture of the place they are in. They take away the uncertainty and the frustration of travelling but in doing so, I would argue, they also take away the sense of curiosity and adventure.
I've spoken with people who traveled through Europe in the age before the internet and they have told me about what it was like, arriving in a city, suitcase in hand and literally searching through a phone book to find a place to sleep at night. The truth is, travelling on your own is not that hard anymore. There are dozens of travel sites and booking sites on the internet that provide dozens of reviews and information on attractions and accommodations. There is a huge selection of guidebooks for any of the major European destinations available in bookstores, both at home and abroad, and even on your device of choice (Anyone who has ever traveled with me knows that I LOVE guidebooks, and on the last few trips I have taken, I took my guide books with me via the Kindle app on my ipod! All the fun of a guide book without having to lug around a huge book! Miraculous!!!).
Yes, booking things on your own can require a bit of actual thought on your part and maybe some advance planning, depending on how adventurous you are (although with Wifi beginning to appear everywhere, including on flights and trains, perhaps even less now than ever!), but it gives you the freedom to do what you want, to change your plans (or travel without any real plans!), and to experience some of those moments of frustration and stress and clueless-ness that humble us and help us grow, as travelers and as humans, as well as leading us to moments when discover something extraordinary or meet remarkable people, both locals and fellow travelers.
I know that not everyone will agree with me on this, and this post may be controversial. But I would like to start a conversation more than anything. Of course, I have to recognize the fact that not everyone is looking to get the same things out of their travel experiences as I am.
I often use a quote by St. Augustine, "the world is book and those who do not travel read only the first page." The kind of travel that I am advocating for is not measured so much by the number of pages read as by the experience of reading. Did we really understand what we were reading? Or did we just skim to find the main idea? Did we savor the moments of poetry and of challenge in the text? Did we actually learn something? Can we think critically about it all or is it just a blur of photos on our Facebook pages?
There are some risks in planning a trip for yourself, not so much risks as in putting yourself in physical peril (especially in Europe, come on!), but risks that you will have moments when you will be pushed out of your comfort zone. Not only is this a possibility, but something that I promise and hope for. Because when you find yourself outside of your comfort zone, you are at risk of learning and of growing and seeing things differently. It's a bit of a leap of faith, but one that I wish more students would take.
The next day, after dealing with the sudden appearance of pink eye (unpleasant, but, in the end, fine), we found a cute restaurant, on recommendation from someone at our hostel, and both ordered food, without really knowing what we were ordering. Between us, we spoke an embarrassingly small amount of Spanish and, to admit something really embarrassing, I did not even know Catalan was a language until we landed in Barcelona... I cringe a little bit writing that, but I remind myself that this is why we travel, to learn things that we didn't know before.
So, Jenny takes a bite of her mystery sandwich and discovered quickly that her sandwich contained walnuts.
"Erin, I have something to tell you," she said.
"Okay...."
"I'm allergic to walnuts."
My heart dropped a little, "maybe you should stop eating then...."
"I can't, it's sooooo good."
As it turned out, her allergy was not severe and we survived to eat many fantastic meals and went back to that place three times and every time ordered a mystery meal and every time we left full and satisfied. (The restaurant was called La Bascula--vegetarian, which is not common in Spain & lots of organic/natural things!)
 |
| Jenny and I, 3 years ago in Ireland--savoring some time in the English-speaking world! |
 |
| Being in Barcelona is like being on top of the world!!! |
The point of this long, self-involved story is that we were clueless!!! Completely clueless!! But we made it through those ten days and we learned so much about ourselves, each other and, above all, the world! We both learned a little bit about reading maps, argued and got stressed out when we got lost, stumbled through two languages (how surprised was I when I found out upon my return to Florence that I had been asking for "a bedtime story" instead of "the check" at every meal we ate in Spain! Or when I booked bus tickets out of the wrong Valencia, Spain!). When our skills as navigators and linguists failed us (which was often), we compensated with curiosity and sincere smiles--and had some help from locals along the way! I often tell people that I learned more in those ten days than I everything I learned combined in my life until that point and, in retrospect, I wouldn't trade all the awkwardness or stressful moments for any other experience.
Which is exactly why it makes me so sad when I see students increasingly choosing to travel through companies rather than planning their own trips. There are at least a half dozen companies in Florence that specialize in planning trips for students, but they all provide more or less the same experience: for what you pay them, they will bundle your accommodations, provide you with a guide, maybe include some food and (joy of joys!) put you on a bus with fifty other American students (or more!) and shuttle you all around Europe.
And students tell me:
"It's so easy!"
"It's so comfortable!"
"They did everything for us!"
"They made sure we didn't stay in a bad hotel!"
The problem I have with these companies is not that they don't fulfill their promises--based on what I've heard, they do a great job of shuttling students around Europe, making them comfortable and taking them from site to site in Europe's most beautiful, historic cities.
In fact, the problem I have with these companies is that they do exactly what they say they do--they make everything so effortless and in doing so insulate students, in a bus full of Americans, from learning about the world around them and from truly experiencing the culture of the place they are in. They take away the uncertainty and the frustration of travelling but in doing so, I would argue, they also take away the sense of curiosity and adventure.
I've spoken with people who traveled through Europe in the age before the internet and they have told me about what it was like, arriving in a city, suitcase in hand and literally searching through a phone book to find a place to sleep at night. The truth is, travelling on your own is not that hard anymore. There are dozens of travel sites and booking sites on the internet that provide dozens of reviews and information on attractions and accommodations. There is a huge selection of guidebooks for any of the major European destinations available in bookstores, both at home and abroad, and even on your device of choice (Anyone who has ever traveled with me knows that I LOVE guidebooks, and on the last few trips I have taken, I took my guide books with me via the Kindle app on my ipod! All the fun of a guide book without having to lug around a huge book! Miraculous!!!).
Yes, booking things on your own can require a bit of actual thought on your part and maybe some advance planning, depending on how adventurous you are (although with Wifi beginning to appear everywhere, including on flights and trains, perhaps even less now than ever!), but it gives you the freedom to do what you want, to change your plans (or travel without any real plans!), and to experience some of those moments of frustration and stress and clueless-ness that humble us and help us grow, as travelers and as humans, as well as leading us to moments when discover something extraordinary or meet remarkable people, both locals and fellow travelers.
I know that not everyone will agree with me on this, and this post may be controversial. But I would like to start a conversation more than anything. Of course, I have to recognize the fact that not everyone is looking to get the same things out of their travel experiences as I am.
I often use a quote by St. Augustine, "the world is book and those who do not travel read only the first page." The kind of travel that I am advocating for is not measured so much by the number of pages read as by the experience of reading. Did we really understand what we were reading? Or did we just skim to find the main idea? Did we savor the moments of poetry and of challenge in the text? Did we actually learn something? Can we think critically about it all or is it just a blur of photos on our Facebook pages?
There are some risks in planning a trip for yourself, not so much risks as in putting yourself in physical peril (especially in Europe, come on!), but risks that you will have moments when you will be pushed out of your comfort zone. Not only is this a possibility, but something that I promise and hope for. Because when you find yourself outside of your comfort zone, you are at risk of learning and of growing and seeing things differently. It's a bit of a leap of faith, but one that I wish more students would take.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)