Posts Tagged ‘travel’

Hard to believe I’ve been here for over a month already. It feels as though it’s been no time and all, and before I know it I’ll be heading back to the Land of Ice and Snow. This trip was very much intended as a litmus test for my vag­a­bond way of life—I’ve been looking for a way to com­bine work and travel for some time now, and I think I may have hit on a com­bin­a­tion that works.

I’ve come to realize a few important things, though.

1. I need more time. Way more time.

This week, I am taking three hours of Spanish class a day, in what will most likely turn out to be a rather in-vain attempt to get my Castallano up to “ser­vice­able”. How­ever, given the fact that I tend to work roughly six hun­dred hours a day, it’s a bit of a chal­lenge doing all the other stuff I need to do, like “sleeping” and “eating stuff that isn’t dulce de leche”. (Ser­i­ously, I’m not sure what sort of magic makes Argen­tines so skinny when their diet appears to con­sist primarily of ham and cheese emapanadas to start, then pasta, fol­lowed up by sixty tons of cow. Is it the mate or the fernet they’re always drinking?)

But South America is a big place, and I want to see more of it. As it is, I’ve only had time to go to Brazil thus far, and a quick weekend trip to the Tigre delta, and some explor­atory jaunts here in BsAs—which admit­tedly is such a huge and sprawling com­plex city, with its own lan­guage and pecu­li­ar­ities, that it’d take me years to really get a feel for the place.

Last time I traveled, I went to Europe for five weeks and didn’t stay in one place longer than a week. I couldn’t work my usual sort of schedule, so it was sort of like a hol­iday for me. If I want my travel to be sus­tain­able, I need to do it slowly enough that it doesn’t inter­fere with the day-to-day aspects of my life. That means three months isn’t nearly long enough for a place.

2. I can sur­vive without con­stantly checking my email.

This is a tough one, but having my iPhone, I got quite accus­tomed to being con­stantly able to check (and send) emails. Problem was, this meant there was no off switch at all on my brain. I’ve been known to check emails in bed. It’s (still) usu­ally the first thing I do upon waking up, and I was always sending emails and tex­ting while out with friends, which I think is ter­ribly rude.

Yes, some­times it sucks not having access to my email when I’m idle at a bar. But for the most part, it means that I can go out for dinner, or go for a walk, without being per­petu­ally dis­tracted by work. If I leave the house, I leave work behind, and that’s a healthy habit to get into.

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Argen­tina is most def­in­itely still in holiday-mode: it’s summer vaca­tion here, a good number of the shops still have their shut­ters closed, and everyone who can afford to is off on the beaches of Uruguay. I’ve been working a lot more than I’d like to admit the last two weeks. Tech­nic­ally I still have a suntan, but I think it’s fading.

Bal­an­cing work and life has always been trouble­some for me. I tend towards work­aholi­cism on my best days, and it’s cer­tainly not uncommon for me to put in a sixty-hour work week. I’ve gotten better: I almost always take most of the weekend off now, and I’m trying as much as pos­sible to go out and about at least a little bit every day. I’ve real­ized that I’m simply not going to see as much of this con­tinent as I’d like to while I’m here.

With all the shut­ters closed, you really get to see the lovely graf­fiti that covers the build­ings here.

But I’ve got new pro­jects coming in all the time, and work is (for the most part) going well. I wish I were doing more per­sonal pro­jects, but that isn’t any­thing new. I had signed up for the Sketch­book Pro­ject some time ago, and now the deadline’s looming. I’ve given up on get­ting mine done, in part because I totally lack art sup­plies and they’re on the expensive side here, and in part because I simply lack time. I’d rather spend my free time exploring this massive city or trying to pick back up on my Spanish, which is just ter­rible. (Porteños speak the most insane ver­sion of Spanish I’ve ever heard, com­plete with its own spe­cial pro­noun and verb con­jug­a­tion, strange pro­noun­ci­ations, and some kind of crazy pig-latin. I’m totally lost.)

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In the middle of the Amazon jungle, seven hours by boat from the closest hos­pital, I cut off my fin­gertip with a machete.

This is how I spent my Christmas: I flew to Manaus, a big ugly port city on the Amazon river, where the warm, slow, black Rio Negro and the cooler, faster, sandy Rio Solimões meet up and run side-by-side for some dis­tance, looking rather neat. Manaus was not the world’s nicest intro­duc­tion to Brazil—the city echoes the sur­rounding jungle with its sprawling messi­ness. Once one of Brazil’s richest cities, it still con­tains the opu­lent (and rather tacky-looking) pastel-coloured palaces built during the rubber boom, but everything else is either a giant ugly factory or struck with urban blight.

But it’s a jumping-off point for rain­forest excur­sions, and that’s what I was there for after all. It took two flights, one taxi ride, a speed­boat, a bus through one of the most poorly-maintained roads I’ve seen yet, and another, much smaller, wooden boat to get to the jungle lodge we’d be spending a good por­tion of the next five days. Early Boxing Day morning, I was on my way to the jungle, excited for what lay ahead of me.

I’ll be honest: it wasn’t any­thing like what I expected. I was ready for a trip that would be phys­ic­ally and men­tally taxing; I got this, but not in the way I’d expected. I’d thought I’d be tired from phys­ical exer­tion, but instead I was just cold and wet. (Or, other times, hot and mosquito-bitten.) Worse yet—I was almost bored.

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It’s been almost a week since I landed in South America, and it sim­ul­tan­eously feels as though it’s been forever, and no time at all. In some respects, I’m still sur­prised we made it down here at all: the 9000km to Buenos Aires was so anxiety-ridden, I’m thinking I’ve used up all my bad luck for the year in one week. And that excludes that whole “breaking my wrists twice” period of the year.

Buenos Aires is utterly gor­geous. It looks like Mexico crossed with Italy, and cul­tur­ally speaking, it draws equally from Western Europe and Latin America, which makes for an inter­esting mix.

I have no (Cana­dian) passport

I really meant to get one before leaving, if only to get into the U.S., and then back home, with less hassle. (I usu­ally just travel on my British pass­port, which is gen­er­ally more useful.) I’d been trying to find my Cana­dian cit­izen­ship card for a while, and was waiting until I moved into my friend Dan’s base­ment before I offi­cially gave up and applied for a new one. (For those of you who were born in Canada, a Cana­dian cit­izen­ship card is proof of cit­izen­ship for those of us who weren’t.) I had an exciting series of phone calls and chats with the people at Immig­ra­tion and the people at Pass­port Canada, who of course have no reasons to col­lab­orate what­so­ever. Their phone system actu­ally at one point (twice!) led me through all the options, care­fully informed me that it would not hang up on me, and to please stay on the line, then promptly hung up on me. You know, usu­ally those auto­mated sys­tems are ter­rible, but I’ve never had one that out­right lied to me. Anyway, the end result is that appar­ently there’s no “proof” that I’m Cana­dian without my cit­izen­ship card, because that card has a photo of me when I was nine (and an old sur­name) and thus qual­i­fies as legit­imate iden­ti­fic­a­tion, and the twelve mil­lion other doc­u­ments I have, plus the fact that I’ve been voting and paying taxes here for nearly ten years, is just my devious immig­rant way of get­ting a fake pass­port, I guess. So I gave up, applied for the replace­ment card, and figured worst come to worst, I could always just return on a British visa.

My last day in town, the replace­ment card arrived.

How about one last trip to the E.R., for old times’ sake?

I was utterly con­vinced I was going to be the one who ended up in the emer­gency room. I went for an I’m-finally-cast-free! scooter ride with a friend before I started packing, and at one point I was very con­vinced some­thing ter­rible would happen and I’d wind up breaking another of my bones, which are appar­ently made of glass and por­celain. As it turned out, it wasn’t me, but my trav­eling com­panion who broke him­self. We were packing and get­ting ready to head off to their air­port at 4am when he man­aged to slice his finger with a knife. Given that it was mid­night, I actu­ally vacil­lated for a bit (and called my dad’s wife, who very calmly talked me through the Steri-strip pro­cess) before hauling him down to the ER.

I’ve never been so impressed by a hos­pital visit: he was all stitched up and out of there within about two hours. (I was still making cup­cakes and packing.)

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In five days, I’ll be on my way to South America. I’m wildly excited, of course. People keep asking me if I’m ready, though, and I’m never quite sure how to answer. I mean, I have a suit­case that will hold 25 pairs of shoes and still have enough room for a couple weeks’ worth of out­fits. I’ve got an apart­ment in Buenos Aires all lined up. I’m finally cast-free and I’m working on my physio so that I’ll be strong by the time we hit the Amazon rain­forests. I have a supply of sleeping pills for insanely-long flights and bus rides across the con­tinent. I have my busi­ness here sorted out and ready for the trans­ition. I know how to say “Where is the nearest shoe store?” and “I have broken my wrist!” in Spanish. I don’t have any kind of proof that I’m a Cana­dian cit­izen, but that’ll only present me with trouble when I’m attempting to return to the country, after all. I love trav­eling, I love adven­tures, what the hell is wrong with me, after all?

I recently real­ized that I hate change. This rev­el­a­tion came as rather a sur­prise to me: I’d always con­sidered myself some­thing of a chaotic free-spirit creature. Shouldn’t I hap­pily embrace change? Why does uncer­tainty make me feel so queasy?

When I was in school, they told us that, as graphic designers, we had two choices, career­wise. We could get agency jobs, where we’d basic­ally work 18 hour days for an 8 hour salary, or we could go it alone as freel­an­cers and pray that our cli­ents would actu­ally pay their bills. (I’ve since real­ized that this advice is faulted on many levels, not­ably for failing to take into account Mys­ter­ious Option C, which is you real­izing that Hal­ifax is bursting with bril­liant unem­ployed designers, and going back to school to study accounting.) I was quite cer­tain, right then and there, that I could never handle the uncer­tainty of owning a busi­ness. I’ve always been a little para­noid about money, which, while I sup­pose is much healthier than being a little cava­lier about money, means that I’ve been overly cau­tious at times in my life, espe­cially when it comes to going into debt.

I figured I’d never be able to hack it as a self-employed type, mostly because I wouldn’t be able to manage the stress and uncer­tainty of it all. I ended up run­ning a busi­ness mostly by acci­dent; I was working at a video game devel­op­ment studio and doing freel­ance work on the side, when the freel­ance work took off and I was forced to choose between the two. Quit­ting my job was, of course, utterly ter­ri­fying for me, and every now and then, I really do miss the sta­bility of a steady job.

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It’s offi­cial: in a little under a month, I’ll have my things all packed away in storage, and I’ll be on my way to gor­geous Buenos Aires, nearly 9000 km from home, and quite lit­er­ally the other side of the world. I’ll be staying for three months, which offi­cially makes it my longest trip ever.

I’ve had my tickets booked for some time, which is about as close as I come to long-term com­mit­ments these days, and I’ve been slowly pre­paring for the trip—by which I basic­ally mean “talking along to my Spanish tapes as I walk down the street” (no, that crazy girl isn’t talking to her­self!) and “con­tem­plating how many shoes I can fit into a jumbo-size suit­case” (the answer, by the by, is “nowhere nearly enough”).

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Everyone (or at least, every designer) loves a good “logos gone wrong” selec­tion. Most of them are just unin­ten­tion­ally dirty or besmirched by awk­ward kerning, but they’re always a good reminder of why you should always show your work to others before final­izing, just in case there’s a visual you might be missing. (And turn it upside down, too, just to make sure.)

So, to follow up on last week’s post about design in transit sys­tems, I thought I’d post a little tidbit I came across in Dubrovnik.

I’d just landed in town, ready for a new lan­guage, new cur­rency, and new adven­tures. I’d had about four hours of sleep, stretched out on a bench in the neon-lighted bar of the ferry from Italy to Croatia, and I was wan­dering about, trying to orient myself, with a back­pack the approx­imate size and weight of a bear strapped to my back. I head toward what looks like it might be a cash machine and I come across this delightful sign:

Don’t play with guns, alright, kids?

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Everyone who knows me at all knows I’m a fan of a good typeface (and a nice bottle of wine, and a pretty pair of shoes). Less common know­ledge is my fond­ness for public transit.

Sure, it’s often dirty, loud, crowded, and out­moded. Often­times it’s a good way to run into people you’d rather avoid. But it’s an excel­lent measure of the vitality of a city—its public transit system is the lifeblood of its “common” people, and a reflec­tion of how it treats them. Of course, the city in which I live has one of the most miser­able public transit sys­tems I’ve come across. I sold my little Honda Civic just before I left for five weeks in eastern Europe last summer, and I’ve been strug­gling to get by without it ever since. (Winter’s going to be fun.)

A year ago I found cheap air­fare to Mexico, and have since been taking off on a reg­ular basis, trav­eling about and becoming a bit of a digital nomad (which is another story entirely). I’ve been lucky to do a decent bit of trav­eling since then, and I’ve taken buses, trains, sub­ways, fer­ries, and trams in various cities across nine dif­ferent coun­tries, most of which spoke lan­guages unin­tel­li­gible to me. Given the lan­guage bar­rier, the fact that I was almost always solo, and the fact that I can get lost in a three-foot-square glass bubble, I started paying a lot of atten­tion to way­faring signage.

Malostranská sta­tion in Praha

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